GAIA - AAA terrain generator, procedural texturing, planting and scene creation

Sorry - got lost in the noise. Gaia already has several noise functions - its in the masking. If you check it out you can have a play with it.

Not sure how I will with this re Gaia 2.0. There are a bunch of things I want to add but it will come down to time. The first focus is multi tile support.

Btw. Multi tile is up and running, and today I solved a problem that took me several days to sort out. Was nice stamping on a 6k x 6k terrain over 9 tiles.

 

You cant - not with Gaia anyway.

However, Unity should be able to handle it.

If using terrain trees then add the colliders to your tree prefab, and then drop the new prefab into the same terrain tree slot.

Alternatively, if using game objects, then just update your original prefab. Gaia maintains the connection for you.

 

As promised in an earlier post here's the video with tips and tricks on using Gaia with VR (Oculus Rift):

Hopefully you'll find it useful and I'm happy to look into specific VR related questions.

Assets used in the video: Gaia by @AdamGoodrich (obviously), Aquas Water by @dogmachris, Tenkoku Dynamic Sky by @chingwa, MegaSplat by @jbooth and the miniature knights in the demo at the end are from the All Stars Character Collection.

When you fly across the terrain you'll see that the prefab objects in the Gaia spawned objects have varying LODGroup culling percentages. For example the different elements of a village pop in/out of the scene at different distances. Here's
the code I used to reset the culling percentage to 1% in the LODGroups of the Gaia spawned objects:

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using UnityEditor;
5.  
6. public class UpdateAllLODs : MonoBehaviour {
7.  
8.  
9.     [MenuItem("Window/T7T/UpdateLODs", false, 1)]
10.     public static void UpdateLODs()
11.     {
12.         GameObject go = Selection.activeGameObject;
13.  
14.         if (go != null)
15.         {
16.             Debug.Log("Selected=" + go.name);
17.  
18.             Component[] allLODs = go.GetComponentsInChildren<LODGroup>();
19.  
20.             foreach(LODGroup lg in allLODs)
21.             {
22.                 ProcessLODGroup(lg);
23.  
24.             }
25.  
26.         }
27.     }
28.     public static void ProcessLODGroup(LODGroup lodGroup)
29.     {
30.         if (lodGroup != null)
31.         {
32.  
33.             LOD[] lods = lodGroup.GetLODs();
34.  
35.             int l = lods.Length;
36.  
37.  
38.             //for (int i = 0; i < l; i++)
39.             //{
40.             //    Debug.Log("LOD "+i+" = " + lods[i].screenRelativeTransitionHeight);
41.             //}
42.             if (l > 0) {
43.                 if (lods[l-1].screenRelativeTransitionHeight>0.01f)
44.                 {
45.                     lods[l - 1].screenRelativeTransitionHeight = 0.01f;
46.                 }
47.             }
48.  
49.             lodGroup.SetLODs(lods);
50.             lodGroup.RecalculateBounds();
51.  
52.         }
53.     }
54.    
55. }
56.  

 

Brilliant! Thanks so much for sharing. If it is OK with you I will add this to the Gaia tutorials. I am also a fan of the blink style of movement as well. Super useful

 

Thank you and feel free to add it to the tutorials.

 

I have been very close to buying GAIA over the last few days, along with a number of other assets in support of really stepping up terrain (RTP, uNature, Aquas, and I'll even mention UniStorm that everyone knows already). It's likely it will happen in the next few days, and I was just wondering about the state of GAIA 2.0, or specifically the tiling support...
I respect that you'll only release a quality product when it's ready, but do you have even a broad idea of weeks or months before tiling would be in our hands at this point?

I am also curious about how this is going to work with regards to streaming the tiles, will you be building in some runtime portions of GAIA that will remain for production which will be used for streaming the tiles? and would you make it easy to integrate with existing streaming options like world streamer (or whatever the latest and greatest are in that area)?

And last, I've seen that RTP does "work" with GAIA and can have some very amazing effects on bringing the terrains to life, but the workflow isn't exactly optimal from the videos I've seen on it (might be outdated). Any plans in the GAIA pipeline to improve the workflow with RTP? or maybe even better, introducing some GAIA terrain shaders? The quality of your product, would prompt me to seriously reconsider RTP if there is something like that in the pipeline.

Thanks for the great work on this product, it's been a tossup between a number of good products that never used to be available, and tiling was the one thing I was waiting for Gaia to have to keep it ahead of the other options. GeNa might find it's way into my library as well down the road.

 

Done

Aiming at first release within the next month. Depends on how many issues I have. Stamping on multi terrain tiles now working. Its very cool. Have a whole lot of awesome things I want to add. I won't announce them until it's ready to launch as the terrain space has gotten a lot more crowded since I launched Gaia

Exploring this. I see streaming as a need for a large environments.

No. I can't work out how to use RTP effectively and consequently can't automate it. I reached out to the author some time ago to ask about integration and he politely brushed me off.



I am however collaborating with a very talented guy on a new terrain shader - see the early image above. The snow is all procedural! This will be a separate asset to Gaia and will compete with RTP but have none of the difficulty associated with setting it up and getting good results. I am also collaborating with some other very talented authors as well on some other very cool environmental stuff, so expect to see more great stuff soon.

All roads lead to Gaia

 

I'm just going to step in and throw this out there, having spent time with RTP. And without knowing who the very talented guy is that Adam refers to above. Yet if you have to make a decision now, please give Megasplat a serious look and consideration.

Beyond it being by far the easiest to learn yet feature rich texture system that I have encountered so far, the developer, @jbooth, is in my opinion right up there with Adam as far as being one of the best developers in the Asset Store and a bright light within this community. Following him will enrich your knowledge rather than add more confusion to the process. Please check out the Megasplat thread and his YouTube tutorials before making a decision.

P.S. I'm not wanting to discourage you from waiting for the new shader that Adam mentions above - if you choose to go with Gaia now, which I would highly encourage, and can wait and see, then do. I'm just suggesting that if you are about to purchase RTP anyway, then pause and give Megasplat a look.

And Adam if this post is uncool, I apologize and will take it down. It's not my intent to cause you trouble or to redirect sales away. I feel Gaia and Megasplat are a great fit together and wish that I had made some different choices early on regarding other terrain tools. And thank you, for your tools and for the inspiration and guidance that you offer here.

 

Thank you @Akshara, I will definately take a closer look at Megasplat in the shorter term.

 

Hi @AdamGoodrich, was wondering if you had reached out to megasplat developer for an integration as well. I understand it's not a one click process when it comes to megasplat. But gaia works very well with the tool.

 

I have been in communication with @jbooth and my intention is to support Megasplat as well - it looks like an amazing product

Megasplat does a great job with the rendering - but you still need to put the right texture in the right place.. and with up to 256 this is a whole new problem to solve.

The new GPU compute capabilities and new texturing techniques I am exploring will be needed to get the best out of Megasplat or any other system that supports lots of textures.

 

With MegaSplat it's more of a texture cluster and when you convert from standard Unity terrain you select which texture cluster you want to use for each individual original texture. So maybe it's not so much trying to paint 256 textures in the right place, but just doing the mapping from regular Unity texture to a texture cluster.

 

Hi @AdamGoodrich ,

Since you're going to be supporting really large terrains with Gaia 2.0 , perhaps this tool will pique your interest. It seems to greatly improve the performance of speedtrees with a large number being present in the environment with a demo containing a hundred thousand.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/alttrees-system-wip-assetstore.431811/

 

I wasn't too sure about MegaSplat, at first I was looking at it like "omg this is fantastic, lots of texturing, this will be great".

But really, to replace RTP, the thing it has to do very well is tessellation. It does a good job of this, so it's already on my list to probably replace RTP. The real issue comes in everything after that.
The integration is the most important. When I go back and forth into gaia to make terrain changes and regenerate the texturing, I don't want to then have to follow through the whole workflow to convert it to megasplat and then still have to deal with any changes I did in megasplat disappearing, or having to be exported and reapplied and so on. Very inconvenient. Let alone having Gaia take 2 layers and generate with 256 texture clusters, each cluster would require rules for procedural placements, this could be a task (though the results would be nothing short of amazing to remove that tiling and some poly stretching effects).
Hearing that MegaSplat has had positive response from the author about integration, I have higher hopes that I will actually use more of MegaSplat's features, but as for now to replace RTP (and avoid like RTP) and other crazy workflow issues, I will likely not exceed 4 textures unless Gaia's workflow with MegaSplat goes both directions and can regenerate megasplat, and then auto reapply any hand changes (even if it doesn't do this part, or does it optionally would be ideal, as you may be regenerating completely new texturing and features and not want to have to fix the old hand painted areas, but just redo them). It may also be that as new versions are released, we have to regenerate textures to benefit and this would get very troublesome as well without clean integrations.

So my review on the combination at this point is to be considerate of yourself while using these together, perhaps only use it for decent shader alternative to RTP for now, and keep most of your workflow in Gaia until the integration is smooth. That said once it is, Gaia is going to really pop out in new demos.

 

Yes I think you make an interesting point. This is the reason why Gaia is engineered the way it is. Gaia leverages what is inherently provided by Unity and does not seek to replace anything i.e. there are no custom shaders or any other unusual dependencies. This enables Gaia to be used in the widest range of scenarios.

With respect to texturing, 256 sounds cool, but the reality is that almost nobody will have 256 textures to choose from, and then even if you had them, how will you choose which ones go where. Then there is the size and memory implication associated with shipping them all in your game. And then finally, changing the way that Unity paints textures then causes integration issues.

Anyways, these are all cool things, but best to go into this type of development with eyes wide open. Every additional cool feature means you have more issues to solve, and for newcomers to game development this is fraught with issues.

 

@AdamGoodrich Exactly. It's nice to have all the sparkly features, but I agree that 256 textures is more than you'd ever use, which is I guess the point. There is plausible reasons for working with more than 4, in the range of 8-16 textures, but most of them become very limited details and can often be handled by better shaders.

I guess at this point, personally, it might be a waiting game. Until Gaia leans a certain way with particularly good support for a terrain shader pack at least. Knowing that some are coming for Gaia gives hope, but in the short term it's really just about that tessellation, which also introduces new physics considerations with larger factors. MegaSplat does address this, but it uses an external asset like Bone Controller or something to manage foot/leg IK adjustments based on the tessellation maps and scale at another $50 price tag.

The truth is, the more time I spend looking into different assets, the less sure I become about a lot of them. Fortunately, all roads do lead back to Gaia, so I have at least one picked

 

256 textures is more than you'd realistically use, but I disagree that 8-16 is necessarily enough. It depends greatly on what you're doing of course. I've seen awesome terrains that use *one* texture, but that only works in very specific contexts.

The big thing that MegaSplat addresses is visible tiling. Obvious visible tiling is one of the ugliest things you can run into with terrains. RTP (and others) have some neat tricks to address that, but you can only go so far with those. When you use the MegaSplat texture cluster concept, you'd typically deal at a high level with a limited number of "texture categories", but within those, you can have so much texture variation that you can 100% eliminate the tiled look.

Personally I hope to see some real MegaSplat integration with Gaia and other terrain tools. It's also worth mentioning that RTP itself will be supporting the texture array technique to support many more textures in a future version.

 

Indeed, the texture clustering to avoid tiling is perhaps the single most interesting feature to me with MegaSplat after the shader improvements like tessellation (and I'll admit snow and puddles look pretty spiffy in MegaSplat, especially runtime animating related to realtime weather with UniStorm, or even just runtime splatting of new textures).
I don't know that it necessarily takes more than 16 textures to achieve decent tiling reduction with clusters... think multiplying each normal texture by 4 versions.
Just because you can use a ridiculous number of textures with MegaSplat, many people may do it without thinking of the practical considerations. However, I will digress and say there are certainly use cases for more than 16 and having 16 different textures for different sands on beaches alone could be practical if you're doing something very large, infinite procedural, or even with a large variation in biomes like desert, beach, oasis, forest, jungle, swamp, tundra, mountains... i'm sure we can find practical value in more textures if we push to do it.

That said, the only reason I won't find myself going further with MegaSplat if I decide to pick it up over RTP, is the previously mentioned workflow issues which exist either direction leaving all terrain improvements that require Gaia's participation for generation in a bit of a limbo state.
I'd be happy if @AdamGoodrich weighed in if only to say which direction he'd lean first in respect to this. I know he mentioned he's working with someone to produce his own shaders, but I think MegaSplat is getting enough credibility to consider some tighter integration.
I'd love to be able to keep a session to replay while only having to later adjust the steps to swap in the new texture support for the generation pass and then hit generate and have more or less the same texturing but with the new anti-tiling clusters and tessellation effects.

Side note, can't wait for multi-tile terrains! Looking forward to pushing the limits with a massive terrain just to see how it works out... maybe 1m unit scale, 1cm precision, origin centered, and 100km x 100km each direction from origin for a total of 200 x 200 = 40,000sqkm map with 1sqkm tiles... should be fun killing unity and my machine... will gaia hold up?

TL;DR, Put me down for tight MegaSplat integration with @Steve-Tack.

 

Blimey!

 

Started integrating everything back into the new multi tile stamping system.

Still plenty of work to do, but its coming along nicely. 5 x 3 x 2km sq. Total area 10 x 6km.

 

Looks sharp, can't wait as knowing the quality of your end products, I KNOW it will be amazing.

 

Thanks I have so many ideas for this. Super excited!

 

very bad, very very bad new for me i will need buy a bigger computer screen !

lol

 

Rofl I have 3 large screens. It's great for development. Wasn't so good for bank account

 

I'm sad to report, I tried to purchase Gaia last night and had some new random problems with asset store purchasing. And it may take upto 5 days to get a sales support ticket response? yeesh, not serving themselves or you authors very well on that front.
And it's nothing to do with my credit card, freezing, or details, as I've ordered before. Even so, I tried 4 times varying the usual gritty stuff that updated systems have bit me on before like a dash in the postal code... still nothing. Anyone else having issues in the last day or so?

Morale of the story, wish Unity's support was as good as you top notch asset authors...

 

Hmm... annoying. I hear stories from time to time. It's to do with their payment gateway. If you still get stuck then PM me.

 

If I don't hear anything back by this evening from support about it, I'll try to purchase again. I was trying to purchase another asset at the same time (Aquas), not that it should matter. Tonight I'll just try Gaia on it's own and if that still fails I'll let ya know. I was really hoping to start working with Gaia tonight and this weekend.

 

Keeping another promise from the previous video and it looks like the topic may be of interest to others given the above posts:

This video shows how to create a 8 splat terrain generated by Gaia and convert it to a MegaSplat terrain. Please note that some part of the video are in Fast Forward mode so it does take more than the 12mins of the video (after creating the project and importing the assets: I guess about 20mins however if you reuse the gaia resource file you can probably shave off 5mins).

Assets used in this video are Gaia by @AdamGoodrich, MegaSplat by @jbooth and Landscape GroundPack by NatureManufacture.

 

Thanks for the awesome tutorial!

I added this one and the other one you created into the advanced section on the Gaia tutorials page : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

 

Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Utils/Utils.cs(611,18): error CS0619: `UnityEngine.Mesh.Optimize()' is obsolete: `This method is no longer supported (UnityUpgradable)'

can anyone help me

 

It's just a warning. Unity automatically updates the code to the new changes they made since the asset was created. The message only occurs when you first import the asset into a project.

 

Yep - I will remove these warnings in Gaia 2.0. It seems overkill at the moment to force a 800+mb download just to get rid of a couple of warnings.

 

Thank you

I have a little question,
How can I have larger terrains stamping the bigger than 8km if I have already 100 width?

 

Don't really understand your question. You set the terrain size in the GaiaDefaults file. Once created there is no ability in Gaia to resize directly - however you could do something like convert the existing terrain to a stamp and then re-stamp it on the newer larger terrain.

 

@AdamGoodrich
Amazing tool, really enjoying my experience with Gaia so far. Everything just works.
I did have a couple questions regarding a bit of future proofing for the upcoming tiling support.
If we are starting new terrains now, should we be making the entire size of the terrain now?
Will Gaia be able to take a 10km x 10km area and tile it up after it's already been generated (or even as a step we can put into the replay)?
I'm asking because I'm not sure if I should be suffer some slowness in the short term and go straight for the large terrain, or if the process is going to be different enough that we would need to start over for working with tiling? We could also make 1km tiles, turn them into stamps and stitch them together later but we'd lose more of the work there. Just looking for the easiest workflow for that transition whenever it comes out.
Thanks!

 

That's why Gaia hasn't been updated for some time

Will look into this. Splitting a terrain up should not be that difficult. I will add it onto the getting very long list of things to explore

 

Fantastic, hopefully you find the time.
On a side note, got the asset store issues sorted out. In case it comes up again, do have people check their banks. In 15 years of buying stuff from new random places on a monthly basis I never had them stop it once. Turns out Unity is appearing on some bad actor lists for some financial institutions which is flagging them instantly as fraud transactions. Strange as it is.
That said, I've successfully picked up another asset, and plan to explode my credit card bill this month with a bunch more. Maybe I'll have a bit of a tech demo in the next few weeks

 

Is there anything you can pass on privately - I can pass it on to the people that manage the asset store and maybe they can do something about it.

 

I've already passed on to them what I could when they got back to me on the support ticket. Last bit I can offer them is the exact name the transactions bill under once it appears on my statement.

 

Ah sounds like the issue my bank has with certain game companies. A certain major game is treated as a major fraud contender so despite years of regular subscriptions my bank decided it better stop the payment in case it was fraud *rolls eyes* ... they did this several times until I explained to them that it was a subscription and will be regularly paid out rofl.

 

Yes! So excited about this! Ty ty Adam! Can't wait, very excited! Hence all the exclamation marks! LOL!

 

Hi Gaia Hivemind!!!
I ran into a bit of an issue with trees in my projects. I've been making projects just fine and everything has been working in my project, but when I went into speed tree to finally update the trees to get rid of those error messages, my trees are no longer affected by wind. I've even tried to open a completely new project, and once I update those files the trees look 10x better, but no wind animation.
Anyone run into this yet?

 

Yeah it's silly that the systems in place today are so riddled with inconsistencies. Frankly I'm just glad I got it sorted out to snag uNature while it's still at it's reduced price

 

I've had something similar happen but I can't remember if I did anything with the trees before hand. But I think closing the project and reopening it made the wind work again. Not figured out any specific pattern to what caused it yet, but it only happened a few times.

 

yea, I can get it to work by reloading the project, but it doesn't seem to be with 100% effectiveness, maybe 2/3 maps I do it with, the 3rd map I had to delete and re add the trees like 3 times while exiting to try it before it finally worked.

 

Hmm... never heard or seen this before. When you edit the speedtree material you can set the wind processing quality for each LOD. Maybe some of your LOD's are messed up - or maybe unity bug :/

 

And a little treat - here is the stamper for Gaia 2.0 running with GPU compute in a 10km x 6km environment, rendered as 15 x 2km square terrain tiles.

The good news is that I am now generally happy with the underlying frameworks and am ready to move on with the final push for the compute aspect of multi terrain tiling.

Whats cool about the way i have built this is that if you don't have the GPU compute capability, Gaia will still leverage all of the cores of your computer to parallelise the process - resulting in an average 2 - 8x speed increase - and with GPU compute this is closer to 500x +!

 

Excellent features .. I see big potential in those ...

 

Wow! Awesome work Adam. Congrats on a spectacular milestone!

 

For some reason, after I downloaded the new version of unity and imported gaia, I get these errors. Can someone assist me?