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

I have never seen this. Did you say Yes when Unity asked to update Gaia ? If not then delete from project and reimport.

If not that then try setting project target to desktop. You can always switch back to what your actual target after you are done creating environment.

Finally, what version of unity are you using? I have not tested with 5.6 since it was in alpha and perhaps they changed something fairly major.

 

5.6.0 beta 3 works fine with November 2016 version of Gaia.

Image 1 - Import Preparation
Image 2 - Confirmation to Import items
Image 3 - Warnings as expected

 

Looks great, have you incorporated the ability to stamp across terrain patches yet? Or does this new multi terrain feature still restrict you to one terrain patch at a time but have all the terrains on screen at the same time?

 

And these are the same steps with one additional as it is being imported from the Asset Store direct, so is the Jan 2017 version of Gaia.

Image 1 - Import Preparation
Image 2 - Confirmation to Import Items
Image 3 - Alert to update Gaia ( click go ahead )
Image 4 - Warnings as expected and error messages regarding speed tree materials as normal

 

Same process works in 5.6.0 beta 9 version of Unity.

Tested basic use of Gaia.

Imported Unity character, effects, environment, camera packages

Stamped Utah Plains

Generated and applied spawners

Spawned player etc

Applied additional camera and lighting effects

All working as usual, only errors were speed tree material resets and warnings about obsolete functions.

 

Will stamp across terrain tiles. In the video I comment that the framework is now complete and show it off, however the the shader still needs to be completed and cross tile scaling and rotation will be fully supported. It's rather tricky to implement

 

I've tried a few times to get this type of error to occur, such as adding stamps while in run time view.

Everything is working fine.

If you still get the same problem occurring after doing what Adam suggested maybe you should explain your steps from additing gaia to a project to receiving the error.

 

Oops, sorry, I don't always have the speakers connected so didn't hear the commentary

 

Ahh.. so you were the dude that commented about the microphone

 

Nope not me. I just don't have my speakers active all the time

 

Well, I'll comment on the microphone....You sounded like you were doing the commentary from in a BOX!!!

Well....I guess I can forgive it,....ONCE, and only once Adam...I mean it mister, you are lucky you are such a genius when designing such an awesome group of tools, that not only enhance my projects, but make my workflow easier.

But be warned, mister I'll be watching you.

 

ROFL - Dammit - i spent about $200 on that microphone!!

 

Hello,

I am getting an error when playing back a session. The error is on line 1481 of the GaiaSessionManager script and is a NullReferenceException.

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Gaia.GaiaSessionManager.ExportSessionResources () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SessionSystem/GaiaSessionManager.cs:1481)
Gaia.GaiaSessionManager.PlaySession () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SessionSystem/GaiaSessionManager.cs:1158)
Gaia.GaiaSessionManagerEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaSessionManagerEditor.cs:416)
UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditor (UnityEditor.Editor editor, Int32 editorIndex, Boolean rebuildOptimizedGUIBlock, System.Boolean& showImportedObjectBarNext, UnityEngine.Rect& importedObjectBarRect) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:1235)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

 

Perhaps the resource associated with the session is missing. Pretty difficult to tell from this whats happening.

 

Hi,

I'm running Unity 5.5.1f1 and running into some problems whilst trying to work with Gaia.

I hit Ctrl + G as the tutorial states but no such Gaia Menu appears for me to generate terrain and alike?
Is Gaia supported on Unity 5.5?




I've imported the package: Cameras, Characters, Effects and Environment.

Am I doing something obviously wrong here? Hope you folk can help.

Thanks.

 

Yep - as have been mentioned many times here now - when you import Gaia - or ANY asset, and unity asks you to update it - say yes.

Please re-import and say yes when it asks you to to upgrade.

 

Hi,

Thank you, but I bought this for €48 and when I import the asset via the 'Asset Store' it doesn't prompt me to update the asset itself, but just download the whole asset as one, into my empty project.

I followed your tutorial on importing the necessary Standard Assets and still, your menu won't appear where I can create terrain etc. - that's the main element so I can start stamping out terrains and getting on with my making my part of the game!

So I have a question: what version of Unity should I be running?

Thanks.

 

Gaia runs just fine on 5.1 all the way through to 5.6 beta. As Unity advances the engine they also change their internal API's. The system they have put in place to handle this without breaking assets like Gaia is an auto update feature.

When you import assets they will prompt you to update. You need to say yes. At the end of this process there will be a few warning messages but they are harmless and the asset will work fine.

You will not be able to proceed until all the red lines in your console have been removed. Delete Gaia completely from your project. Wait for unity recompile to complete and then look in your console. Hit the clear button. If there are still red lines, and Gaia is not there, then the issue is nothing to do with Gaia. You will need to fix those yourself - best bet is to remove the asset completely from your project, or if it is your own code, then fix it so that it compiles.

When you have a clean console then re-import Gaia. When asked to update then say yes. Fix the Speedtree issue as documented in quick start (this is actually Unity / SpeedTree issue).

Hit clear on console and you should have nothing in the window. If you still have red then you have an issue - have not tried 5.6 beta for a month or so, so it is possible that Unity introduced some new goodness that breaks it.

 

I was just checking the release notes for latest 5.6 beta.

If you are using a 5.6 beta version then there is a known bug with the script updater that might be causing your issue. I am in the middle of doing Gaia 2.0, and there is no easy work around for this so you will need to make sure you are using 5.1 to 5.5.

Scripting: An API Updater internal error "Recursion detected while updating scripts (assembly index: 4)" is thrown when updating scripts. Note that this occurs when importing some 5.4 projects directly into 5.6 beta. One workaround is to do an intermediate import/save into 5.5. (863941)

As a general policy while beta versions are nice to have, I only support released versions of Unity.

 

Hey thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.

I'm trying to get to step 1; like begin creating terrain for the first time, I import through the menu and I'm on 5.5 and the only current red error I get is

 

There is something really off in your install / project. I am actively developing on Unity 5.5 and have no issues at all. Please PM me privately and we can do a Skype call.

 

Yep, something was definitely off! Turns out I had things set up incorrectly:

Unity was installed onto my D: drive but the cached version of Gaia on my C: drive (C:\Users\%name%\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store-5.x\Adam Goodrich\Editor ExtensionsTerrain) .. so I wiped the Asset Store-5.x cache, re-installed Unity from the D: drive to the C: drive and that seems to have fixed things.

Now, time to get cracking with Gaia!

 

Just to provide a bit of comic relief from people nagging about when version 2 will come out, here are some pics of a simulation I did of the recently announced TRAPPIST-1 system. For anyone who didn't get the memo, NASA just announced the discovery of 7 rocky roughly Earth sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star about 40 light years away. Their orbits would all fall inside the orbit of Mercury in our own solar system, so their "years" are between 1.5 and 20 days. But because the star is so cool compared to the sun, this puts at least 3 of them in the Goldilocks zone where liquid water can exist. The only downside is that most would be tidally locked to their sun, which could make them uninhabitable, except possibly for temperate rings around their fixed day/night lines.

So trying to imagine the view from one of these hypothetical habitable areas, I modeled the sun, planets, and orbits to scale, based on published data, and then parented the whole system to a POV on Trappist-1e, right in the middle of the habitable zone. I decreased the time scale so that a day takes about a minute, so you can see a full orbit of the farthest planet in about 20 minutes. The innermost planet only takes a minute and a half! Once I got it into Unity, I found the planets looked a bit small, so I tripled their sizes to make them a bit more visually impressive. The sun would be a dim red color, and locked near the horizon, with the planets rising and falling along the ecliptic plane. With the help of Gaia, and some alien Speedtree trees, here's what it might look like:

 

Nothing short of awesome.

 

Very cool

 

Hello,

How would it possible to create a way to run a blocking function that creates a Gaia Scene from start to finish? I've been trying to do it, but the coroutines are returning before the operations have completed.

 

That is awesome, @FargleBargle!

 

It's possible in current Gaia but not really supported. You would need to read the code for how I do this in the editor - specifically the code that updates the progress bar.

I am making a nice design time / runtime API for Gaia 2, and this will inherently solve those sorts of issues.

 

Thanks, when do you think that Gaia 2 will be released (a month, 3 months, a year)?

 

I am working very hard to get it out ASAP - eta is 1 - 2 months - earlier if possible. It is very complex stuff to even get your head around!

 

Hi,

I have recently got GAIA and like it a lot. Now I'm just working through the QuickStart Tuto. Looking at my Spawner rules I only find hash numbers in the list (see Screenshot). This issue occurs in all my Spawner GOs. I am using GAIA 1.5.3 with Unity 5.5.1f1 and Unity had to update GAIAs scripts on import.

Is there a quick way to fix ? Thanks in advance.

 

Hi
I just started gaia today
Please can you help me out Everything I followed your tutorial but nothing is spawning

 

Complement to my previous post: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/g...d-scene-creation.327342/page-144#post-2938809

Now I found out why I always getting this error, when my scripts are in this project.
After a while it comes in to my mind, that I should use namespaces in my scripts, because my Project becomes larger and larger. So I decided to edit all of my scripts to put own namespaces into it, after I've done that and reimported Gaia (because I deleted all of the Gaia scripts) everything works fine like it should.
So burn into my mind always use namespaces to avoid conflicts
I hope I can help somebody with that.

 

Check out these posts: #6822, #6823. Go to Edit>Project Settings>Editor, and if you have asset serialization set to "Force Text", set it back to"Mixed".



Another possibility is you have the Editor in "Debug" mode. If so, try turning it back to "Normal". Use the little hamburger menu next to the lock icon in the picture.

.

 

Can anyone please help me out
My everything seems to be ok
I created a terrain uses mesas to customize it and did not do a single thing with the setting
when I give texture spawn it spawns half of the textures and when I try to spawn the others nothing is spawning
I got no clue what's going on Please help

 

Thanks a lot for pointing this out. Indeed I had it set to "Force to Text". However, switching it back to mixed didn't solve the Issue. I still have numbers after restarting Unity. Do I need to reimport GAIA with the new Settings?
Thanks for the help.

 

You've got me there. I haven't actually had this problem myself. I just remembered reading about it. If that was the cause, I'd think re-importing Gaia should fix any lingering issues, but the only way to know for sure is to try it.

 

Confirmed : the reimport did the trick! Again, thanks for your quick help!

 

Hi,

I'm working on a project that needs awesome terrain, and i'm about to buy gaia since it has so much great review.
My question is : I've read about rumours of gaia 2.0, should i wait for it to come out / when it goes it will it be available for the people who bought the v1 ?.

I don't want to buy something and then it goes out of date right after haha

 

Gaia 2.0 will be a free update.

With essentially zero information to work with its pretty hard to help you.

When you are starting the best bet is to follow the quite start guide to get a sense of Gaia, and then take a look at the tutorials here: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/.

Between these you should be able to get started.

 

Yes, what matters is what the assert serialization is set to at the time of import. As long as you import it in Mixed Mode, you can change it to Forced Text after. It's a known Unity issue that's been around a while.

 

New stamper UX coming along nicely:



A new show and hide help button talks you through each section of the interface.

 

That looks... brilliant. It's really simplified the interface. The stamp selector certainly looks quicker and easier to use than before. My only question is what happened to some of the things that were removed, like Smooth, Normalize and Invert, or the Position, Rotation, and Scale controls? Are they gone, or have they moved somewhere else, or do you just handle those functions in a different way now?

 

For now I have left them off, as I re-add the features I will also re-add them into the interface. They will be kept out of the way via the toggle buttons... so you only see them if you need them.

BTW... in another rather major leap forward... cross tile / multi tile stamping lives

In this example the stamping was performed in parallel as background tasks across the CPU cores on my computer rather than via GPU. For big number crunching this is massive as your system stays responsive, and it also delivers a massive speedup

The practical impact is that those of you who run on Mac this feature will make your day, and it is fast!

 

Looks amazing, can't wait to use it.

 

*dances* woot definitely a worthy addition to the asset for non planet sized terrain ( a planet sized terrain system is one of my mini projects for a later big project ) but Gaia is definitely my go to asset for creating smaller landscape projects

 

Hello, and thanks for a great asset! I was trying to implement a real world terrain using the tutorial:

. However, the terrain-party did not give me so nice terrains here in Norway. But there are free DTM-files (in the same USGS format as Terrain-party seem to use) for the whole of Norway so I thought downloading such a file and then generate a height-map from there should be easy. Hehe, so after firstly downloading DTM-data and installing "MicroDem" and "Gdal" I was able to open the DTM-data and they look nice.

From here I generate a GEOTIFF greyscale image that looks like this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6uoh690LocbYkJnQkZ1c1pneFE/view?usp=sharing

And then I try to drag this into the gaia Scanner and I then I don't really get the result I was looking for, it looks like this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6uoh690LocbeExGRzlaVlBiR0k/view?usp=sharing


I am probably doing something very wrong, can anyone point me in the right direction ?

 

Look at getting a Blue Yeti Pro, they run about $130-150, and they are fantastic. They are nearly on par with $800 studio mics. I work for a company that is extensively in the voip and video conferencing territory, so I've seen a pretty wide variety of everything from headsets to SIP phones. Most at work use the Blue Yeti Pro.

Now, on topic of Gaia... I had a couple questions and maybe ideas for the next version about the workflow. As I've been working more with Gaia I've unfortunately run into a couple things that really taint my workflow. The first thing, is that a session retains the "undo" action of a stamp, rather than actually undoing it in the session replay. This issue relates to a second problem, but because of this one I'm forced to do a lot of manual deletions when I am stamping and undoing when I don't like the result.
So this ties into the second issue, is the undo itself. When I do a stamp, I am first only able to undo the most recent stamp I've placed, and secondly this only works as long as I don't run the game (which I like to do in order to see the actual terrain from a player perspective and full engine at work). So the problem here is that first I can't run the game and undo the last stamp after, the undo memory is just wiped out. Secondly, I cannot undo more than one thing, so this is a little troublesome when I decide to try a couple stamps together and don't like the result. And finally, because of these issues, I am forced to go back, delete all the undo and stamping in the session, flatten, regenerate, and then I can try a new set of stamps. This really slows down the workflow, but this comes from a programmer perspective who has no vision for what stamps will look like until placed.

Another thing, and this one might be entirely user error, but I seem to get no effect from smoothing a stamp before I stamp it (neither on the preview, nor on the resulting changes). As a result, I often find when I'm trying to put down rivers or lakes, or even mountains, I am forced to pull out the terrain smoother and get lazy with high opacity and brush size to just splat it down a bit. I realize I could run the smooth terrain feature in the helper, but this is a bit overkill if I just want certain stamps smoothed to varying degrees depending on heights and widths producing funky stretched and pointed low-detail poly peaks.
This is probably a factor of user error, as I'm still also trying to figure out the impact of some of the other pre-stamp stuff to prevent having to smooth edges of stamps that have an unwanted edge sticking up over the terrain too. I think this is just working with the curves and getting them right, but the preview didn't really update to reflect what would happen to the terrain so it was a little more difficult and thus causing a lot more "undo" actions.

Also, I've found that working with a very large terrain to start (10km) isn't going to work very well, unity limitations on the terrain detail and height maps make it subpar without tiling. But in addition to that, I think I crashed 4 or 5 times before I gave up trying to do some initial large stamps over it to vary the base ground first. I gave up on this approach, and decided that it'll be easier to work with 2km x 2km tiles, and then turn those into stamps and smooth the seams once gaia supports tiling... really looking forward to this one @AdamGoodrich ... guess I'm lucky I started this when I did, can't imagine the others who have been waiting longer

Let's see, what else... I haven't done a lot with the spawners yet, so I'll get back to you after I spend more time customizing with those... I haven't actually tried yet, but given that I do plan to use RTP or MegaSplat (still undecided, I can't find anything about MegaSplat supporting terrain holes yet, which is what it's boiled down to now), I am curious if Gaia can still operate with more than 4 textures until then? I should just try this, but I've had enough crashing for the moment lol.

Oh, and one more thing, I'm not sure if this is necessarily gaia so I apologize if not, but I am finding in some cases that the default spawner setup for details (grass) are causing grass patch spawns a little too close to water edge. The result is some of the patches end up actually under the water, seems to happen most on really soft beaches with a foot or two of water above the ground, but only the first foot or two of water depth. Shouldn't be a precision issue, as it's very close to zero on the vertical axis, so I'm thinking the patch spawn is just too close and radiates out putting some under water.

Alright, think that's all for now.

 

Cross tile / scaled stamping WIP - starting to look quite nice. 15 x 2k x 2k terrains there!