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

The default installation sets up everything with what comes with Gaia. The only reason it wouldn't work is if the rules had been cleared out at some point for some reason or it self clears if the required assets have been removed.

Try creating a new project and redownloading Gaia and see whether it works then. Perhaps your installation files have got messed up along the way.

 

There are a bunch of ways you can mess your rules up - all user initiated

On the assumption you didnt mess your resources file up, just delete the spawner and re-add from the advanced menu in Gaia.

 

Hello.
I am learning Gaia with v1.5 QuickStart Guide on Youtube.
When I push 'PlaySession' button in Session Manager, then Unity freeze at the 1st stamp proceed(0.0%).

How can I use Session Manager?

And how can I change the Sea Level at Stamper?
It is fixed text '50m' on 'Helpers:' , so I can't change it.

My environment is MacBook12inch and Unity 5.5.1f1 and Gaia1.5.3.
Thanks.

 

Ouch unheard of . But the sea level is not fixed. You can change it in the Gaia resources file if I am not mistaken.

 

Hi, evilangel89.
Thank you for replying.
I could change sea level.
Gaia adjusted sea level before stamping.

And I avoid the problem of freezingn Unity without using session manager of Gaia.
I use stamper instead of session manager.
Finally, I done the QuickStart guide.
And I added UniStorm and EasyTouch's Controller.
Gaia is great!

 

I have never seen this - I will test on 5.6 and see if I can replicate it.

 

Will the new terrain shader have distance based UV scaling to reduce tiling, similar to Distingo?

 

Yep. The following image is a standard 4 texture Gaia environment, treated with the new shader. There is some very slight tiling on the near cliff face, which is a configuration thing that I never noticed when I was setting it up. I will share some videos of it very soon - the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. A rather cool new feature being added right now is substance support !!

 

Among other well developed products that use 'Gaia' we also managed to launch our first game-play trailer for our little open-world game, "The Unwritten Critias & the Lost Island". You can watch the trailer here!

The terrain, terrain textures, distance trees (except the ones manually placed on cliffs and some zones specially designed for quests) are all generated with Gaia.

The game's demo is finished, and we are hoping that we can have your support when submitting it to 'Greenlight'! Of course, we can't submit the full open-world island in the demo, but we can give you a good taste on how the game will look and feel when it will be finished.

 

Wow! love the graphics and the art has a AAA finish to it. Congratulations. Would love to see more of your game in future May I ask what water asset that is ? Looks like aquas

 

Thanks a lot! However I am 100% sure that we are not even close to AAA looks. I'll post another update with the 'Greenlight' campaign later, and I hope that as soon as we get to pass we can post the game's demo so that players can get a good read on it, on their own PC's.

For water we used 'Ceto' that is now deprecated, and we still have improvements to add to it, like differently colored water in shallow/deep areas.

 

Looking forward to G2 with substance support!

 

Hi, Adam.
Well, maybe my unity project is broken.
It always happens the freeze problem on the my broken unity project.
But I create the new project for Gaia, and it was no problem when pushing the 'play session'.


Apologies for any problems that I have caused.

 

I'll definitely be buying the GPU instancing AND the new shader unless the price is really high. So far your prices have been good so I don't foresee this being an issue. I tend to buy everything you make. I still need to buy Pegasus.

 

Adam, just a thought that sprang to mind regarding the multi terrain feature.

I ultimately want very large landscapes for continents and wondered, due to the computer probably having problems dealing with all those terrain blocks with all the Gaia created items on them at the same time, whether we could stamp the terrain blocks while they are all on the screen together as a first step as at that point we are only dealing with the base texture. Then once happy with the basic visual ( maybe do a texture cover run to make sure it looks right at that point ), create a separate project for the individual terrain blocks or deactivate them before running the usual tree, objects and grass spawning stages on them.

We could then test run the scene with a script that displayed a set of tiles to see how they work together.

 

I'm with Xrystal as I'm building continents as well with my RPG.

 

@Xrystal: How about creating a large multi-tile terrain, texturing them all in one scene, to allow blending, and then creating individual scenes for each tile to do your planting, building, and detailing in? Then use a streaming solution to instantiate individual tiles from those scenes as needed in your final "playable" scene. Nothing special needed there except the streaming software, which you'll probably need to get anyway.

 

That is what I'm wondering if this is possible in the new multi tile version 2 Gaia

 

It's a MystLike !!!!!!

 

Exactly what I was reminded of . I loved all of it. My favorite was Myst III Exile.

 

I think this is more than fair. The amount of time and passion you put into this deserves to be rewarded. The point of a community like Unity's is to support each other, not to grub around for what morsels we can get for free. I would gladly pay for the upgrade, just to see the market advance.

 

I just purchased Gaia and I must say - I'm impressed! I finally have the terrain I've been looking for. I'm just having one issue I can't seem to get past. When I click on "Create Camera Effects" I get the following error:



I DO have the standard assets effects installed. I've even deleted them and reimported just to make sure. I then rebooted Unity just incase Gaia needed a 'fresh' look, but still... I get the error message. I'd really like to get the lighting working correctly. Does anyone have a fix for this? Thanks again!

EDIT: It seems my image link doesn't work. The error says: "OOPS! Could not add antialiasing. Please find import Standard Effects Package: Assets -> Import Package -> Effects."

 

Hi @saltysquid, While you can always ask a question here I would highly recommend searching the forum using the quick search fields the 1st page of the gaia thread links to.

I cannot see your screenshot, it's an X for me, but I am assuming you're on 5.6 . 5.6 no longer has image effects as scripts built in, which is probably why you're getting an error. There's a post processing stack Unity have recently introduced and this allows you to stack a set of image processing effects in one go and also in the right order. You will need to download the post processing stack asset from the asset store (available as a free download from Unity) and check out the instructions here on this page.

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/gaia-extensions/camera-and-light-preview/

Let me know how it goes.

 

Thanks for the assistance Evilangel - I'll let you know how it goes

 

Will the current Gaia extensions for 3rd party assets be compatible with Gaia 2, and are there any new extensions planned for Gaia 2?

I'm curious because I'm considering buying the Desktop Tree pack from Speedtree, but I'm not sure if I should wait for Gaia 2 (and maybe even Speedtree 8) to come out before making a purchase.

 

@evilangel89 - Thanks for the assistance, I got it working no problem.

 

Yes.

Yes. Lots

Get it and do cool stuff now. Don't wait for SpeedTree 8 - my sense is that it will be some time before it is updated.

 

Happy to help.

 

I hear ya. Speedtree 8 is currently being showcased on amazon's lumberyard. Should be sometime till it hits Unity.

 

Height blending in new terrain shader

 

You are torturing us Adam! Stop it now!

 

Yeah and it isnt even out for lumberyard yet.

 

I don't know how much it costs, but I already bought gaia and gena. I would love to buy the GPU addon also.

 

Is that a substance ? The rocky texture

 

Yep - well spotted.. did I mention it has substance support?? And now that I know how to do it, I will be bringing this to Gaia 2 as well

 

Just had to share this - a massive crunch from @NatureManufacture and I over the past few weeks - and the results are epic!



(procedural snow, per texture tinting and strength adjustment)



(geo layering, height blending, per texture triplanar)



(tesselation)

 

Holy cow. That is super amazing. You guys have really outdone yourselves. Congratulations. I really dig the procedural snow because it's the most natural looking snow I've seen in a terrain shader yet, and I own both rtp and Megasplat.

 

Adam will the terrain shader be coming next week?

 

You did actually but didn't mention the part about bringing this to g2. Thanks a bunch for that. Really hope you put the gpu compute out soon because I honestly feel guilty already about going to receive erosion, terracing and all for free.

 

Screenshots look amazing. Specially Triplanar and Tesselation.

@evilangel89
Dude calm yourself. 3 Posts in 2 minutes. XD

 

o'h my goodness, o'h my goodness, o'h my goodness. Amazing !!!

 

I know it's probably a lot to ask but is there any chance of some sort of paint ability to raise and lower parts of a terrain maybe by brush or something? I'm seeing a lot of terrain with edges that go into sharp cuttofs and what I would like is the ability to paint the edges down into the water. After that we could add splatmaps, trees, object etc as normal.

 

I've always been warned about yellow snow, but never the red kind.
Seriously though, looking superb and can't wait for new shader and gaia 2.

 

Maybe im missing something, but GAIA just creates a standard Unity terrain, which already has those tools.

 

No you aren't missing anything.

Gaia
1. Add Unity Terrain Object
2. Terraform using selected layout
3. Optionally refine terrain using terrain tools available when terrain object selected
4. Texture using specified rules
5. Apply objects and grass etc using specified rules
6. Optionally repeat steps 2 to 5 as required until satisfied

Unity
1. User adds terrain object
2. User terraforms using terrain tools available when terrain object selected
3. User paints texture using terrain texture tools, no rules available to apply
4. User paints grass and trees using terrain object tools, no rules available to apply
5. User repeats steps 2 to 4 until satisfied

 

Once your Gaia Terrain is generated you can use the usual Unity Terrain Brush to raise or lower terrains in specific places. It's not a mesh, it's a standard unity terrain. What I would recommend is save your Gaia session delete Gaia references and then go about doing what you do extra. I don't really like to modify my Gaia terrains. The stamps I have are too good and very interesting haha.

 

I just purchased "World Streamer". Do we need to purchase a terrain stitcher, too or will Gaia 2 do that already?

 

As V2 continues to evolve, I'm hopeful for a solution for this as well.

 

If you go back and read the replies Adam gave to your own questions, you'll find that the answer is G2 will do terrain stitching.

 

Adam, very excited about the upcoming Gaia2 ( would love to beta test as my project is on hold until the substance compatability is integrated as in VR the textures just look too flat with a normal map. I definitely have to by the GPU extension as well since it's a VR project. Now for my questions: any chance to add VR compatible grass to Gaia2? I'm trying to convince the DirectX11 Grass Shader guy to get back into contact with you to make it compatible with Gaia so I hours that happens at some point as it's the only solution that actually looks good in VR that I've found. Also, is there a better way too spawn trees that you know of other than as game objects for VR? I know this is a Unity issues that causes the trees to dance when they are billboarded when you turn your head in the HMD, but if you have a suggestion that would be great . Also, what are the specifics of this VR setup for the terrain that you're implementing? I'm very curious! One more thing, how drastic will the improvement be in frame rates with the GPU add on being used for VR? Or have you not treated it with an HMD? Could you guys if not? Thank you again for everything, I'm happier every day that I went with Gaia over anything else for my very large open world VR project. Gaia is truly the best.