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

Hello Adam, I was planning to use uNature for GeNa generated foliage, but there is no integration and the manual workflow to convert standard grass to GPU instanced uNature grass is a bit of an overkill on the long run. Elroy claims he asked you already for a callback function to make tight integration possible, but so far the issue has been put on ice.

I know it might be hard to implement what he asks for (not knowing any of the technical details, obviously) and I want more than anything to have Gaia 2 out as soon as possible (being more important to me than GPU instanced grass at the moment), but wouldn't it be possible to implement some 3rd party callback functions later on?

Alternatively: do you (or anyone else) know about a uNature alternative for high performance foliage rendering that works already well with Gaia and GeNa?

Thanks for your answers in advance.

 

Yeah - my plan is to integrate, but to do when I am ready to do it, which I am not yet. GeNa however should be pretty easy - I will look into it.

Yep that grass looks nice. I would be happy to speak with the author if he is interested. I haven't looked at it for awhile, but it strikes me that it would be so much better if it supported instancing, and from a coding perspective this is not particularly difficult to do.

For VR I drop resolutions of what is generated, so that it uses less GPU when rendering. You can do this now by lowering resolutions in GaiaDefaults file. My suggestion is to experiment until you find settings you are happy with. The GPU stuff I am doing is merely for terrain generation, although the new terrain shader also out performs unity (and looks waaay better), so it should be interesting in VR.

 

Wow, a new terrain shader is coming? What are the most important features? I can already see height blending. Anything else? What about vertex baked effects (occlusion, color, wetness, etc.), tesselation/pom, tiling reduction with perlin noise?

 

All there. Except for wetness effect which will come later. Snow is already added.

 

Baked vertex occlusion really sells me! I'm really excited for that.

 

Ok I am not so sure for that but Height Blending, Tesselation / POM / Perlin Noise / Snow Effects should be definitiv there.
Geometry Blending and your Baked stuff could be an open point where I am not sure. Adam will surely give us more input

 

Hey Adam!

Just wanted to ask about this "Sea floor" that Gaia is kind of automatically doing, is there anyway to make it go on for ever? because I have Suimono wich is infinite ocean, but the floor is not.. you see where Im going with this?

Thanks man!

 

Yep - you are doing unity terrain that isn't infinite. My suggestion is to create a flat plane at the base of your terrain, add your sand texture to it, and make it as large as you want.

You forgot perhaps one of the most important features - simplicity and usability. I am in love with this shader it is amazing ! More information soon.





If you look at the textures here you will see some interesting wet effects... oh then there is ice...

 

Adam, is there any way at all I can test the new shader? If it does what you say, it will truly fix my team's problem. We are at a standstill with our current game, a large open world vr game, until we have something that works better... I hate to ask, but it really sounds like the solution to every single problem we are currently having, and we only have a 4kmX4km biome right this second.

 

And last one... for today


@mindless2831 we haven't tested this on VR yet. This will be launched in next 2 weeks so you wont have long to wait.

 

Btw - the shader for launch is now feature complete - needs a little more UX work, doco, and some robustness testing, but that's essentially it. This thing was way more work than @NatureManufacture and I anticipated.

 

Further to last comment - it has been tested on VR and works fine. I was not aware of the test but I know a couple of the guys in the beta are VR gurus.

 

Hey Adam, good to hear about the shader asset. Hopefully it will play well with beautify which I just purchased?

I was considering another shader for wetness and snow. But I will now wait for yours.

Your shader will it do the same job as Global Snow by Kronnect @Thrawn75 Or dynamic nature by @NatureManufacture? As I am considering one of those.

 

I can't comment about global snow, but @NatureManufacture did the shader part of this asset

 

I will get the new shader the moment it releases. Do I properly understand that this is a seperate from Gaia package?

 

Classy shader or not classy shader putting a house that near to a flood plain is asking for trouble and you've got about 0% chance of getting home insurance

 

It will work 1:1 with Dynamic Nature starter 1 week after shader relase. I will coppy and use the same functions for snow and models blend so it will be absolutely perfect.

CTS + Dynamic Nature + MegaScans rock and trunk (2 models;p) CTS will contain about 40 texture sets also from this screen. This demo scene will be also included but without models.

 

@AdamGoodrich Is there no development thread for the new terrain shader? I'm currently using Megasplat, but I'm always curious about new terrain shaders. This new one looks promising.

 

We will make one soon. It's been sort of low key, and we are only about a week away from launch, so are only just starting to get serious about marketing. Been a bit lazy and putting stuff in the Gaia forum

 

OK, I'll await the launch then to see the details.

 

Yep - this is separate product. Its a collaboration between @NatureManufacture and I. Brings the best of our experience together to deliver what I think people will find to be a stunning product.

It combines my experience with terrain generation and my increasingly obsessive approach to usability and UX together with Bart's deep knowledge of unity, textures and shader brilliance. The end result took way more time and effort than we expected, but is also way better than either of us would have done by ourselves.

 

Dear Adam,
Just to keep me dreaming before the release...Do you confirm with Gaia2 i'll be able to use my already made height map and then recreate my 16 tiles in few secs, then texture them, spawn my biome, spawn points of interest, and even lock some tiles to give them other biomes??? (BTW in the new shader How many terrain textures can i give to my tiles? 4, 8, more? in a single pass?) My prototype is only using 4 textures...
All that at the end i can buy your new shader and give my world a huge graphic progress with all your new lightning and post processing stuff??!!!!!!!!!!

I can't wait!!!!!!

 

Cant wait for gaia 2! Im gonna buy Gena with the release. Do you have an official release date?

 

Hi,
What will be the price range of the new shader? We are all very interested
(How many textures possible in a single pass with the shader?)

Btw, you made a Terrain generation tool, a populating tool, a camera tool, now a shader...? You give us everything to create a world, but 1 thing can be missing.
To me the next step to follow the logic ( my logic actually) would be to get into the competition with.............."Horizon ON" and create a background tool. There is only 1 tool on this market.
What do you think about the idea?
We all face this limit, wether we surround the map buy gigantic mountains, or a fake skybox bkground and some fog, or some use water....Some even try to create and infinite terrain only for horizon............ As i said on another forum to me the terrain tool deals all the terrain data so it would be the perfect starting point to extend the environment into a "simple mesh" textured to fit the map edges.......
your opinion please

 

Most likely $50, perhaps launch special, 16 textures 1 pass.

Gaia can export low poly meshes now... so with some creativity you are already there.

I have some corking ideas for what's next. Systems I have designed & prototyped .. but I am still 1 person. So it will take time.

 

50$ is a good price, with special events it will be very affordable for more people. Thinking of the original integration with gaia2 i'm sure the accessibility will allow us to get many steps further with our environments!! I'll get it i'm sure. (16 textures is great!!!!)

edit:AND....i forgot if i asked...Will you add a tool to Gaia or your maybe your new shader to Detect texture collision for footsteps sounds or any Fx ??? This is very very important to me!

Sorry for my lack of knowledge about Gaia For many reasons i won't bother the audience with, i'm still on Unity 4 so i design in U5 with Gaia but don't go further....Can't wait to dig your advice cause if you say so...It means it's definitely possible!!!

You said to much now!!! We all wanna know what are your ideas even if they will remain ideas...You are all alone, we know that and we do respect a lot. Cause without people like you and other great authors on the store, people like me wouldn't do much with default Unity........


Cheers

 

Does the new terrain shader require the use of texture arrays? Or any other specific requirements such as shader model, etc?

 

By the way, will the new shader support mesh terrains exported with Gaia?

 

Texture arrays.

Not in initial release - spent a lot of time and effort making UX work well with unity terrain... but the shader itself will... so we will make it work with meshes some time not too long after.

 

yo!

I was checking out your tutorials... again... because I started fresh and want to get everyrhing right, I corrupted something in the last project.. anyways, colliders on trees.... is it possible to change the size on them? like make them taller, because if you jump against a tree you go thrue... they are kinda short. and what is your optimazation recommendaants?

have it good!!

 

Gaia is just using the colliders attached to the tree prefabs.
Drag a tree into the scene so you can modify it. Change the colliders from there, and then apply the changes back to the prefab. Then delete the tree from your scene. Then you might need to get gaia to place your trees again.

 

Lazy, or clever marketing? At 169 pages, the Gaia thread certainly attracts a lot of eyes. The sample pics you've posted are sure to generate the kind of pre-launch buzz a new product needs.

 

Turns out speedtree 8 for lumberyard came out the same day I made that post!

 

Tsk, tsk, now you've given the secret away

 

FYI, word I got from a friend was that doing Speedtree 8 for Lumberyard first was less about them being less interested in Unity (or Unreal) or getting a giant pile of cash from Amazon and more about them making the most of a giant pile of cash deal with Crytek to do the nature for Far Cry 5. That makes more sense to me, a lot of their development has always been driven by the big money AAA title or feature film customer. Let's hope that Ubisoft or some other big studio presses them to start moving forward on Speedtree 8 for the Unity engine.

@AdamGoodrich wow, that CTS demo video, and those preview shots... look really amazing. And hooray for texture array support, too - using 4/8 with RTP looks pretty amazing, but still feels a little stifling.

 

Where on earth did you see a demo video

 

Yep I tend to communicate most here. The large amount of pages is sort of a challenge actually as I think people get overwhelmed, and interesting techniques or solutions to common challenges get lost in the noise.

The pics I have made are all using Gaia as well... and after using CTS it will be hard for me to go back to the standard unity terrain shader ever again

 

ah Okay! Cool thanks!

 

I thought a video had been posted here too, but I saw it when @NatureManufacture posted it in the Dynamic Nature thread.

 

Didn't realise he had shared publically.. well here it is then

Video demo not complete yet but already looking pretty nice

The water here is just a texture !

 

What happens when you walk on that water texture? Would you just walk on it like it was ice? How deep can it be/appear?

 

Looks awesome! Where can I read about whats new? Im so eager to check gaia 2.0 out Im almost nervous xD I do

 

Same as what happens when you walk on any other texture. Nothing. It's an illusion, like many aspects of what you do to make games. This is something that would be used to add a wet look when needed. We stumbled on it when playing with the snow shader... turns out that if you swap the textures the snow feature also works great for water.

 

@AdamGoodrich have you guys looked at integrations with weather systems for the shader ?

 

I think it's working like with Gaia 1.. It shouldnt really affect anything.

 

Adam, you wrote on Asset store that Gaia 2 will have a new post fx setup, but I guess I can achieve same with beautify or something similar? The shader is that really makes it more beautiful than gaia 1 right?

Have a nice day

 

You can get a preview of the new post fx setup here:
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/gaia-extensions/camera-and-light-preview/

 

I have Beautify also and I'm also interested to see if Adam has tested his shader with beautify?

 

That is seriously impressive!