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

Nice! Tutorial on a mesh terrain?

 

How does the asset work in a project of it's own with a terrain ?
Then add Gaia, does it work fine then ?
The add each other asset you had installed one at a time and make a note of the results and errors.

These tests will identify why the camera script is having problems.

 

Hey Adam. Having an odd issue. The Texture Spawner isn't spawning my textures. I should note before I go on, two things. I'm using the same texture in all four slots, then using CTS to colour them (going for a flat look, experimenting). The second, I have deleted and reloaded the Texture Spawner several times, trying to fix this so something is surely out of place in there, but I've been awake for 48 hours now so probably missing something crucial.

https://i.imgur.com/RbykU1K.png

https://i.imgur.com/ETn0tZn.png

Is it the a single texture causing this (odd if so, surely?) or have I messed up some settings?


Thanks

 

I think you need some sleep

Not sure - can you send me a little more info here:
https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/home

 

I ended up stripping a bunch of stuff out of my scene and it works now. I think it was a conflict with unature and gaia, maybe.

 

any good news about GAIA 2 ?

 

Hello! Do you happend to have any "Cut a hole in Unity Terrain Shader" that goes good together with gaia & CTS ? .. I have found a "hole in unity terrain" but it messes up the terrain shader.. when it goes on custom.... so.. dont know what to do..

 

CTS supports transparent terrain with mask. I have considered making the rest of what is required but its not trivial as there are lots of potential issues that will get exposed when you disable the terrain collider... and then people will blame you... (for example any other rigid body in the scene will then fall through the terrain) so its one of those things that is more of a hassle than it is worth unfortunately.. but CTS at least helps you along the way by doing the shading part.

And because its been a little quiet in here.. thought I would share some of the more recent stuff I have been experimenting with









Terrain is Gaia, terrain shading is CTS, and have been exploring the automation of Megascans asset import (its working quite nicely).

 

Beautiful!

 

Okay thanks! good thing that tje support is there.. trying to figure out a way to get the terrain collider only disabled where you enter the cave or something there that let you thrue without messing with the terrain collider.

Woow nice pics!! Really good

 

Hello Adam,

Sorry to bother. I bought Gaia yesterday but the every time I close a project and everytime I open it again the session manager disapear and gaia isnt avaible anymore on the window tab...

Any idea where this might come from?

Thanks!

a.

 

An alternative approach would be to temporarily remove the terrain's layer from what your character controller and camera controller collide with. I think that would have fewer far-reaching side effects. You'd obviously need to have two "ground" or "walkable" layers (one just for the terrain). I haven't tried this myself yet, but on the surface it sounds like it would work.

 

Thanks for tip =) But the "hole" tool im using only make the are walk thrue where I paint so it works like AAA game =)

 

Sorry for destroying your gaia topic with cave things

 

try to clear the unity cache

 

There is no need at all to disable the collider of the terrain, you just need to use an area with a box collider as trigger and when a rigidbody enters in this trigger it call Physics.IgnoreCollision(objectCollider, terrainCollider, true) and when it go out of this trigger area it calls the same method but with false parameter.

So with this you can throw rocks, pass with the player to a cave, or even make an npc go inside.

Cheers!

 

HI! What is this error I get with my 8k terrain in Gaia ?
(When I try to bake)

Assertion failed on expression: 'packedSizes == sizes || packedSizes.x == kDefaultSystemAtlasSize || packedSizes.y == kDefaultSystemAtlasSize'

I have a 8k kind of flat stamp wit ha bit of bumps as sea bottom... and then quite small stamps as islands..

 

Hi! Just purchased Gaia and having lots of fun trying out terrain generation!! Awesome asset!

Some basic questions that I didn't seem to find the answer to as yet...

Where is the size of a raw stamp defined ?
Is it possible that different stamps have different raw sizes ?

I know you can adjust the scaling factor or "width" of the stamp...
In my trials on a 8192m terrain, the stamps are seemingly about 100m in raw size ?
So with a width of 4, about 400m ?

Thanks for any hints

 

Just to check, Is this the best place to get support as I see no replies for >10 days to the recent posts? Or is best on the proceduralworlds site? Thanks

 

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/
Is the best place to get support.

 

OK, thanks I've moved my question over to there...

 

Use ticket system

 

No Probs - its a good forum to ask in

For support go here : https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/home. I check this every day and generally respond within 24 hours.

I have not been on the forums much as I have been crazy busy preparing in the week leading up to Melbourne International Games Week, and am there this week. Time and internet access has been quite limited.

I presented at Unite Melbourne on Monday and will be on the TAFE stand near the indie showcase at PAX from Friday to Sunday, so if anyone would like to come over and say hello then I would love to meet you

 

What is "CTS"?

Edit: Oh sorry I see. I thought Lux Custom Terrain Shader.

I need to read through 179 pages here. HAHA

 

I can't wait for Gaia 2.0 xD Mainly can't wait for the pinning of terrains.

It'd be nice if there was a tutorial for making a much bigger island though. Maybe that will come with the pinning of terrains, who knows

 

Best solution is to not try to disable it at all. Build your 'Sea Level' or 'Ground Level' up 100m (or more) which allows you to 'Dig' down. So where you are going to make an Underground Cave System 'Dig' the underground into the terrain then place over top of it a series of Rocks/Meshes/Whatever to make the Above Ground portion. Place a Trigger that lets the Scene know that => bIsUnderground so the directional light can know it needs to turn down really low (normal maps still need it).

For really large undergrounds you should really do a scene transition but you could use that in combination with the above method. This makes both your Above and Below ground look more realistic as well.

You can see this method in action in Skyrim, Fallout 4, SWTOR, LoTRO, and other open world type games use this.

 

How big? .. I just baked my 8x8km terrain, and tried to build it for PC:..looks amazing.. no problems really... just something with the atlas size but theres and option to make the lightmap smaller at the terrain settings that gearwheel...I was making a video and wanted to upload it now, but I cant because its like 700mb.. so..

 

8km is better than the default size xD

Every time I try to change the size it doesn't look right. Too stretched maybe? And mountains aren't very steep either as they get stretched too.

Cool that you were going to upload a video, if you can't right now you could just do it when you go to bed maybe?

 

I assume you are using the random generation feature. I have tweaked these to suit the default 2km size. You do have full control over how things are sized - so try playing with the settings.

 

Home again after another Melbourne International Games (MIGW) week of madness.

Just loved the amazing games, the huge amount of interest, and just hanging out with really amazing and talented people.

Among other things I got Gaia up and running on Hololens - what a buzz that was! Way too many cool things to mention, and am very glad to be home again and to be resuming business as usual

 

What can I say, I joined after the Random Gen feature so I was spoiled xD

Yeah I'll try playing around with manual stamps and see what I can do there. I haven't actually used it manually yet.

That sounds like it was really fun Hope you enjoyed yourself!

 

Hi Adam,
Thank you for making this awesome tool!
A quick question about the “Coverage Texture Spawner”. It always leaves two blank strips along 2 edges of the terrain (at xWUmax, zWUmax positions), but the other two sides are OK (at xWUmin, zWUmin). It seems the two strips are gradually faded from solid texture to blank at the border pixels. Shall I change something in the Spawn() function in the SpawnRule.cs? Thanks a lot in advance.

 

Hey Adam!

Is there a way to use Gaia to procedurally generate map and POI ingame? Like every session would be different?

Thanks for answering !

 

I'm sure it can be done. Not by default though.

You'd have to code a system to make it to the random stamps on load at Runtime, then do all of the coverage spawners, etc. It'd be more work though!

 

Yes - but I won't support it because it opens up another whole can of worms, and in order to deliver the type of experience I want to deliver it would need to be nicely scripted - which is why I have never advertised it. I will be exploring supporting this in Gaia 2.

There is a runtime stamper script you can take a look at.

BTW. GeNa does support runtime POI spawning.

 

you updated the price

 

Is GAIA 2 going to be a free update for current customers? (asking cause some asset developers make it "pay2upgrade")

 

Hello. I have problem with custom trees, I have added my trees but the rotation of the tree is wrong when spawned or when painted from terrain, its lying horizontally on the ground, when I drag the prefab to scene its facing upwards correctly, how to solve this?

 

I guess - fix your trees so that they work properly in the terrain - once they work properly when hand painted in terrain then Gaia will spawn as terrain tree just fine - I am not a 3d modeller so I am not sure how to do this.

If you use Gaia to spawn trees as GameObjects - and you can pre-rotate them there in the resource settings.

Gaia 2, by the time it launches will be another year of development, and includes many more features than just multi-tile support - for example there is a completely new procedural stamp generator that has a choice of 8 different fractals to explore, plus a new filtering tool so that you can add things like terraces, multi threading and much more, so it would be quite reasonable for me to charge a significant upgrade price.

However what I decided to do is make it a free upgrade to existing owners because I always promised multi-tile.

The way I will get paid for all the extra work is to make the GPU compute modules as optional plugins that can be purchased separately. The GPU compute modules do all the number crunching on the GPU instead of on the CPU, and this speeds things thousands of times... typical stamp and texture operations now complete in about 10ms on GPU. In fact the slowest part of the new system is Unity. There will also be some features that will be only implemented on the GPU - e.g. thermal and hydraulic erosion

 

Gaia 2 sounds great! really excited

 

A couple scenes I generated with Gaia 2 today.

They are both quick examples from the new fractal explorer and its a 2 x 2 tile terrain set.

Generation and texturing time was sub second.

 

Hi Adam this looks beautiful, what sky are you using?
is this the new Enviro ?

thanks

Norby

 

Adam, Are you using only GAIA 2 here ?

 

Skies are the new Enviro 2 beta - very close to release now and they are looking amazing!
Terrain was created with Gaia 2.
Terrain shading is CTS - i just can't look plain old terrain shading any more.
Water is AQUAS - with an enviro path to handle fog properly.
Post Processing is Unity Post Processing Stack v1.

 

Thanks Adam

 

Hi,

Huge fan of Gaia here. But today I ran into something weird that I can't seem to get out of.

It looks like the splats are being drawn wrong or something. I included a picture of that here.
Also, it's getting an out of bounds error on line 401 of HeightMap.cs

Also, this worked fine until today. The only changes I can think of that I did before I started getting this error was that I used EasyRoads to build some roads on the terrain.

Enclosed are also photos of the correct terrain and an in-game shot from back when it was correct. It's supposed to be mostly grass with beach only along the very very edges of the water, and under water.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
-Chilton

 

Follow-up. I tried it in a new scene and it didn't have this problem.

But in the new scene, it's botching the placement of trees. The visualizer shows one thing, and the placed trees are somewhere else.

Note the trees on the ocean floor. The visualizer is correct, it's like whatever under the hood it's using to store the trees is backwards.

-Chilton

 

AdamGoodrich said: ↑
No Probs - its a good forum to ask in For support go here : https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/home. I check this every day and generally respond within 24 hours.

here is another link to Adams request in the CTS forum explaining why he wants people to use the support
web page he has set up >> https://forum.unity.com/threads/cts-complete-terrain-shader.477615/page-24#post-3278697

here is a direct link to the put in a request = https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

 

I'm trying to set up a script to generate the terrain at run-time instead of in the editor. Got any tips on where I should start? Looking through the session manager script, I'm guessing that using that would be the ideal way, but I'm a bit lost. Thanks!

 

It depends a bit what you would like to do with Gaia during runtime. All the steps you are performing with the Gaia components during design time should be possible to do via script during runtime as well.

For example if you want to use the stamper first to stamp out some mountains and then spawn fitting textures on it, you would need to get a reference in your script to the Stamper.cs in your scene (or create a new one from scratch from your script) and then call the methods it offers to recreate the exact things that you would do with mouse and keyboard in the editor.

Same goes for texture spawners, here you would need either to get a reference to a readily-configured texture spawner (Spawner.cs) in the scene, or create a new one from scratch and setting all the spawning rules etc. in your script, then you would call "RunSpawnerIteration()" to run the spawner once so it places the textures on the terrain.

The session manager allows you to recreate or "play back" multiple terrain operations that you performed one after another, either at runtime or at design time. If that sounds like a thing you could need during runtime, playing back a defined order of operations, you could skip looking at stuff like the stamper & spawner and just figure out how to load and play back a previously created session during runtime.