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

Thanks for the heads up. I have not had issues with Unity terrain with Gaia in 2018... and from memory we do not do anything with materials... but I will dig into and do some testing as we also need to update CTS to support the removal of substance in 2018.

I have been very quiet on the forums over the past four or so months as I have been crazy busy developing new technology and positioning Procedural Worlds for growth based on where we see the industry going.

As part of this process Rand Leeb-du Toit, an amazing guy with an amazing depth of experience, has accepted the challenge of delivering on our vision as both co-founder and Chief Operating Officer. You can learn a more about Rand here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/about/ and on linked in.

This change in focus is already bearing fruit and has already been mentioned we recently got the opportunity to work with some amazing mapping technology (as alluded to in the video above).

We are under NDA and can not discuss the project, however you can learn more about where we are going in this blog post: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/blog/origami-reimagining-reality/.

 

I am super excited to see what you folks release here, Adam!

 

Good use of googlemaps.

But i like the way of creating whole worlds fully proceduraly from scratch , even houses are procedural.

 

There is certainly some cool tech out there! I will study this to see what I can learn

Origami will be integrated with Gaia 2 - so whether its driven by mapping or your imagination - it will work either way.

 

I'm not asking indies to get the same tooling than what produced those AAA teams lol
This is just to say prodecural tools can produce entire worlds without using real map data input.

Anyway, terrain is the base, but it's not a whole world generation, on top you need roads and buildings generation, or have some rules to replace googlemap data with different types of buildings based on their size and location on the map( factory, city, villages ...).
Such solution made of different procedural tools indeed is more geared towards big teams and prices would be higher.

The best would be to be able to mix googlemap locations.
Similar to Gaia stamps, you would stamp some googlemaps City area and stamp on top of it some villages, factory and less dense areas to create unique places.
For example delimit areas with a selection tool and use it as stamp that would be smoothly blended.

 

Adam,
It looks like the issue is because I changed the rendering from the default unity pipeline to the lightweight rendering (new for 2018). The light rendering appears to change the default material for the terrain and leaves the old standard with issues. Thanks and looking forward to your future releases

 

Thanks for the heads up... i will investigate!

 

Yep - just ran Gaia on 2018.1 with no issues with their default setup.

Will now see what I can learn about the new formats. I can't wait for the new post fx to be included in some sort of standard package as well.. it would be nice to roll support for it into Gaia.

 

Really excited about this; and don't worry, I understand NDA since I do work with unreleased products, and make totally sense.

Very strong credentials for your COO; now I hope you will be able to go from vision to finalized product soon.

One thing I may suggest, is to not generate everything procedurally; but allow a certain degree of freedom to add specific elements. Many times in Gaia I feel disappointed because I get a great terrain but I want a specific element like a mountain, river, hill, plateau, lake...and working with stamps to mix them up is really a lot of work; while you could have a procedural element, to place where you want, and then change parameters on it to satisfy the terrain morphology and overall environment.

With a global scale procedural terrain, it is essential to be able to mix and match easily between hand-made structures and the procedural part. As some games did show, if you go totally procedural, the results are not always exciting; while if you mix that with a manual placed element(s), you get more organic and believable results.

Good luck for the project and keep us informed!

 

Yeah - hes a legend and am very excited to be working with him

Actually, having written two significant procedural systems prior to Gaia I know first hand how difficult it is to 'tame' procedural generation. To me the stamping system seemed a very natural way to allow you to customise your environment any way you like - as its not really that different to placing a 3d model into your scene. I would love some feedback via PM on how you think I could improve this.

Yep I totally agree - in fact most of the time I hand craft my environments with Gaia and GeNa... my workflow is usually to craft the terrain I want in Gaia, add CTS to it to make it pretty, and then do the rest in GeNa as it gives me the power of procedural, but with a massive amount of control over where things get placed.

While Gaia and GeNa are more about generating natural environments, Origami is more about built structures, and will be integrated into both Gaia and GeNa.

So for example, lets say you use GeNa to put a simple village at some location. With Origami, I can now do incredibly sophisticated structures, and the plan is to allow GeNa to then leverage that... in fact you could keep 'rolling' your village at the desired location until you are happy with it - well that's the plan anyway - we are not quite there yet.

So yeap - I completely agree - full procedural can be cool - but artist directed is much more interesting in my opinion.

And speaking of cool things - if anyone would like to join our Discord server - here is the link : https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

do you have a release date?

 

hey! do you guys have any clue why my paint brush is sqaure on size 1? and round on bigger size...

 

The square you see represents one "pixel" from the current "control texture resolution" settings on your terrain. Since the circle cannot be smaller than 1 pixel, it is displayed as a square, and when you increase the size it can use multiple "pixels" to display the circle shape again....hope that makes sense. =)
If you want to draw smaller shapes than that one pixel square, you should try to increase the "control texture resolution", but be careful, I think it resets all your terrain texturing if you do that iirc.

 

So you are saying it worked? I just get pink out the box

 

yes thank you I think 2k is max

 

No. We are still exploring how we will do this. There is a lot of interest in it.

Just worked.. but I did not select any particular pipeline - just create 3D environment (which in hindsight is not one of the new render pipelines.

Now that I know how to do different environments as well I will explore more.

OK - so i created a new HSRP project... created a new scene... and right clicked to add a terrain. And..... nothing. Invisible. Ok.. added a texture... and still nothing.. invisible. Nothing else in project at all.

First thoughts... seriously Unity? Even your own terrain system doesn't work with it !!

 

Very happy with our discord launch - over 100 people already - and some good questions and discussion going on :

Here is the link : https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

LMAO Yes thanks. I get invisible too. If I change the default to something else than I get a nice pink

 

Any idea why a project would get these errors? Unity 2017.3.1f1

 

whaaat... nope.. reimport?

 

If you are targeting UWP then this is because Microsoft disabled a bunch of stuff and broke Gaia with it.

I looked into changing this - but the issues run deep as all of Gaia's file handling also use API's that Microsoft decided to disable (who could imagine that File.Read would be an issue!).

I had a similar issues when targeting Hololens. The workaround is clunky - but works:

* Create your environment with Gaia as usual
* Make a unity package just out of the Gaia scripts directory
* Delete the Gaia scripts directory
* Deploy to device and do your thing

If needed to do more work with Gaia, double click on your unity package to re-import the scripts

The scripts package is tiny, so the re-import is usually sub second.

This issue will be resolved with Gaia 2 as it is a major re-write anyway.

 

In my scene I'm wanting to procedurally place structures, ( houses, factories, oil rigs...etc) however, for example, I may want the houses to be randomly placed and be placed wherever Gaia decides to place them, but concerning the factory and oil rig, I would only want one placement of each of those, and at a certain spot instead of random. How would I go about doing this?

Thanks!

 

Just do it manually.

 

@AdamGoodrich ,

Hi Adam, couple of GAIA related thoughts/questions:-

1) with World API Manager ("WAM"), I am still trying to calm down and choose one way forward - so many possibilities! - but, can you control the base water level (I seem to think I saw that on the demo vid)? In other words, tides etc?;

2) with 'Seasons' we of course have our Seasons in Enviro - but wondering if you could encapsulate custom 'Seasons' on a higher level and in WAM? (ie. covering off post-processing, CTS, Aquas even stuff)? Then just call them?

3) with Enviro and Aquas, who holds the keys to updating the integration to GAIA as those other Assets develop too? You and/or the Authors of those Assets? - just wondering;

4) something I'd love to see is ground mist, through trees, or over a lake, or over a river early in the morning? Do any of my current assets facilitate that (or through World API Manager)? I have of course GAIA, Aquas, Enviro, CTS...?

5) same question - but heat waves, haze?

6) forgive me if this has been covered already, but can WAM trigger external things like say triggering a behavior in Emerald AI or triggering some other external code (Behavior Designer etc)?

 

@AdamGoodrich ,

And, sorry, can't resist it:- (7) any news on release eta for GAIA2 and also what will be in and out of it, update cost? (sorry, again, but hey, I LOVE this Asset!)

 

I have not got speedtree folder in 3rd partysamples is that wrong or? I just downloaded it again today.. but cant seem to find anything to do with speedtree at all but I still get some errors to fix related to speed tree. thanks for any info

 

Hi, I made a terrain with Gaia and setup the wind fairly high to simulate a storm, trees work great (default ones, sway violently as intended) but grass keeps waving as if nothing is happening (like just a calm breeze) feels like the wind in the grass and in the trees is not the same or is not synchronized, is there a hidden parameter/script to affect grass in a stronger way?

 

Hello,
I am planning to buy the plugin. Is there a way to see where roads are supposed to be, once I imported a map?

 

If you already had the whole StandardAssets -> Environment package imported before importing Gaia, then the SpeedTrees are probably located there.

 

Can you explain a bit more what you want to do with Gaia and roads?

Gaia uses the unity standard terrain and allows you to "stamp" mountains and valleys, etc. into it. You can then place trees and vegetation and texture the terrain with Gaia, according to rules you set up like you want them (rock texture on slopes, put trees in flat areas etc.)

 

Ah okay I understand. My understanding was that if you stamp mountains etc you will be able to see the roads as well. Or at least where the roads are supposed to be.

For instance if I copy a part of a city with mountains it can copy the mountains but for me to replicate the roads that are in the city I have to wing it with a picture I guess.

 

I think if you want to replicate a real world place with Gaia alone, it will be difficult when it comes to the roads. You will just have the terrain height information as a starting point, but you would need to place the roads yourself with road assets or another road building plugin. You can test how real world data would look like in Unity without owning Gaia as well, there is a way of importing height map data directly.

There are two more things that could be interesting for you:

• This free Unity WRLD SDK claims it lets you rebuild parts of the world within Unity. I have no idea how good it works or if it is suitable for your project, but maybe it is worth a look.
• The Easy Roads 3D plugin is for building roads on the Unity terrain, plays well together with Gaia and it has a function to import real world road data (OSM/KML format). I never tried that function so I can't say how good that works, but maybe your workflow could be >Import terrain from terrain.party > Import Roads with Easy Roads > Texture & plant vegetation with Gaia.

 

Not within Gaia. You can source road locations from other data sources, and EasyRoads 3D is a very cool application to use to apply those roads into your scene.

Unity terrain does not unify this - you need to change the wind speed in the settings on the grass in your terrain object as well.

 

Nice idea

Also a cool idea

This is controlled by other authors, but I will often help.

There are some great assets that do this... but its not controlled by WAPI. Also a good idea.

It could easily do this if you created an integration script...

Love your thinking here - come join us on Discord - I have some cool stuff in the works.

https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

Can you send me your whole product is not it beautiful too?

 

Just a heads up - there is a new version of Gaia coming in the next week or so!!

It will have some cool new content, a mobile and vr setup, 2018.x LW SRP support, and hopefully a much nicer water solution.

NOTE: With the next release of Gaia we will also be increasing its price to reflect the increase in content and capability and to prepare for the incoming version 2.0 release which will be a FREE update for Gaia 1.x owners - so if you want Gaia at this price you had best get in now!

Gaia 2.0 will be multi tile enabled, dramatically faster, run-time generation enabled and much much more. More news soon

Also - we just released the latest version of CTS our PBR terrain shading solution for Unity. Here is a a tutorial on how to take your Gaia terrain to the next level visually with CTS! I am always surprised at how big a difference our shading system makes!

 

ok, I thought building terrains using Gaia etc was going to be easy but I need to tag the trees on the terrain so I can interact with them in the game. For example I want to tag them "Wood" so my bullet impacts know what to do. But I can't figure out how to select any of the trees or details in the scene from the editor to be able to add scripts or even tag them. Any ideas?

 

Hehe - welcome to the world of game building - nothing is generally as easy as you thought!

Instead of spawning trees as terrain trees set your tree prefabs with your script and spawn them as game objects.

Problem is that lots of game objects will kill performance if you have deeply wooded environments. Solving that is beyond the scope of Gaia.

There are lots of tutorials on how to set Gaia up here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/?section=tutorials

 

This is kinda a problem that stems from the Unity standard terrain: Even if you would place the trees & vegetation with unity manually, you would not be able to select a single tree in the editor and make changes to it.

I'm not 100% sure, but if you change the tag on the tree prefab that you selected as resource for spawning with gaia, does that not automatically change the tag of all spawned trees as well?

If you are proficient with scripting, it should work if you make yourself a small editor script that iterates through all the trees on the terrain and sets the tag for you, see

TerrainData.treeInstanceCount
TerrainData.GetTreeInstance

You could also look into the Gaia spawner code and hardcode it in there, but then you would need to keep track of that change on every Gaia update to avoid it gets overwritten, etc.

 

@arkon

err... Vaguely I recall doing something like the following for that
https://gist.github.com/twobob/f7b34a4b404a9cee44da I think that is the freshest revision

You could populate it from the tree stuff indicated sagely by OneManBandy above

I also used a particle system at one point to emulate trees
https://gist.github.com/twobob/0ab2a30ecb92c4627c0d unsure if that code is helpful but it is there also to eyeball.
Basic tracking stuff IIRC

 

will Gaia 2 be compatible with Unity 5.6.5f1?

 

Most likey not. Doesn't make sense to me to hold the product back in order to support old versions of Unity. We will see how this pans out as it gets closer to release. It may be that some things can easily be managed with some smart use of #define

 

Might I politely ask if 5.6 support is dropped in Gaia 2.0 will Gaia 1.0 be considered a LTS branch for 5.6 with retrograded suitable "gaff, sticky-tape, critical API, and obvious performance oversight" fixes? Or deprecated entirely. Many thanks

I ask with a thought to the potentially dark comedic and star-crossed timing of the release of Terrain 2.0 from Unity3D and the launch of Gaia 2.0. You see my point. Thanks

 

As per my last comment - not 100% sure yet. Ideally I want to support widest range of platforms.

A case in point though - ECS and Jobs. I am exploring supporting this as this is inherently where Unity want to take the platform.

Regardless, existing customers will still be able to get 1.x releases, and they will continue to be backwards compatible.

 

And here is a little peek at the 1.7 release - due next week!

 

Accidentally drools on keyboard.

Fair enough were just pretty invested in 5.6 for a while so. purely selfish question.

 

I really like the way 1.7 is shaping up so far

 

Playing with Gaia again right now, WebGL has come a long way. Desktop perfomance is overall better now. Software platforms and their integrations are becoming stable and mature. The possibilities are literally becoming staggering...
Can not wait

 

I'm still invested in 5.6 as well, or more I'm "held hostage" in that version because I was getting quite heavy editor performance issues in the 2017 versions. Fortunately (?) I'm not alone with this: https://forum.unity.com/threads/2017-2-0f3-editor-very-slow.500288/

 

Also invested in 5.6, thanks for the update!