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

Now I'm going to have to wait until I get home from work so I can watch these with the sound up lol

 

I have session files from an older version that don't seem to work anymore. Is there some way to upgrade them or something to the latest version so that they will work?

 

There is no reason I know of that they should be broken. I will run a test and see what’s going on.

 

Hmm.. well I copied some session files from an older project and when I open them in the new project with the latest Gaia, the entries look all corrupt.

I also tried loading soem of the older ones that come with Gaia itself (in the Data directory) and they look corrupt as well. For example:

 

U2018 obsoleted a call in the serialization and it looks like my replacement didn't work. It was such an obscure thing they suggested to do that I was unsure what to do to fix it. I will explore this and put out a patch later this week.

Now that they have their own json serialiser and de-serializer I will explore replacing the open source one i used with theirs - hopefully that wont break serialization - and the fix will be pretty simple.

 

Hey Adam, just to let you know, there is a bug in Gaia, which manifest if you move the folder in a different folder.

The Gaia folder is re-created in the root asset folder, and inside it, the stamps folders (all of them) are generated again. Not sure if it is a new bug or was there before; I just tried today to move the gaia folder from the root asset folder into another folder (one lever below the root); and even if I delete the Gaia folder, it gets created again with the stamps folder all empty.

 

Hey everone - we have finally made all the new tutorials live on the web site - the new terrain utilities are pretty epic:
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/?section=tutorials

And we also created a new video that gives you a sense of the power of the entire Procedural Worlds suite working together:

Some of you might also have noticed a particularly cool addition to Pegasus - this will be published within the next week as well.

It's not a bug its by design - Gaia expects to stay in the one folder. In Gaia 2 I will address this so that you can move it anywhere.

I have mostly resolved this in Gaia 1.7.2 - but still have one weird little niggle to work out. Hopefully will publish this tomorrow.

 

Looks like I need to re-familiarize myself with Gaia

 

Hello! Is this normal now? Running 2018.1 and latest gaia update.

that the terrain is white instead of beige? *stamping, havent spawned texture yet..

EDIT: Spawned texture and it looks awesome, omg I love this new gaia! The thing I love most is the new terrain tools and that you can choose the terrain size. 16x16 km, making a place in Finland with alot of islands and water.. I post soon some pictures

 

You need to update your materials - its an automated srp thing - just look for it in the menus - I have not found a way to detect / script it yet.

 

Gaia 1.7.2 is live.

It has a small bug fix on flow map export (the terrain is flipped now so that when you apply it as erosion as per the tutorial it is now correctly aligned).

There are also a bunch more mask generation and processing options in the terrain utilities module to make it easier to generate interesting effects.

And finally, a partial fix to the session management issue that happens when moving to u2018. The older sessions are now viewable but still ultimately broken.

Unity has deprecated a key piece of data and it’s breaking animation curves on import for sessions created with earlier versions of Gaia!

Still trying to work out what to do about this because their documentation is sparse at best.

 

Yours is one of the top assets, and they don't tell you these things? Huh.

 

It´s saturday, and I cant seem to find it right now..

 

Any news on Gaia 2 ?

 

Procedural Worlds Podcast #2 has the most recent news on Gaia 2 in the FAQ section at around 7 min. The whole podcast is an excellent listen though.

 

I see, so the whole Gaia folder should stay in the root.
Then I am not sure that it should allow the copy at this point; because as is now, it create empty folders in the root of the projects; it is not failing in any way. Maybe we have different opinions on what is considered a bug

Looking forward to V2; BTW are you going to make more detailed tutorials about how to customize Gaia object spawner, to make constructs like cities? I know you are working on procedural goodness that you can't mention yet, but the idea would be to get something simple to generate areas with buildings and props, without spend efforts in making rules for each specific prefab.

To me Gaia has been very valuable in making terrains and randomly generated environments; but when you start to go more in details about how you want a specific area, the time spent making rules, is considerably higher than the time spent making the area by hand. Got in this situation when trying to make areas with different vegetation that should not mix up (imagine a mountain area with pines only, while in the valley you use different trees and close to a river yet different trees). If you have 10 different types of tree, you spend ages making rules
Same goes for cities; if I create a city block, the rule creation takes me 10 times more than just create by hand the layout and populate it with the buildings and props.

I know that this is not what Gaia was made for; but I am hoping in something that allow me to do the level creation in a one stop fashion, and generate variations quickly. Looking forward to try the new 1.7 tools!

 

If its by design then its not a bug Anyways, as already commented I don't like the design either, but its not trivial to change and that will come with Gaia 2.

Origami will have ability to do cities. You can see environments I created for Google with Origami, Gaia, GeNa, CTS and Pegasus, plus some middleware i created to interpret and translate the metadata supplied by the Google Maps for Unity API:

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/blog/origami-reimagining-reality/

When I have terrain and city working hand in hand in real time - then that will truly be something pretty epic.

Gaia is awesome at codifying a rule set that can be applied again and again and again to any terrain. That comes at the cost of some complexity in its setup.

If you want fast setup, and both global and local spawning power the check out GeNa. It doesn't do terrain, but it does the rest far quicker and more intuitively than Gaia and is the tool that I generally use for everything after I am happy with my terrain because I like a lot of control.

 

Hello! I imported Gaia into Unity 2018.1 and I recieve an error. I have the render core and hd pipeline.. It¨s setup, other stuff works. Can you assist?

EDIT: Terrain is pink... and when I just tries to create a terrain.. its not even showing... is 2018.1 HD pipeline not ready with terrain system?

Parameter name: shader
UnityEngine.Material..ctor (UnityEngine.Shader shader) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/Shader.bindings.cs:97)
Gaia.GaiaDefaults.CreateTile (Int32 tx, Int32 tz, UnityEngine.Terrain[,]& world, Gaia.GaiaResource resources) (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/ResourcesSystem/GaiaDefaults.cs:383)
Gaia.GaiaDefaults.CreateTerrain (Gaia.GaiaResource resources) (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/ResourcesSystem/GaiaDefaults.cs:239)
Gaia.GaiaManagerEditor.CreateTerrain () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaManagerEditor.cs:1146)
Gaia.GaiaManagerEditor.DrawAdvancedEditor () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaManagerEditor.cs:684)
Gaia.GaiaManagerEditor.OnGUI () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaManagerEditor.cs:506)
System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:222)
Rethrow as TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:232)
System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke (System.Object obj, System.Object[] parameters) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MethodBase.cs:115)
UnityEditor.HostView.Invoke (System.String methodName, System.Object obj) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/HostView.cs:291)
UnityEditor.HostView.Invoke (System.String methodName) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/HostView.cs:284)
UnityEditor.HostView.InvokeOnGUI (Rect onGUIPosition) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/HostView.cs:251)

 

Trying to figure out how to insert stamps.
In this picture this is what I want the stamp to look like


This is what it looks like after I apply the stamp which looks nothing like the stamp. I tried different operation types.


Here are my settings

 

@mattis89 there is no support for terrain shading in the HDRP yet
@Shadowing look at your stamper settings, the operation type is set to 'Blend height' which might not give you the results you are looking for, try to use the 'Raise height' option

 

Thanks for the reply.
Ya I tried that operation setting too. Same results.
I've own GAIA for a few years now and have never gotten stamps to work right.
Doesn't even come close to what the stamp looks like.

 

How do you create your stamps? Through the scanner? GAIA's scanner creates some additional data for the stamper to work correctly. Check out this excellent tutorial by Adam for more info:

 

Idk I just use the stamper component and use a stamp that comes with Gaia. which I just drag into the component.

 

ah, my bad, i thought you were trying to create your own stamps. The ones provided by GAIA have never given me any problems..
Based on your stamper settings i see a very aggressive distance mask. This distance mask will make it that your stamps effect will diminish toward the edge. The preview does not show this, try stamping without a distance mask and work your way up from there.
Other than that, i dont have any more suggestions based on the info you've given..

I hope it'll work out, because once you've got it down it is an awesome system.

 

No. Not last time I looked a few weeks ago.

Am very comfortable stamping system works as designed. and there are many videos that show it off. I am away this week so its hard to dig into detail so please lodge request with support system (plus screen shots) and i will explore when I get back next week. This is only way to ensure you will get a direct response from me.

Stamp meshes represent the raw stamp - not its blended version. So what you will get will always be different if you are using masks. The videos show this as well. It's not ideal, but when running on CPU you need to manage visual performance against response times... If the stamp updates in 5 seconds every time you touch something on my slow machine then people will complain so... in Gaia 2 i do this on gpu and its real time.. in Gaia 1 i have an undo button so you can keep exploring. This is by design.

Always open to feedback on how to do it better for Gaia 2,

 

Was it Gaia 2 that was getting support for multiple terrains or 1.7?

 

Gaia 2

 

@dterbeest Hey man you was right it was the mask that was causing the problems. I set it to a straight line max and it did the stamp exactly like it was shown in preview.
I think that should be fixed. I think the default setting shouldn't be that mask. That made things super unusable and confusing for me.

 

I have the mask like that too and it works, I only change it if I want the stamp the belnd differently depending on what Im stamping.. But I have always ticked the ground base, and it smootly connects with the sea floor...

 

@mattis89 you have it like my setting or the default one?

 

Indeed I am looking forward to the release of your next product

I think Gaia is good at what it has to do; sometimes we just stretch out a tool to do what is not meant to do; which in my case is to create specific zones with specific requirements; and as you did mention, is not really the main focus of Gaia.

That is fine; it still save me a ton of time to set up many other aspects of a map. I may see usefulness in adding some more profile files, especially for trees and details on the terrain (grass and rocks); so it is easier to spawn them on determined areas (say the pine tree on mountain areas or small rocks around a river, or big rocks around a lake and such). I will give a spin to GeNa eventually; BTW would you consider to sync up with the author of easyroads? the 2 assets would really be a nice match, exactly like Enviro and Aquas (I own all of them, and the integration is the main reason why I did pick the other assets).

 

I really hope road and river building is included in Gaia 2

 

I'd be interested to see how you use Gaia to generate city blocks. For my own project I was considering creating complex rules to generate unique villages, but never actually attempted it.

 

City blocks is just basic scripting. Hope Gaia 2 doesn't include that. That would be going way away from direction id want Gaia to go. I want Gaia to focus on making more and more natural looking terrains. With realistic path ways. Like game trails stuff you find in nature. Better control with roads and rivers.

 

default

 

I didn't see it but thought I'd ask. Is there a way to use meshes as masks?

 

If you can add a collider to your mesh then you can turn it into a stamp with the Scanner (Advanced Menu). Once it is a stamp it gets all the benefits of stamps... including the generation of a greayscale heightmap preview image.

I often use those preview images as masks.

 

My attempts hasn't been successful at all; the buildings need to be set in a specific way, to be believable, and when you use rules, they just have too much space in between, if you add all the single buildings as prefab. Had better luck making small blocks and then use rules to build different sections (like residential, industrial and such), although you are confined to the fact that you need to tweak rules for long time.

In the end I just create the zones by hand at this point, while I leave to Gaia the coverage of props and elements (which is much easier to define in a rule, since I want them random and not arranged in a specific way. works for street props, plants, even cars parked on the street, but for buildings and other ordered structures, unless you want them spawning at random in an area, you are forced to do it manually. Not a big deal, but if you add streets too, the whole thing is really time consuming.

If you get around the limitations and are able to make a rule that is working for your terrain, the advantage is that you will be able to re-use it in the future. In my case, the effort to make the rule for buildings is not worth, since I am not re-using it in other contexts.

Crossing fingers that Gaia will add something to help with this scenario; even a simple streetmap importer and use the existing placeholder buildings to place building props would be really helpful. I am writing my own at this point, since this may never happen.

 

I think that GAIA doesnt work very well for urban placement besides maybe some simple medieval villages without any real city structure. Nature is where it shines. If you're looking to procedurally make cities then I would recommend taking look at https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/86716 and https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/53895
Both are really powerful and depending on what it is you are trying to do might be of help.

 

Generic question, but everyone here is using the same assets I'm using. I am on Unity 2017.3. Should I update to 2018.1.1f? I've learned you upgrade too soon, your assets don't work. You wait too long, nothing works.

 

Lots of issues with 2018.x. Many assets do not yet work there. The built in renderer seems generally ok, but the SRP's are a mess due to lack of support.

We built Origami to handle these sorts of scenarios. You can see Origami being demo'd by Google for their new Google Maps API for Unity here:

We are still not sure how we will commercialize Origami yet - but either way it wont be until later this year as we will bring it and Gaia 2 together in parallel.

 

During my search for run-time environment generator I have heard that there are plans for such a functionality in GAIA 2.
I would like to know if this rumors are true and if GAIA 2 will definitely support run-time environment generation.

Also I would like to know if such a scenario will be possible:

I would like to put buildings/towns and roads on a terrain. Problem is with the slopes, my roads slope angle must not exceed specified limits. So I have to be able to modify the terrain before foliage and stuff is placed on it or give a terrain/heightmap generator some constraints.

Also I would like to restrict some regions, like "road spline" to be clear from randomly placed items.

 

The plan is to support this.

Makes run-time procedural difficult.

Quite a shopping list you have there.

The reality is that a lot of work that goes into making these tools - I am talking man years of effort.

Our goal is to be the best end to end procedural generation tool suite on the the planet - but it takes time as some of these things are quite difficult to solve.

I would love to go faster by hiring more resources, but the reality is that this is not possible without also changing people for regular upgrades, which we have never done with any of our products, and plan also not do for the Gaia 2 release.

So it will come when it gets here - within the constraints of the resources available to our very small team

 

I'm sorry .

It really might sound like I'm asking for a lot of stuff, but I'm not thinking that you should implement all the functionality.
I was more thinking about some kind of strategy pattern.

For example when you are generating heightmap (I assume you do) when it is raw and ready to place objects it could be nice to modify it by the user before further work.

The same could be done with objects like foliage, before placing the object there could be an callback (or something ) that we could wire into and could reject the placing. Regions should be resolved by the user.

 

We introduced a very powerful mask generation and usage system in Gaia 1.7 via the terrain utilities system.

There are a bunch of tutorials here:
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/?section=tutorials

Some of this was bought back from Gaia 2, and a bunch will flow forward into the real time / run time version of Gaia 2.

 

So, I just started using Gaia and now I wonder that how was I surviving without Gaia till now?

One question though, how can I create a desert like environment? I want to have an environment for desert racing sort of games.

Currently, my desert doesn't look realistic. It has mountains but no real sand dunes etc.

Any tips guys?

 

Lower the vertical scale of the stamp?

There are some stamps that give you slightly rolling hills that can be used around the terrain

 

There are dunes stamps there as well in the plains stamp directory.

 

In my opinion, would make sense if you would pack the 2 together, or make Origami as extension for Gaia. The fact that I can not only make a terrain out of real data, procedurally fill it and then even add on top of that, streets and buildings in a easy way, is the holy grail of map generation. Looking forward to your progress for the end of the year then; in the meantime, I am going for my custom solution, until you make Origami available. Thanks!

 

I'm complete new in terrain creation.i have some questions:
- if the terrain textures do not fit with my purpose i could change them ? Is it hard?
- could i spawn trees in specific location that i want ? Like the real life terrain
- how could i find other assets that support gaia ?
- if i want to dig war trenches , is it possible in gaia ?

I think my purpose is making real life terrain and im not sure if gaia is fit for me.
Thanks