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

1) textures can be changed. check the videos on Adam's youtube channel
2) trees can be spawned in specific areas, check the videos
3) I had no issue adding in Gaia any asset I own; you just need to prep them briefly, as described in the videos
4) Gaia won' dig trenches, but you can scale river stampers, and use these as trenches.

It all depends from how much time you want to spend on setting up things, and how many times you need the same actions done, compared to place by hand. Gaia is pretty useful in most steps, so that helps a lot

 

Here are the Gaia Tutorials - while a lot of is is Gaia specific - you will also learn about Unity and terrain in general : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/?section=tutorials

On top of what @darshie1976 said - if you created a trench stamp - then you can dig trenches that conform to the terrain using the stencil option - stencil allows you to drop the terrain by a given height.

 

thanks, i think i will give gaia a try

 

come check out our discord channel as well - lots of awesome stuff here : https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

I just got Unity plus (1 year prepaid) a few days ago. I got my Unity key and the free video courses subscription rather quickly but it's been around 5 days now and still no email with the free vouchers for Gaia and Gena. I've also heard one or two people mention they're taking part of the "spend money and receive free assets" promotion who still didn't get their free vouchers. Anyone knows if there's a problem with issuing free vouchers or something? or maybe they're just swamped?

 

This is handled directly by Unity rather than me. I will send an email ask about it.

 

Never mind that, I got Plus through a company's special program and it seems the free asset vouchers don't apply that way (just got an email from them about that). A little sad, but nothing we can do about it. Anyway, thanks for answering though.

 

Hello, I'm a newbie for "Gaiar" I got several questions about:

- How can I create multiple terrains which they can adjacent with each other?
- Your stamp is great and very handle but there are any bad consequences if I just use it to create a terrain only but paint it with another tool? For example MegaSplash.

Thank you.

 

You can currently only use Gaia on one terrain at the same time in the editor. Multi-terrain editing is coming with Gaia V2. At the moment, you can either create one huge terrain and then split it up in multiple smaller terrains with scripts, or you use Gaia to create one terrain after another and deactivate the terrains in the editor that you are currently not working on.
With both methods it will need some extra attention to make sure that you can't see any seams / borders between two terrains. There are assets like Terrain Stitcher or Multiple Terrain Brush that can help you to edit out these seams, or you can write scripts to "harmonize" the terrain splatmaps and heightmaps at the seams.

No, the terrain is a default unity terrain after you stamp it. So you can add and paint textures manually, or you can use any other asset that works on the default unity terrain. Gaia won't interfere in any way, you can even remove it from your project when you are done designing your terrain.

 

For terrain splitting you can use this : http://kostiantyn-dvornik.blogspot.com/2013/12/unity-split-terrain-script.html

 

Hello everybody.
I'm new with Gaia. I do everything what the tutorial said over adding Gaia to an existing terrain.
But i get a really strange thing with the texture.
See the screenshot.
Many thanks for any answers.

PS: I have unity 2017.4.3 and Gaia 1.7.2

 

Set the location increment in your spawner to 1. I made a system to modify this but there seem to be some edge cases where the value that gets set there is incorrect.

If you still get the issue then gradually reduce that value.

 

Just a heads up - I am now travelling to Germany for Unite - and will be largely offline for the next 12 days. For support please lodge a ticket, but also be aware that I will be largely offline while I am away. Thanks for your patience.

 

Thx you so much.
Now i can move forward.

 

Do you still thinking on Gaia 2 ?

 

Yes. Check out our podcast on our youtube site to learn more.

 

Sorry, I can't see it. What I see is new assets.
When you will release Gaia2 ? It been long time since we hear about it.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...d-scene-creation.327342/page-187#post-3503426

 

I haven't had any problems using Gaia so far, but today I set up a new game object spawner, and I've been stuck on 72.8% progress for about an hour now. Unity editor is 1,728 MB or 0.3% memory, fluctuating between 0% to 0.7% on CPU, and fluctuating between 0% to 1.3% on GPU.
I've shut everything down except the unity editor, and I'm still stuck at 72.8% progress.
The prefab I made for the game object spawner does have around 15 volumetric point lights attached to it, so I'm wondering if I should have disabled them before spawning.

Any suggestions?
Unity 2017.2
AMD FX 8300 3.30 GHz
GTX 950
16 GB RAM
Windows 10 64 bit

EDIT- I fixed the spawning time by disabling all the vlumetric lights, but now my spawn prefab is spawning at 0,0,0 as an empty game object, even though it lists it under spawned objects.
I've watched the tutorial video on setting up POI 3 times, and I'm getting the same results. At this point it would be faster to manually place them.

Any ideas?

 

Hi.Some time ago i where able to get Heightmap of gaia..now i cant find that option...or its hiden?

 

Not 100% sure if this is what you mean, but with the Gaia scanner you can create a black and white heightmap from an existing terrain, that you then can use again in a Gaia stamper or for other purposes.
Check under "Utilities" in the Gaia manager

 

EDIT- I fixed the spawning time by disabling all the vlumetric lights, but now my spawn prefab is spawning at 0,0,0 as an empty game object, even though it lists it under spawned objects.
I've watched the tutorial video on setting up POI 3 times, and I'm getting the same results. At this point it would be faster to manually place them.

Any ideas?

OneManBandGames, you seem to know your way around Gaia pretty well.
Any ideas?
Thanks

 

EDIT- I fixed the spawning time by disabling all the vlumetric lights, but now my spawn prefab is spawning at 0,0,0 as an empty game object, even though it lists it under spawned objects.
I've watched the tutorial video on setting up POI 3 times, and I'm getting the same results. At this point it would be faster to manually place them.

Any ideas?

OneManBandGames, you seem to know your way around Gaia pretty well.
Any ideas?
Thanks

 

When you spawn GameObjects, they will show up in the hierarchy like:

Game Object Spawner > Spawned_GameObjects > "ResourceName" > Spawned Instances

I think the empty spawn prefab at 0,0,0 that you see is not a spawned instance, but just the empty container game object that is supposed to hold the list of actual spawned instances. I assume somehow your spawner settings / rules contain some restriction that lead to 0 instances being spawned.

When you click on the "Visualise" button in your spawner next to the resource you want to spawn, are the preview spheres of the visualiser green or red when you drag them around the terrain?

If they are red, you need to find out what rule is the restricting factor that prevents the spawning. If you have trouble with this, you could also create a fresh test resource for spawning (a white cube for example) that you create "as open as possible" so that it spawns everywhere. Then you start to restrict it more and more until it fits your requirements for the actual thing you want to spawn & then you can just switch out the prefab.
You can test the current settings quickly by reducing the range of the spawner so it does not always do a full run across the entire terrain, usually just a small area is enough until you find the fitting settings.

 

I'll give it a shot! Thanks man!

 

Hi Folks,

I've just started tinkering with Gaia and wanted to run a question by you if you have the time.

I've used the scanner to save a heightmap as stamp I can use with the stamper, here it is.



I then proceed to drop the stamp in the stamper preview. The preview of the terrain in the scene window looks good:



However, after I stamp the dreaded 'jaggies' appear!




My heightmap is from realworld data and I can't see any of this detail in the map itself. I've ran a few surface blurs filters in 'shop with various parameters to see to see if that would smooth out the map but no luck.

I don't seem to get any artifacts running the stock stamps so I'm assuming it must be something to do with my imported heightmap but would love a few tips. The heightmap is 1024x1024.

I'm running 2018.1.0f2 and v 1.7.2 of Gaia.

 

I want to add worn paths to my terrain, and was wondering if I export a top down screen shot of my terrain into photoshop, then painted the paths where I want them in white, then brought that png into Gaia and turned it into a stamp if that would stamp as decent paths?

 

You probably need to convert the heightmap to 16bit grayscale.

 

I messed a bit around with the height map you provided and also can't 100% put my finger on it, but I have a theory what is causing the jaggies. The theory is a bit hard to explain, but here it is: Your stamper image is more suited to represent a flat area, since the "mountains" are very similar in color / tone in the image. You can then of course increase the height of the stamper / terrain to force them looking like mountains, but that is what creates those jaggies.

If you look at the crater, the deepest point of your map, the walls of that crater seem to contain less jaggies because there is a shift from full black to half-gray in only little space of the height map image. Therefore this part of the map is less prone to produce jaggies when you crank up the height. But the rest of the image is mostly similar grey tones which is why these areas look worse with the increased height.
Instead of creating the height of your map with the spawner / terrain height settings, you could try to increase the contrast in your original image so you get a more even black-to-white gradient across your heightmap. I made an attempt and put it in the attachments, it gave me a bit better results, but I also had the issue that increasing the contrast leads to color banding that you need to combat then.
Take everything with a grain of salt though, I don't use the stamper very often, but maybe that is the issue here.

That could work, as long as you paint the paths on a separate layer so your stamp only contains the path info & if a path on the same level everywhere fits well into your terrain. If the path at the same level runs across mountains and valleys it will probably look cheesy then with huge walls / drops on the side of the path.

 

@camta005

Thanks for the reply. The original image before it was converted to a stamp was a 16-bit greyscale image saved as a png. You did get me thinking about lossy formats though and I tried a lossless tiff which resulted in less jaggies but they were still there.

@OneManBandGames thank you ever so much for the detailed reply. Definitely progress though and I agree with your assessment of the stamper image. Its interesting as I uses a terrain party image which I think Adam used on one his tutorials. It maybe that the quality isn't sufficient.

I will try another height map and test further. Thanks again.

 

Hi, I have some questions about GAIA before buying it.
I purchased synty nature pack, and I wanted to use it with GAIA. From what I saw in the previous pages you've got some presets for various 3d party packages, would there be one for synty nature too in the future?
Then I want to have a world with underground dungeons and I know you cannot dig hole in unity terrains. So I thought I could have a really high terrain with some very deep cliffs, and I could build dungeons down there and fill the gaps with prefabs from synty. Since I have absolutely no experience for this, do you think it could work? Would GAIA have any problems with this setup? Think about a huge plain with rifts (or crevasses I'm not sure what english term is best for it), like those in the grand canyon.

 

Very good, made spectacular terrain, indispensable for any project with large terrain. It took a week to learn but now it's all clear. I created the "Data" that made my land very realistic.
One problem I'm encountering is about the "Virgim Terrain" for Spawn grass, which insists on being raised under or very close to a tree, even having an active collider.
When I place a prefab of the same tree on the ground, the grass spawn is not generated in the collider. But when this tree is generated by the Gaia and then it generates the grass, this grass does not respect the collider and it generates anyway. With the "box" "Virgim Terrain" marked.
(first the trees, then the grass)
What can I do to solve it?
I use Unity 2018.1.3f1.

 

Lets say i need generate terrain like islands...some time ago i was generating terrain in GAIA and then from each terrain geting Black White Heightmap (.PNG format i believe or JPG dont remember) and then i put them in Photoshop to put together and combine big terrain with islands...but now i cant see that option i can only take .RAW from terrain...that not realy working for me...

 

Gaia randomly rotates terrain trees when spawning them as this creates a more natural feel to the environment, however it did not seem to be working.

Encontrei um tópico que diz o seguinte para resolver:

1- Create empty game object
2- Add LOD group
3- Add mesh to LOD group
4- Repeat for next LOD
5- Save as Prefab

They can now be treated like any other terrain tree in Unity and will now rotate correctly when spawned.

In fact it works by turning the trees, but now the wind zone has no effect.
The trees stand still.
The wind runs on the prefab.

 

There should be no issues with Gaia here: With Gaia you can set spawning rules by height and terrain slope, so you could make sure nothing would get spawned on your cliffs, and no "dungeon prefabs" are spawned on the plains etc.
However I think you could get problems in other areas:

• The Unity default terrain shader does not handle steep slopes very well, and usually displays ugly stretched terrain textures. Unless you cover up all your dungeon walls with meshes, you would need to get a better terrain shader with triplanar texture mapping support (CTS, Microsplat, etc)
  
• When you close the gaps with meshes / synty prefabs, you need to make sure that these meshes are drawn over a large distance. It might look really ugly if the player sees a rift in the distance in the terrain, and as they get closer, the rift suddenly is closed with mesh assets that popped in while approaching. Same with the ceiling when you are inside the "dungeon".
• Lighting could become problematic since you aren't in a real cave but you are only in the "shadows of your terrain", if that makes any sense It will be difficult to make the dungeon pitch black dark (if that is required) and if you have a dynamic day / night cycle, it will influence the lighting in the dungeon as well.

So in short: No technical issues with Gaia, but I would test the idea thoroughly with an example dungeon and some test assets to make sure you can't find any technical issues that you can't work around with this.

 

I think the issue is that the collider in the tree prefab is not "present" during design time in the editor. What you could try to resolve this, is using the "bounds radius" setting on your tree resources.(See attachment) This should create additional collider objects in your hierarchy when you spawn trees that then should work accordingly with the "virgin terrain" setting to counter grass spawns close to your trees.

 

Can you try the following steps:

1. From the Unity top menu : Window > Gaia > Show Gaia manager
2. Click "Utilities", then "Show Scanner"
3. Find your terrain in the hierarchy, and Drag and drop it into the field in the scanner where it says "Drop here to scan"
4. Click "Save Scan"
5. You should now find a .jpg heightmap file in your Gaia\Stamps folder. The exact name and location of the file is depending on which options you choose in the scanner. (See screenshot in attachments)

 

This is because your source image is in 8 bits per channel, which means you have only 256 possible heights, and this looks terrible on Unity terrain... and you will see both resolution and compression artefacts. Your sources need to be 16 bits per channel to get good results. In this instance, take your source in photoshop, convert to 16 bits per channel, and then run a smooth. You can then export the 16 bit photopshop file as 16 bit ibm raw format image and then import that. Check out my import real world terrain tutorial to get a sense of this.

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/import-real-world-terrain/

 

This will work. You can then use the stencil operation to etch paths where the stamp is high. There are tutorials on various stamping modes on our web site as well.

 

As far as I know this is an issue with the vanilla unity tree creator rendering. If you try to put unity tree creator trees on your terrain manually, you should notice that those are not rotated as well unfortunately. I think that has something to do with how Unity handles its trees and billboards within terrain rendering.

What you could do is:

• Create rotated copies / variants of your tree for spawning
• Use speedTrees instead afaik those rotate correctly when being spawned
• Turn into meshes (as you did, but then you need to look into using your own shaders for the wind effect)
• Look into alternative tree / vegetation rendering assets. Vegetation Studio does tree rotation on tree creator trees iirc.

 

Hello. Why when i try to spawn grass they appear then desapear? Thx.

 

It did not work.

 

So I need another program for this to work?

 

Hmm, that is weird. Do you see the tree colliders created by the bound settings in your scene during design time? If they are there, the "virgin terrain" setting should work with them. The only thing that I could imagine is that there is an issue with the collision layer maybe. Can you check on which layer the colliders are being created on (should be "Default" normally") and if the spawner uses this layer for collision checks as well? (There is a setting "Spawn collision layers" in the spawner).

For the "turn into meshes" method you would at least need a different shader that can display the wind movement on your tree model. If you search for this topic you can find unity threads on the forum where people tried / did the same, for example this one: https://forum.unity.com/threads/shader-moving-trees-grass-in-wind-outside-of-terrain.230911/
The last post says that the shader does not work in unity 2018 though :-/

 

Perhaps your detail resolution per patch on your terrain needs to change. Try setting it to 8 instead of 16. To do this select your terrain - then select the cog - then change the settings.

Beyond that I have no idea because you have given me no information.

As a general comment for everyone reading this - if you want a response from me - as has now been asked many many times - please ask your question via my support system - you can see it in the links on all my posts.

Also, if you do ask for support, then please provide details with screen shots or video, as even the best expert in the world will can not help you if you do not give them any information from which to form an opinion.

 

Thanks for that @AdamGoodrich thats the exact tutorial I followed. I can confirm that my source heightmap is a greyscale 16 bit png. I tired using a .RAW file inititally but Gaia wouldn't recognize it (Byte order was set to IBM PC).

The attached file was what the scanner produced? If I bypass the scanner and use a raw directly I get expected results.

 

Thanks for that @AdamGoodrich thats the exact tutorial I followed. I can confirm that my source heightmap is a greyscale 16 bit png. I tired using a .RAW file inititally but Gaia wouldn't recognize it (Byte order was set to IBM PC).

The attached file was what the scanner produced? If I bypass the scanner and use a raw directly I get expected results.

Just to follow up. I created a new project, with a clean import of Gaia and now RAW files are recognized by the scanner and give expected results. Thanks.

 

Question, I have a lot of far hills. As I was driving through some hilly farm country this week, I thought, for far hills, is there some sort of combination of geometry and shader that could be used for covering a far hill with a texture that would look like hills covered with trees, without the cost of covering a hill with Speedtrees? The player would never need to go into the hills.

 

Also, Gaia and other high end asset users, anyone yet on 2018.2b9 or higher?

 

It's called "billboarding" along with multiple LOD's (level of details).

Beta releases aren't supported. Best version is 2017.4.x LTS. 2018.1.x may be working but may need minor tweaks.