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

Using a proximity tag with a road object from easyroads3d does not seem to work — the visualizer is red only. Is there some requirement for an object in order for proximity to work? Testing with a plain sphere works fine.

 

Guess I was lucky then I downloaded the package from another computer. It´s up an running now. One question, though: Stamp scaling is only possible with power of 2 ?

 

Stamps can be any size - they are interpolated. Terrains sizes are done at power of 2 to make them more efficient, and also to minimize artefacts.

 

Proximity is calculated from the root point of the object. You are better to use a mesh collider and virgin terrain check.

 

Ah that makes sense. That approach won't work for me though. I need texture along the road side but not over the entire terrain. I may have to work manually near the road.

 

Yep - you should still be able to save a lot of work however.

I often use Gaia to do the heavy lifting and then touch things up manually with standard unity terrain tools.

 

Hi,
Probably a newbie question but, is it possible to create continuous terrains for planets? That is, a finite curved/spherical terrain you can walk/fly it's circumference and reach the starting point.

Thanks.

 

is there a way you can help me with some settings as gaia seems to be not texturing my cliffs lol or edges it just covers my whole terrain in grass LOL

 

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/spawners-unity-terrain-textures/

 

Not possible with Gaia as Gaia uses standard Unity terrain, and that does not support this sort of capability.

You could also exlpore shaders like Curvy.

 

FREEBIES!!!

We have made the custom blacksmith environment, and the GeNa spawners demonstrated in this video available for free in our freebies channel on discord.

One of the things we did with the Blacksmith environment was to re-configure it to use the Unity Standard shader, and that means that it will now be usable with the Unity 2018 LW & HD SRP pipelines!

Jump into Discord, say g'day on your way through, and grab a copy of it from our freebies channel! https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

how about creating an environment with book of the dead assets with HDRP ? What do you think gaia can handle this ?

 

Gaia can, Unity currently can't. They don't have a terrain shader for HD SRP yet.

 

Thinking of getting this and sticking with Unity for next project, however the terrain stitching isn't directly supported with this asset. Though I've seen it mentioned multiple times that v2 will be supporting it in the future... when is the future of the v2 release what are the features that it is coming with?

Will it support terrain tile streaming aswel? Any gui and support similar to Unreal's large scale terrain stuff? like overview of tiled terrains etc https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/LevelStreaming/WorldBrowser ?

 

Hi, I am interested in creating LowPoly terrains using Gaia. I choose 'Mobile And VR'. The landscape has the feel and look of LowPoly, but the scene generated is too dark and brownish. I prefer more shades of greens and light khaki! I am looking for vibrant colors, the mood should be happy and cartoonish. I am new to Gaia, is there any pre-configured spawn rules that I can produce textures of such color scheme.

The scene is also not rich, I keep spawning trees and details, but the result is still not satisfactory. There are very few variety of trees, flowers and grasses. There are no houses and villages at all. I saw the House and Village models in the Synty Studios folders, but they were not spawned. May be I am not using Gaia correctly?

 

Hey everyone,

We are very excited to welcome SECTR into the Procedural Worlds family today!



SECTR is the go to solution for streaming huge open worlds to desktop and mobile devices. The SECTR suite of modules is all about spaces and the connections between them. This suite works seamlessly with the Unity and with the end goal of building the most efficient, best looking and sounding games possible.

Over the next few months we will work together with the author of SECTR to familiarize ourselves with the code base and ensure that the same high standard of customer support that both SECTR’s existing customers and Procedural Worlds customers enjoy is maintained.

For existing SECTR customers, please be assured that your investment is in good hands! We are working with Unity to migrate SECTR over to the Procedural Worlds publisher account. Your existing purchase is safe and when the migration is complete the changeover will be seamless.

Moving forward, we will continue to develop SECTR, and will be integrating it into our suite of products as part of our commitment to continually enhance the Procedural Worlds content generation and delivery pipeline. We expect Gaia integration to be launched in a few weeks time.

You can learn more about SECTR here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/blog/sectr-joins-the-procedural-worlds-family/

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Hi Adam,

Regarding the SECTR integration into GAIA, will this require purchasing SECTR or will it be a free update? And will this be in GAIA 2.0 or an incremental update?

 

You will need to purchase it. It is a significant body of work that solves a significant problem and deserves to be compensated.

By way of example, I generated an 8km sq environment in Gaia a few weeks ago. It was densely populated and unity struggled to run it. Unity threw lots of collider errors and ran it at 20fps. After treating that with SECTR the collider errors went away, and the framerate climbed to about 150 fps.

We will be releasing an update to Gaia in the next few weeks with a SECTR compatible workflow.

 

Hey there, just bought both Gaia and CTS.
Anyways, not going to read the entire thread, great tool, sorry if these tow ideas have been suggested before.:
2 suggestions
1. a heat/trail map between villages, farms etc. The more traffic generated, the thicker and more distinct the line gets. How much more road clearness in relation to travel heat is adjustable in the settings. Maybe even have it so at certain threshhold is goes from trail to wagon trail to dirt road to road to superhighway. Eventually, maybe even just make an urban sprawl tool/simulator: the thicker you make the road lines, the wider/more populated the villages get. Because it has a threshold, I am guessing it would map to RGBA well.
Number of items in village set = number of lines shot out to random connections but weighted for nearer villages/farms

2. and snow on trees. I know already begged for, I am sure.

Cheers... money well spent. Worked out of box, as advertised, no fuss, no muss... ..I didnt even use the read me. Just watched the Berlin Unity 2018 video, and I was sold at "1, 2, 3".

 

I tried to join discord to avoid making this post but the link on the Procedural Worlds website is invalid.

Edited:

i was having trouble with the spawners not spawning details and trees, however, i found the solution. I had a collider with a trigger for discovering areas of the map and that was blocking the spawners from working correctly, i assume. still, the discord link is invalid

 

Can you try this invite link (valid for 1 day): https://discord.gg/PMQ3ZS

 

I tested the discord link on the web site and it worked Ok for me, so i am wondering if there is another link somewhere that I am missing.

Can you try the link in my signature please and see if it causes you an issue.

 

Again, it was an issue on my end. I reinstalled discord and the link in Adam Goodrich's signature worked fine. I am still having issues with the spawners though.

 

About SECTR:
Just wondering about the future of GAIA here. Since SECTR does something similiar to Multi Tile Support through Streaming... What does this mean to your Multi Tile Support for GAIA? I thought this will come as an free update for GAIA users with next big update. Or do you need SECTR for Multi Tile Support with GAIA in the future?

Just wondering what your plans are because didn't here anything about the new big Gaia Update with Multi Tile support for a long time.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Nothing. Streaming was never promised for Gaia 2 - multi tile was. A significant amount of effort is required to deliver streaming and we don't think that everyone should have to pay for it if they don't need it. The two can co-exist and add value independently of each other.

We now do the majority of our communication via discord rather than here and it has been surprisingly successful - we only launched it about 3 months ago and already have nearly 800 members.

What I love about discord is that it allows us to have a far closer relationship with the community. The server is very active and more often than not peoples questions are answered pretty much immediately by the community - there is a lot of great information sharing and support.

Your question comes up every so often and I tend to forget that we don't communicate the answer more broadly. So to answer your question - you already have a bunch of Gaia 2 in Gaia 1.7 in the Terrain Utilities module. We back ported this because we did not want to make people wait for Gaia 2 to get it.

We will still make good on our promise of Gaia 2 offering multi tile for free but progress is stalled while we wait to see what Unity delivers to the terrain system in Unity 2018.3. You will understand when you see it why we waited as this inherently affects what we want to do with Gaia 2.

To keep up to date with the latest join our discord server here : https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

Thanks a lot for the very detailed answer. Never used Discord very often but it remembers me of the good old IRC times Gonna use it more often now that I know that lot of Unity Asset Communities are there too.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Is Gaia 2 a free upgrade or a separate purchase?

 

It should be a separate product because it's like a remake of Gaia to work faster and better.

 

Hi Adam,
Just wondered if now that SECTR STREAM is part of Procedural Worlds if you will be addressing the fact that it doesn't allow for floating point limitations and world re-centering. Can you give a bit of an insight on how Gaia and SECTR will integrate going forward in regards to large open worlds?
Oh, I bought SECTR only 2 days before the announcement so I'm hoping it's potentially good news.
Cheers
Chris

 

Hello! I put Gaia into a new project, and this happens after I run a session, specifically river island.



How do I fix? This happened before, is there a way for it to work again?

Thank you!!

PS- I know I havent been on discord often, I cant seem to get on it anymore (its all good ), so I am posting the question here. thank you!!

 

Is it creating the same terrain when you click run session? Do you have random terrain generator turned on in the session manager? Are you adding the stamps before running the session?

 

It's good news for you. The integration is basically done and if testing goes well we will launch next week. New features include complete and transparent Gaia and CTS support, and there are some nice sectoring improvements.

We have a cunning plan to address the floating point challenge - we haven't tested yet - but its definitely on the road map.

Unfortunately Unity killed the serialization approach we took for animation curves in the transition from U2017 to U2018 - and this in turn killed those lovely demo environments in U2018.

At this point despite a bunch of investigation into this we have not been able to work out a way to resolve it. We will keep looking but for now the only way you can get them is to run Gaia in U2017. You could generate the environments there and save them in a scene, and then export the scene as a unity package to get it into the newer unity versions.

 

Hey everyone - we recently had a chat on discord where we talked about the speed of development on Gaia 2, and someone suggested I put out a poll to get a sense of what the community thinks, so today I did this (see top of page).

To provide some background - Gaia 1, 1.5 & 1.7 were all major releases, and each one introduced significant new functionality, and at no point have we ever asked for an upgrade fee despite improving the product considerably.

However, at one point I promised Gaia 2 multi-tile for free, and with Unity copying my stamping concept and implementing it in 2018.3, we are now at an interesting juncture.

** Some people asked - why pay for this if Unity is doing it anyway? They have sped terrain up, and the only other significant thing they have added is stamping (as far as i can tell). Gaia does many more things than stamping. **

Multi tile terrain creation exists in Gaia now, in fact it has been in there since 1.5 but is hidden as we did not have a matching multi tile stamper. But with Unity 2018.3 we get one in Unity itself and we will leverage this in the next release.

So we now need to re-think our approach and throw away a significant portion of the work we did on Gaia 2 (about 8 months full time effort) in order to re-engineer it to be compatible with where Unity is now going.

Another part of the challenge is that we need to pay our staff, and free updates don't pay the bills. The way we have approached this is to release more products in order to create more opportunities to generate revenue.

So our catch 22 situation is this - we can charge an upgrade fee of $15 and hire a dedicated resource to get Gaia 2 to you faster - or we can fit development in as we can and get it to you for free - at the cost of it taking considerably longer.

You can cast your vote by clicking here and we will be guided by the community.

 

Has it been that long already ?? Oct 27th 2015 - Version 1 submitted .. Gaia 1 just about 3 years ago.

I voted for the for the upgrade fee, because it has been a long time, Gaia runs on many different versions of Unity,
and as seen with the stamping sessions Unity has changed a lot internally making the devs work harder ...

If you compare Gaia one and remember that version to what we have now and what Gaia 2 will do.. really it is
almost a separate program now and will be with multi tile for sure.

Personally i think some sort of upgrade fee would not be out of order, I would rather Adam get extra help to
get Gaia 2 out ... and yes that will be worth the extra up front cost .....

How many dev's have just up and deprecated their assets ... ?? we all know the answer if you been around since
2015 .. XD

I am planning on paying extra for the GPU version, and I think it will have a lot of possibility for run time and integration with CTS, RAM, SECTR, various sky and water assets all integrated, which is extra that does not need to be done...

Gaia is more then was intended I believe , with all the interrogations that kind of just happened...
but this in the long run is a lot of extra work, that they did not need to do, and that has a huge value all on its own.

 

First of all, let me say that GAIA is a great tool.

I voted to have it for free. Why?

I bought GAIA quite some time ago and I've never used it in any of my commercial projects. (I am mostly working on 2D games so it's to be expected.)

The thing is I was about to vote for it to be paid because as a developer I'd like to get paid for work I do as well, but the reason I voted for the free version is because even though I agree with it being paid, I probably won't buy it (at least not right away, I'll probably buy it at some point) but you might get the wrong idea about it and if more people think the same way I do and if these people just vote for the paid version because they want to feel virtuous, you'll end up putting it out with noone actually buying it.

I kind of hope I am the tiny minority of people with this mindset.

 

Appreciate your candor - and we put this out here to encourage debate.

It struck me today that maybe we were doing more harm because of a poorly considered promise than good.

So our desire is to understand what the community want - pay a little and support us to get it out faster - or keep it free and have it arrive when it does.

 

I have zero problem with an upgrade fee if it's a significant upgrade. You deserve to be paid for your work. If you feel guilty or such, make it a cheaper upgrade price for a few days and then lock it in at $15.

 

I have no problem with the idea of paying $15 for an upgrade, however (I don't know if Unity will allow this though) I would think that anyone who buys the current Gaia X amount of time before the new release should get a free upgrade.

 

Happy to pay for an upgrade, but hope that upgrade would also still support at least unity 2017 versions as a minimum. So many assets have been broken by the bugs and design changes introduced with the unity 2018 version chain, that I am worried upgrading to 2018.3 would leave me with just gaia as the only working asset.

 

About updates, so much work have been put on Gaia, it should have made some paid updates already to support it's continuous development and to support work on compatibility with Unity latest updates.

Unity terrain is doing what Gaia was doing, will Gaia still have some value ?
Should a new Gaia 3 redefine new ways to make terrain and try bringing features that really stand out from Unity new terrain ? For example Vegetation Studio Pro is bringing Biomes generation and editing.

 

Here is my input. You can put it as a grain of salt or a piece of bread

I agree with @Esteem on that if its paid I wont really get it right away (I don't usually buy assets often). Its not a bad thing for it to be paid, but if its a promise then its best to keep it a promise.

I learned the hard way on waiting on assets for our games. sometimes its really worth the wait. Sometimes its not. Yes some of us have deadlines, yes some of us are hobby devs. If you make a great game, is it better to rush it or take time to put effort and time into it? I am hoping this is not turned the wrong way. Course we are all working hard on our games. Gaia is a really amazing tool!!

There is also family. I understand that that $15 upgrade fee is helping Procedural Worlds workers.

This is really a neutral opinion. I wanted to say both in voting but I couldn't. In all respect I am towards the free one, but that's just me. Either way is fine with me!!

Thank you for your time!

 

I have the terrain. random terrain generator is on. no stamps beforehand.

 

Like Ultimate survival plugin and some other plugins i baught, there was lot of promises ; and a great deception many announcements where abandonned ( too much work, irrealistic etc ...).
You buy a plugin as it is, but you can't always rely on promises or roadmap annoucements.

 

Normally I'd say free but because of your dedication Adam I'm willing to throw $15 your way.

 

I would kill for some realtime spawning,

free does indeed seem to undermine the spirit of support. so, Money

 

I'll chime in on this.

Software development is a major undertaking. There is not a single software company that ever gets deadlines correct...Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. etc. They all make promises that are unkempt with deadlines that are unmet because that's just the nature of software development. Your past promises are irrelevant. My biggest issue is how you seem to be so concerned with the feelings of the community. I think that's a mistake. Don't beat yourself up over this.

Adam, you should do what is best for your business and your employees. Stop pussy footing around this. Hire the people you need and then charge an amount you think the product is worth. The longer it takes you to get the product out the door, the greater the chances that the platform foundation (Unity) will have shifted underneath you....like it already has. Developing for iOS and Android are no different than developing for Unity. You have to move and deploy as fast as you can before everything changes around you. Charge as much as you think the market can bear.

If I were you, and I felt Gaia 2 had significant advances over Gaia 1, I would release it as a completely separate product. I would charge ($69.99 - $79.99), a premium over Gaia 1 at it's current price, then drop the price of Gaia 1. People would now have 2 products to choose from. A premium Gaia 2 and an older but very effective Gaia 1. Some people will complain because they want stuff for free. You don't want those customers because they take just as much time to support as the people who pay. But with 2 paid products, people can choose. Move the market forward and as your products advance, move their pricing upwards. Take a stand and ask for money for the product you have labored for years developing. Stop worrying about the feelings of the community.

On the other hand, you could wait another 2 years, equivocating over the people and the marketplace and perhaps by then Unity will have a Asset Store paid monthly subscription service (SAS)....like for example the kind Unity just switched to and every other major software development company has moved towards.

 

I think it only fair you charge a reasonable upgrade fee. You have financial responsibilities, after all. Some may not want to upgrade, and that's fine, but hopefully there will be compelling enough features to lure most into buying it.

Don't do the subscription idea, as stated above. That's a terrible idea. It's not something I have done yet for any product and something I'll resist.

 

My two cents.

Gaia 1 is...well...Gaia 1. It works and does what it does very well. I still use it...for the longest time I used 1.1 until Adam asked me if I was an idiot for not using 1.5. I told him because it worked great and never breaks! A well built product. Gaia 1.1 and GeNa....perfect. Ahhhhhh

Gaia 2 is...well...Not Gaia 1. So why call it that and use the same forum?

Mr. Adam (coming from our friendship side)...why not call it Adam's Super Scene Combibulator (ASSC)....perhaps better Gaia Pro . It is a related but different product. And do not try to fluff it to work with 2018.3 and older versions. Just put the Unity level requirement on it with a different name and go with it. Also separate it and your new videos on your web.

Some people will stay put with Gaia 1 and some that have upgraded/fell victim to 2018 (for future better) can purchase Gaia Pro/ASSC/Whatever to have the tool in their project for simplicity. Leave this to your customers to make that decision. In the end you may or may not make money from the new version...more likely you will. Just get your a.s.s. out of 'flaky la la land' and make a decision. Simple.

Cheers
O

 

I would never buy a plugin as subscription until it would also contain Vegetation Studio Pro features , CTS and Gena and features that would make it the ultimate terrain tool.

 

That would be cool!!

Yeah I don’t do any subs either. But it’s unfortunate since a lot of company’s are doing that now. Better to pay for a $800 console once then sub it. Is it worth the money? Yes it could indeed be. Is it worth it for the fans and people using it? Could be a bit slim imo.

Thank you!!