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

Solved it with aquas as well ( even though I'll stay with the water from Ambient Sky Samples for my game).
What was the issue : At startup Aquas runs a script to detect the available camera and add Aquas_Camera script to it. In my game the cars take care of instantiating their own cameras so aquas couldn't find them and didn't add that script.
Solution: if you have cameras that you create or activate only in gameplay, make sure they have AQUAS_Camera.cs added to them or add it yourself dynamically in the game camera.gameObject.AddComponent<AQUAS_Camera>();

 

Hi,

I'd like to create an artificial island for hosting an airport.
What would be the optimal way to create a rectangular (or other custom shaped like the letter L) island ? Does Gaia offer something like a mask applied on top of the stamp, to select the region you want to draw ? Other options that I thought about were to just apply the round stamp and manually lower the terrain or try to modify the heightmap image and create a new stamp, but before doing those I wanted to check and see if there is a better way of accomplishing this. How would you do it ?

 

You can mask the area that is actually affected by the stamping process in two ways:

A distance mask that lets you fade out the impact from the center to the border according to a fitness curve
An image mask that allows you to restrict the impact of the stamp to a certain area.

I think it should work quite well if you create a grayscale image of a rectangle on a black background, and then use this as an image mask to create your rectangular island. The process for distance / image masks is explained in the Gaia manual from page 75 onward. Let me know if that is sufficient, if not I can make an example with screenshots etc.

 

Solved it with the grayscale img, turned out quite well.
Also looked over masks, very powerful feature, thanks for the advice.

 

When i have my level ready with GAIA, can i export it to work with it in another project?

 

Yes, you can export it as a unity package. Please follow these directions to create a package that will contain the terrain with all necessary assets: https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk....hare-my-gaia-terrains-with-other-unity-users-

 

Hey Adam! So I've just upgraded to version 2018.3.3f1, and it appears to have created in odd problem... If I create a terrain through Gaia, and then apply Microsplat, the terrain becomes unselectable in the editor window. If I create the terrain outside of Gaia, it appears to work however. I poked Jason in the Microsplat forum, and he doesn't think it's a Microsplat problem.

My repro - create a new project, with Microsplat imported. Create a terrain object, and apply Microsplat. Select the terrain in the editor window, and see that it's working fine. Import Gaia, and associated packages. Create a terrain object outside of Gaia, the select that in the editor window and see that it's working fine. Create a terrain object through Gaia, and see that the terrain cannot be selected by clicking on it in the editor window...

Any ideas what might be going on...??

 

Is there a release date for GAIA 2? I want multiple Terrains

 

Couldn't wait for Gaia 2 (has been promised for a couple of years already) and the fact that every new Unity version is breaking some things with each iteration (postpone the assets update) I went for World Creator Standalone, not cheap but brings peace to the mind and I don't have to wait.

 

And another weird interaction with Microsplat in version 2018.3.3f1... Terrain created with Gaia will not tesselate using Microsplat, it just vanishes where it should be tesselating - see screen shots below with tessellation on and off. I'm posting to Jason also in case it's a Microsplat problem, but maybe you're interested to check it also... To repro, create a new project with only MicroSplat, Microsplat Tesselation, and Gaia. Create a terrain using Gaia. Convert to Microsplat and turn on Tesselation, and you'll see that it doesn't work... Create the terrain outside of Gaia and it's all fine though.....

 

Follow on to my two earlier posts concerning issues with Gaia and Microsplat - it's not Gaia, it's instancing that's creating the issues. It's just because Gaia is creating the terrain with instancing on by default that I've been seeing the issue only through Gaia...

 

Gaia 2.0?

 

Looks good, i check this out when GAIA not release a Version 2.0 next 2-3 months.

 

Hi StevanJay,

glad you found a solution to your issue. Just to confirm: This solved both issues, the tesselation issue and the "Terrain not being selectable" issue, correct? Or is the latter still open?

 

Unfortunately there is no release date for Gaia 2.0 yet.

 

Yep, turning off instancing fixed both the problems...

 

I have everything except the CTS from Procedural Worlds, but i really miss GAIA 2 with multiple Terrains. What i not understand is that GAIA 2 was announced in 2017 with pre release sale from GAIA 1 on FB https://www.facebook.com/procedural...run-time-generation-smaller/1056111927854065/ I must say i am a little bit upset. Also in another Post you write that you focus is now not an indie... In my opinion "That is not fair"

 

I am confused, so does that mean, indie people, like a lot here, and hobby people,
does this mean we should stop expecting updates ?

 

We know it has been announced for a long time already and we would originally have expected it to be out by now so far. The problem was when Unity announced the terrain changes as we are seeing now in 2018.3 we noticed that a lot of stuff we are doing with Gaia 2 had intersections with Unity. Just as an example:
Take the multi-terrain support - originally Unity did not support multiple terrains in any special way so we built in support for the Gaia tools to work across multiple terrains. Now Unity has built in multi-terrain support where you can select neighboring terrains to paint / stamp across the seams. Imagine we would have released Gaia with its own system to set up neighboring terrains that runs parallel to the unity settings - that would have been quite confusing for the users, you would need to set up neighbors once in unity and once in Gaia again.
There were other changes as well that did not directly intersect, but certainly did influence such as the terrain layer system. Before 2018.3 we could assign textures as SplatPrototypes, now we have to create a TerrainLayer asset file and assing this. This is not the end of the world as this can be programmed, but it is another entry in the to-do list that pushes back the release date further.
All in all I can assure you there is no "hidden ,evil plan" going on to not release Gaia 2 or to delay the release date artificially, it is just that we want to get it right and deliver functionality that makes sense in the context of the terrain tech changes, rather than running into issues with open eyes.

The comment Andreas quoted was not targeted at Gaia 2, please see the attached file for the full context. The tech Adam is talking about here is not part of Gaia 2 but an independent project from which parts might find its way into Gaia or other PW products or new assets in the store. The "not being targeted for indies" means we can't take this project 1:1 as it is and plant it in the asset store.

 

Thanks for making this more clear. I think more of us understand now, why it takes some time.

 

The main issue I have with the delays is those people that purchased Gaia 1 on the promise of a free upgrade to version 2 (e.g. the facebook 'advert' dated feb 2017). This doesn't affect me as I bought Gaia 1 when it first came out (it was my first asset store purchase), however I've been waiting for multi terrain and run-time generation ever since and although Gaia was my favorite asset I have moved onto other products in the meantime to meet my needs.

 

I apologize that this question is not specific to Gaia but I'm hoping someone here may have an answer since it is terrain related.

In Unity 2018.3, when Draw Instanced is checked/selected on the Terrain (which is the default), the built in Unity Projectors no longer work. They simply do not render.

I use projectors for indicators because it's a great way to project textures that can follow the contour of the terrain. I'm not aware of any other method to place textures on non-flat terrain.

If anyone knows of a projector alternative or a reason why projectors do not work on Draw Instanced Terrains, sharing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Allan

 

Yep there is lots of water under the bridge here. Gaia 2 is still very much top of mind.

Lots of stuff doesn't work properly in 2018.3. My sense is that it wont settle down until Unity 2019.

 

Can I make some halls and dessert waves with Gaia ?

 

In theory you can make any kind of terrain with Gaia. Gaia comes with a lot of pre-defined mountain and valley stamps, but you can also add your own from other sources such as http://terrain.party.
Here is a quick desert I clicked together with the random terrain generator & the default textures that come with Gaia. It only uses 3 textures, the default water that comes with Gaia etc. so I think you can imagine what you could do with more textures, palms, fitting rock assets, etc.:

 

Those are good. what is still i can't see in gaia or other terrain generator is waves. Yes, gaia can make hills and other earth shape parts. What i'm taling about is hills with waves showing direction.
Like this one:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pink-hill-waves-sahara-desert-morocco-1099950464

 

CTS, Gaia, Pegasus, Path Painter 2.0s status plz

 

There are dune stamps included with Gaia as well, I flattened out the previous scene and used the dune stamps on them:

Again as before, just 3 textures, the sand texture is not optimal for the kind of sand you would see on dunes in the desert, no details added, but I think you can estimate the potential. To explain better what kind of features you can create with Gaia, here is an Editor screenshot:


The golden, dune thing floating above the terrain is the Gaia stamper with the dune stamp loaded in. You can then apply those dunes at different height, size etc. in such way it blends in seamlessly with the surrounding terrain. Gaia comes with a lot of premade stamps for the most terrain types, but you can also add your own stamps from publicly available sources or that you made yourself in other tools.

 

Development on the next CTS update is completed and it is being tested internally, it should arrive very soon.
Gaia update is still in the works, I would expect it to arrive in the coming weeks.
We do have collected improvements for Pegasus and Path Painter for future updates as well, but we will concentrate on CTS, Gaia & Sectr first as these show issues in 2018.3 that we urgently need to fix.

Do you experience any issues with these products at the moment in your project? If yes please report them here, on our discord or via the support system (see signature) so we might be able to help you out with a workaround in the meantime.

 

Thank you PWPeter so much.

 

Hey! I'm having a weird interaction with VSPro and terrain created with Gaia - not sure where the issue is, so contacting you both...

If I create a terrain, stamp it directly, and add VSPro, I can generate a shadow mask no problem. However, if I disable "Ground Base" in Gaia, and push the "Y" value up when stamping, the vegetation realigns correctly when I recalculate terrain in VSPro, but even after re-snapping the shadow mask creator to the terrain I'm no longer able to create a shadow mask, it just comes out black... Any ideas...??

Edit: Found the issue with Lennart, it's a bug with VSPro - will leave this up here on the off chance that somebody else comes to this forum with the same issue!

 

Hi Stevan, I saw you contacted Lennart on the VS discord and he invited you to debug further via DM. I think Lennart should be more able than me to sort this out, I have 0 idea how the shadow mask component of VSPro works. Please contact me again if it did not clear up in the DMs with Lennart and you want me to investigate anyways.

 

Hello,

What options are there to reduce the reflection / smoothness of the terrain ?
Here is a current snapshot from the scene where I've marked some reflective/shiny areas :


Currently using the textures (albedo and normal) that came with Gaia (resized them to 512px).
Smoothness is set to 0 for each texture in Gaia Resource settings & Unity terrain settings (but there is no visible difference if I set it to 1).
Directional light has intensity of 1.2 and looks ok on any other diffuse object and I don't use Global Reflection Probe.

Thanks

 

With default Unity shading there are two things you can try:

• The smoothness slider per texture in the new Unity terrain layer settings seems to not work properly yet. Unity still takes the smoothness from the alpha channel of the supplied texture. You can test this by opening one of the shiny diffuse textures, and then set Alpha Source to "None" in the texture import settings. After you apply the changes you should notice that the texture now has 0 smoothness when the terrain is rendered. If you only want to reduce smoothness for that texture, you would need to adjust the alpha channel in Photoshop / Gimp / etc.
  
  
• Create a new material in your asset hierarchy and select the Nature\Terrain\Specular shader from the small dropdown menu on the top when selecting the material. Note how this material exposes a specular color and a shininess value. Assign this material to your terrain via the settings in the terrain inspector (Switch Material to "Custom" and select the material you just created). Now you can adjust the global specularity and its color for the overall terrain via the exposed settings in that custom material.

With an advanced terrain shader you should be able to adjust these things more conveniently, but since I know you own CTS already I'll spare you the sales pitch

 

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Helped a lot the info with the alpha channel per texture, fixed it by making the alpha channel darker.
And yes, you were right about CTS, using it makes everything a lot easier by adjusting a smoothness slider.

 

Hello there. So I tried to use the texture placer and I ended up with this. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

 

Hi, this is a very common problem with Gaia that can be easily fixed, please see the instructions here: https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk....gaia-spawns-textures-in-a-grid-or-dot-pattern

 

Hi
Sorry because maybe you told us about this topic but I am interested in working with Gaia for VR projects, for it, Does it create 3D Environment VR Ready?
Thanks
Alejandro

 

Gaia creates default unity terrain and uses the assets that you set up as resources (e.g. if you created or bought trees and add those to Gaia, those will be used on the terrain as if you would have placed them manually).
So as long as you use assets that are VR compatible, the output by Gaia will be VR compatible as well.
The sample assets that come with Gaia are compatible with desktop VR targets, with mobile VR targets I'm not sure if you will run into issues with the sample water & post-processing setup.

 

Any chance Procedural Worlds assets can be moved to be under Tools in the editor instead of under Windows?

These huge assets in the store have theirs under Tools. I'm currently asking Vegetation studio and others to move theirs to under Tools as well. This way we get some sort of Global standard going. There is enough stuff under the Windows Menu anyways.

Natural Manufacture
Odin
Opsive

Also CTS should be under Procedural Worlds right? Right it has its own category.

 

We would rather leave them under Window for now. Back then we had placed the different tools where we thought it makes sense from the context of the asset, CTS is a component that you would add to your terrain, so we placed that under the component menu. Gaia would go under Window, since you would access most of Gaias functionality via the Gaia manager window.
Then the Unity change came that stopped non-component entries in the component menu from working, and this lead to the decision to place all our products under the Window entry.
The problem is if we move that now we will get hundreds of support requests because people are watching then outdated tutorial videos, documents & forum posts that show the entries being under Windows. We still receive support requests today for CTS where people are looking for the missing entries in the component menu.

Yes, we will correct that with the coming update.

 

Gaia 2.0?

 

Was planning to support Gaia 2.0 and pay the upgrade price, however seen the time between promise (and free upgrade) and now (no free upgrade but still no new version) I decided to move the budget to more evolving terrain systems like World Creator or even World Machine (both working outside of the Unity upgrade cycle).

 

World Creator unity version have some bugs and not updated for long time. If you want to take it, try to buy it from there website.

 

Using the standalone version of World Creator and works perfect.

 

Good. because World Creator Standard version will not work with pipeLine scene. Good Luck.
P.S. I'm talking here about the one on unity store.

 

Unfortunately a lot of things are at play here so this continues to be a work in progress and I don't want to set expectations that we can't meet.

Unity terrain is in a state of rapid change and it makes no sense to re-invent a wheel that Unity is already working on - as it stabilises we want to extend and work with it - not re-invent it.

Gaia has also grown to be way more than just a terrain system, and we need to be super careful about how we do the next version. I would like it to be streamlined and super light weight - but some people might not appreciate the change in direction.

We have some amazing new technology in development and when we are ready we will release it. We would love to be more open about what and when but this has not worked well for us in the past.

In the mean time, while Gaia 2 is gestating, we will continue to improve on and add value to Gaia 1, and an update will land in the next week that brings full support for LW and HD on 2018.3, including support for LW and HD with our water shaders.

 

Hey everyone,

We are very pleased to announce that Path Painter 1.1 is now live on the asset store!

Path Painter is a cool tool of ours that allows you to create roads, ramps, paths and rivers on Unity terrain and works perfectly with Gaia & CTS!

In this video you can see how we can use Path Painter to take advantage of a Gaia Terrain and the height blending with CTS to create perfectly blended paths with your terrain:

Enhancements:

• The paint button is now bigger.
• Changed the size hotkeys to CTRL+Q/E.
• Updated for 2018.3 to use the new terrain API.
• Path Painter can now be placed into any directory.
• Single active terrain is now automatically selected on open.
• Made the status bar hotkey tips adapting to OSX (CTRL/CMD).
• Added visualization to show the active line (editable) and display when straight painting.
• Added a workaround for the Unity bug that causes things not to not render over the terrain in 2018.3.
• Updated warning message for non-square terrains to make it more clear that only square terrains are supported.

Fixes:

• Stop null pointer exceptions when the environment changes. Path Painter should now do a much better job recovering from these situations.
• Avoided cursor pointer exceptions on OSX!

You can get it here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/path-painter-127506

 

Wow! When I think of all the work it took to lay down and texture paths on my island terrain using the native Unity tools, I only wish something like this was available 2 years ago. And now that I've converted it to a mesh terrain, I wish I had tools like this when I need to make changes to it. Oh well, plenty of other terrains I can use it on. Sold (actually, I bought it a while ago - I just didn't realize how powerful it was)..

I know you're reluctant to talk much about Gaia 2 under the circumstances, but just for laughs, is there anything you can tell us about what Unity is planning? I know the details are probably in flux, but if you have access to any big picture broad stroke ideas they're working on, and are at liberty to talk about them, I'm sure there are lots of people here who are curious. The terrain system is long overdue for some TLC, and has been on their long range road map for years, but they haven't been that forthcoming about their plans. If they're finally getting close to rolling something out, a few teasers would be nice.

 

Adam can't tell you until 2019.3 is out...