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

Due to the lack of overhangs cliffs are a bit difficult to make with the unity terrain sytem alone. 3D Models should help for sure, otherwise you could also try to use the unity or Gaia stamp tool to stamp some detail into the side walls of the cliff, this way they look less artificial: You could also try to mix in another rock texture to break up tiling in the distance. If you are using CTS you could play with the far tile size and the mix distance as well. Also if CTS is involved check if the triplanar setting is enabled for those rock textures, that should make a difference.

 

Hi, I've been following you guys for a while now, and I hope that's true that we see it in a few weeks. I just started a new project, and I think I won't be upgrading past 2018.3 for a long time. I would really like to use Gaia 2.0 in my new game, but what versions of Unity will it be compatible with? I know there have been a lot of big changes lately, and I would understand if 2.0 was only for 2019.x and newer.

With how close you are to release, do we have a date yet? Not to be pushy, but you guys have been saying 2-3 months for 2-3 years. I can put world/level design on hold for a few weeks maybe, while refining mechanics etc, but I can't wait too long.

Keep up the good work. You guys have come a long way.

 

There have been changes indeed, but we already have made the adaptions for Gaia 1 to work across multiple versions of Unity, so there currently is no reason why we couldn't support 2018.3 and earlier versions as well.

No, there unfortunately is no release date yet. An exact date is difficult for us to plan anyways as all the problems and issues we face during development can inflate and deflate unexpectedly and we also don't fully control the ecosystem that we are developing in.
Recent example from today: I was looking into fixing errors that currently occur when you install most of our products. The errors are caused by a change introduced in Unity 2019.1 when importing scripts that use the InitializeOnLoad-Attribute, those are getting executed now directly while the import is still running which creates follow up errors in the installation. There is probably a good reason why this change was made, but it creates (unplanned) effort for us in correcting these things, the "workpower" for fixing this is then missing elsewhere and delaying development further.

 

This is unfortunately the bane of our life, esp with the rapid rate of change in Unity. Following on from this, the best part of another two man days (on top of what Peter has already done) has been spent fixing other aspects of what U2019.1 has broken across three render pipelines. The good news for you is that we will have another free Gaia release tomorrow.

 

Gaia 2.0 tomorrow?!

 

Love your enthusiasm, but unfortunately it is "just" a smaller release containing bugfixes, 2019.1 compatibility fixes but also better HDRP / LWRP support for higher SRP versions in 2019.1.

 

Thanks for destroying my dreams Peter...

 

Hehe - and many man months of work!

 

Hey everyone,

We just released a pretty cool update to Gaia - taking Gaia to version 1.9.3!

Release notes for Gaia v1.9.3.1 May 2019
· Removed directory that should not have been included

Release notes for Gaia v1.9.3 May 2019

· Added 2019.1 support.
· Fixed 2019.1 import bug.
· Reworked shaders for 2019.1.
· Reworked post fx for 2019.1.
· Added support for LW 5.7.2 and HD 5.7.2 pipelines.
· Moved some of the default setup back to Ambient Skies GX.
· Fixed editor utils resource leak.
· Updated horizon shader.

Please note - the asset store upload application has a bug and has uploaded an additional directory that it should not have and this causes the Gaia import to break - so I am uploading 1.9.3.1 now to fix this. It will be live in the next hour - so please ignore this if you are seeing Gaia 1.9.3.1 in the asset store.

If you do happen to have the issue right now - here is the fix - just unselect the top level Gaia Dependencies directory. See image below.

Gaia will handle all dependency management itself when you open it up. Its a bit tedious but is unfortunately necessary because of the wide range of user experience, and unity versions and pipelines that Gaia now supports.



Cheers,
Adam.

 

Wow, thank you for your hard work. I have just imported the updated Gaia asset into my 2019.1.0f2 project using HDRP with no errors. I'm very excited to start using the asset.

 

Awesome. I can't wait until unity start supporting grass and speed trees - its quite frustrating having all this cool light and not being able to do much with it.

My first impressions of 2019.1 are positive as well - seems a little unstable - but looks great and feels buttery smooth.

 

Sry about that. I didn't have much time on my hands in the last few weeks. I'll get to testing this in the next few days and I'll get back to you then.

 

Hi,
sorry if it has already been asked (I'm sure it's the case ;-)), I read the latest pages of the forum but not everything. Do we have a list of new features coming with GAIA 2.0.
On asset store, you indicate that the multi tile will be supported, great. But is there any other features which are not a secret? ;-)
Especially, I'd like to know if it will add the possibility to create caves? I'll need this soon, so it will be niice to know if I have to look for another tool or just wait a bit.

Thank you.

Regards,

Guillaume

 

We don't have a list with locked in features out yet, but there is nothing included for caves, depending on how you solve this adding caves is complicated enough for a whole other asset.
What you can do right now though is:
Use an advanced terrain shader such as CTS (shameless plug) that can display holes in the terrain. Cover the seam of the holes with rock or ground meshes, and then add a cave mesh below the terrain. You then only need to disable the collision between player and terrain while the player / object enters the cave. With this approach you could use Gaia as usual on the outside, and work with meshes on the inside of the terrain

 

Hi all,

I'm really struggling to understand what I can use for my needs, as I'm a programmer, not an artist, and it seems like most terrain tools are slanted toward an artist manually creating terrain.

I am procedurally generating terrain at runtime and then needing to procedurally apply textures after the fact (also at runtime during the game). I have no concept of how this is normally done in a Unity workflow, and I don't know if GAIA can accomplish that.

Can someone explain how GAIA could do this or point me in a direction on how to understand this?

Thanks very much in advance for anyone's help!

 

Awesome! With this, Gena, SECTR and your WAPI, etc, I'll have all I need and more. SECTR seems much more useful now than when I got it years ago.

While you can certainly micromanage and finetune results with the eye of an artist, these Procedural Worlds tools will create a better game world than you can imagine for those of us with little artistic ability. Really, anyone can use it. They make it that easy.

 

Runtime terrain generation is not officially supported, Gaia is first and foremost a design-time tool. However some of our users use it for runtime generation as well by adapting the Gaia sources. This can work to a certain degree if you have a game where it is acceptable to have a "generating terrain" loading screen at the start of the game, it won't be fast enough to do procedural generation on the fly while the player walks through the game world.
If you look into the scripts / classes that are called when stamping or running a spawner, you will find that you can excute those calls from your own script during runtime as well. However some of the functions make use of the UnityEditor namespace which is not working in a build. You would then need to find workarounds for these occurrences to make it work during runtime as well.

 

Hello, I have a strange issue with the quality of the Skybox. The environment is generated using Gaia and the skybox (material/texture) used is the one from 3rdPartySamples/AmbientSkiesSamples.
When I start the editor and open scene/game view the sky quality is not that good, it looks like a it has small transparent dots all over it. If I go and reimport the texture then the quality reverts to normal and it looks good. The issue is that if I build the project and run it on the device the skybox looks bag again.
Below are 2 printscreens :


Any ideas why this may be happening, has anyone run into anything similar ? Thanks

 

From the first sight of it it looks like you have platform specific texture compression settings for that cubemap texture, as soon as you make a build to your device those settings are being applied and you see the compression artifacts, when you reimport it seems like it is reimported with the default settings first and will then be compressed again on next build. Can you please check the compression settings for the AmbientSkiesSampleDay Cubemap and especially if it has platform-specific overrides?

(My screenshot only has the default Desktop build targets, in the unity manual there is an example how platform specific overrides could look like for you with multiple build targets installed: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextureImporterOverride.html)

 

Hi, so I've come across some interesting issues regarding Gaia, Aquas and Enviro integration (this is after fixing the earlier mentioned error when importing Aquas and Gaia together). I've posted my findings in their threads as well which is what helped me solve the issue. I'm using Unity 2019.1.2 on Windows 10 under bootcamp on a MacBook Pro 2015 using the built in renderer and the latest versions on all three assets.

To replicate the issue: I started with a new scene and used the standard tab in the Gaia manager, did step 0, 1 and 2, then built a random terrain with the Gaia session manager, then I used option 3 to add the player, post fx, screenshotter, water and wind. Then I added Aquas using the GX tab, adding the underwater effects breaks the scene by just showing a black screen. Deleting the Gaia water and removing some conflicting post processing components fixes it. Adding Enviro from the GX tab breaks it again, I also added Aquas integration while I was there. Removing the Enviro Post Processing script on the main camera fixes it again.

I don't know if the Enviro Post Processing script should be removed if I've just added the asset as I would expect Enviro needs that to do its thing, but it did fix the black screen issues. I figure this is a Gaia issue as using the Gaia manager to integrate these assets I would expect Gaia to remove whatever components would conflict with it.

Edit: I got a response from the guys on the Enviro thread telling me to add back the Enviro Post Processing script and then "please disable the "Render To Camera Target" option in "Post Processing Layer". That option will break all image effects using "OnRenderImage". They really should disable that one from default and let users activate it if they want..." so I guess the part regarding Enviro is nothing to do with Gaia, but the Aquas integration could definitely be improved

 

@Kandy_Man : Thanks for reporting your findings!
Please note that we don't create the Gaia extensions / integrations for Aquas and Enviro ourselves, the code that is executed behind the buttons in the Gaia Manager is part of the respective assets.
We are partly responsible for the issues with integration as well though since we change our scene setup around a lot as well (for good reasons of course, but every time we make a change there is the chance it might break something in the integrations).
Throw in the changes in unity versions, multiple versions of post processing in circulation and the scripted rendering pipelines and you got a lot of potential for things not working as they are intended to

 

Oh I wasn't aware that the GX buttons just link to code in the assets, that's good to know. Well I've mentioned the issue to all 3 parties so hopefully whoever is responsible for each bit can take care of it and if anyone else runs into it in the mean time they have 3 places to find the answer

 

Dear Adam, dear Peter,

i saw this nice tutorial from Bart, to create a nice looking terrain

or here from you Adam

My Question ist how are such landscapes combined to a large continent together (blend)

Or is it even possible with Gaia to create very large terrain for example 30kmx30km with different climatic zones (biomes)

I see no tutorial about it, or a large terrain about gaia?

 

In theory you can just increase the terrain width and length up to 30 km and have one large terrain, and use Gaia on it. In practice this is a bad idea for various reasons: Unity's terrain resolution settings - control texture resolution, heightmap resolution, etc. have a tight upper limit. This means when simply increasing the terrain siz,e you stretch those internal resolution textures across a huge terrain which results in a terrain with poor resolution settings.
Also spawning times with Gaia increase, and if you populate that large terrain with objects you can run into performance issues in the editor.

To combat this, you would normally create multiple neighboring terrains and connect the borders between them with a tool such as terrain stitcher or by stamping over the borders with the built-in unity heightmap tools (Gaia does not support stamping across terrains yet)
The next thing you would then most likely run into is that if you have 30 x 30 1km terrains in your scene that would be 900 terrains at once in one scene which is not going to work well performance wise. You then would usually need to look into terrain streaming. We have just released a video for terrain streaming with SECTR a couple of days ago:

With a size of 30 x 30 km you will also run into floating point precision issues: https://forum.unity.com/threads/floating-point-errors-and-large-scale-worlds.526807/
SECTR has a workaround (origin shift) built in for that, but activating that comes with several trade-offs as well.

The multiple climatic zones you could realise by not using the same assets & textures on all terrains. You could create "intermediate" terrains that allow for a transition between two climate zones, e.g.
ice terrain with 16 ice textures 8 ice trees
transition terrain with 8 ice and 8 forest textures, 4 ice 4 forest trees
forest terrain with 16 forest textures, 8 forest trees.

 

I understand I'm not completely satisfied with the answer. How does Crowfall manage as an MMO? The terrain will be a lot bigger and have more than 16 texture

 

Or this guy here he create more than a 256km terrain with any issue

maybe you could make a tutorial on this topic?

 

QUESTION:

@PWPeter

I want to use Gaia only for what it was originally focused on: stamping, terraforming, mesa-shaping algorithms, and light spawning (basically everything except the 3rd party assets and Ambient addons). Gaia docs have always said it could be uninstalled, but that isn't true as much when these embedded systems are forced on people. How do I decline to import all the embedded systems, and not throw errors? I understand that I should uncheck 3rd party, but I also don't want the Ambient stuff which seems rather bloated. If I uncheck Ambient, then what other dependencies should I uncheck so I can use Gaia freely? It seems that trying to turn off these extended embedded systems throws a lot of errors.

 

TERRAIN STREAMING IN MMOs

@Twoonebe, good question. I'll try to answer it.

As Peter said, professional Unity developers cut the terrains up into small chunks and stream them, applying occlusion, literally blocking a lot of distant objects with mountains or hills so the camera doesn't have to render it, using low-poly models for what is far away. Sometimes LODs or billboards. But the terrain is cut up. Each terrain has its own set of textures, even for small terrains (chunks).

Same thing for a 265 km map or an MMO in Unity. That is the only way to do it in Unity. In Unreal Engine, terrain is rendered in chunks automatically, but Unity will choke on a large terrain, so it has to be cut into slices (chuncks, pieces). It's better to finish your terrain before you cut it up.

Textures are "per terrain" so you can change the 16 textures out differently for each slice of the terrain (which means a slice is actually a single small terrain), but it's better to use the same textures because they are cached in a game and you don't want your game to constantly be loading heavy terrain textures all the time.

 

It is fascinating to hear people's perspectives.

Over the years since Gaia launched in 2015, we have continually added value to Gaia, and it has evolved into far more than what it was when it launched.

Some of these things we have added that aren't about stamping include:

• A wizard based terrain and scene setup system
• A powerful terrain enhancement system that sits on top of the stamping system
• Multiple sets of quality asset samples, all pre-configured for use with Gaia so you just click a few buttons
• Sample sounds from Ambient Sounds to add life to your scenes at different times of day
• Sample HDRI Skyboxes, and PostFX from Ambient Skies to also add life at different times of day
• An automated pipeline setup and changes and the corresponding lighting setups for each pipeline
  
• A simple and powerful extension system to make it easy to add other quality assets.
• A free and fast water system that works across all the pipelines.
• A consistent experience from Unity 5.1 through to Unity 2019.1.

Our belief is that the vast majority of our community appreciates the time and effort we go to on their behalf, and Gaia gives you a nice starting point and in general saves you an incredible amount of time.

Our intention is to continue to make Gaia better and easier to use and you will see more awesome coming with Gaia 2 over the coming months.

However, also I think we tried a bit too hard in the past few releases and the Ambient Skies and Sounds integration can be intrusive when they are automatically added in that final step, so we will make it an optional thing via the GX menu.

By the way, Ambient Skies and Ambient Sounds has now launched and Ambient AI will come soon. We encourage people to go take a look as they make it easy to take your environments to a whole new level!

 

Crowfall also uses multiple terrains in so called "Parcels". Gaia is used to create and texture those parcels, GeNa helps populate them, and a derivative of CTS does the terrain shading. You can see it in action here:

The terrain shown in that video was made in World Creator 2 according to the video description. WC2 also works with multiple tiles / split up terrains on larger terrain sizes to my knowledge.

 

That's great because I was wanting to use the stamper only yesterday and it seemed like a struggle to detach the rest. Thanks.

 

So I bought GAIA and CTS and after a lot of headache and swapping betwen Unity youtube and manual I somehow applied CTS to the GAIA generated terrain.

Problem is that after applying CTS to the GAIA generated terrain I have tried to add another texture but my Coverage Texture Spawner is doing nothing after hitting Spawn button.
Is this normal behavior ? I can paint this new texture manually on a terrain it's just automation based on rules not working anymore.

 

If you can paint the texture on normal, then the spawner should be able to paint it on as well. I assume there is some spawning rule setting preventing this from happening. Can you try to click "Visualise" next to the texture in the spawner? This will open the Visualiser (red and green spheres on the terrain) as well as the spawn rule settings in the inspector. Can you try to deactivate all spawn rules so that only "Is Active" is remaining? The Visualiser spheres should turn all green then, indicating that the texture will now spawn everywhere on the terrain.
You can then try spawning, or re-activating the spawn rules one by one to see which one influences the Visualiser spheres in such way that they turn red again.

 

Looks like I got MaxInstances set to 0 on all Spawner Rules and IgnoreMaxInstances unchecked.
Strange thing I don't remember touching this settings.

 

Hi all, I am new to Gaia (purchased it this week), and I am making my first steps with it.

I have one general question about design time vs. runtime creation of terrain:

In my game, users can create their own GameObjects (i.e. villages with houses) which will need to fit into the terrain that is generated by Gaia.

Have a look at the screenshot below.

There is a chain of hills around a rather flat area, again around a lake in the middle. How can I prevent Gaia from spawning trees and grass in a narrow, circular, "reserved" part of the flat area? I want the users to create roads and villages with houses in that area, but not at design time but at runtime. So, Gaia cannot know about those objects because they do not exist at design time.

What would be the easiest way to get a good-looking "reserved area"?

The screenshot that shows the flat area between the hills and the lake:

Cheers,
Matthias

 

The easiest way would be to use large "fake" colliders during spawning and make sure that the grass and the trees have the "Virgin Terrain" setting activated. With the colliders being there, nothing should spawn inside those then.

Another method would be to use an image area mask in the spawners: An image area mask tells the spawner to only spawn in a certain area according to a mask image that you provide. A picture says more than 1000 words:



In this example a green grass texture was spawned with the only restriction being an image mask. Note how the spawned shape correspond with the mask image. You could do the same by providing a mask image that has black spots in the places where you don't want to spawn anything.

To create the mask image, you can use one of the various export tools under Gaia Manager > Advanced > Handy Utilities > Terrain Utilities, for example the basemap exporter:


You could then use the resulting image in Photoshop / Gimp and paint over it in grayscale colors on another layer to create your spawning map.

 

Wow, thanks @PWPeter for the fast and precise answer! I'll try these options and see what they do.

 

Hi. Thank you for all the tools they are really awesome. I just want to ask. How can one go about doing biomes in Gaia/Gena Spawners. I was thinking to have to world map with masks. then basically do the same over and over in each area using these masks. area 1 texture plant are 2 texture plant and so on. Any other methos or techniques I can use to accomplish this. Also do you have any plans for biomes in gaia 2 or later. Thank you...

 

this is a cts/gae/gena question. So i have a base heigh and color map from Gaea.. I use gaie to stamp it and cts to applyt global color map.... Ok so how can i use the cts global colormap as a mask for color on my spawners. ie. spawn grass where green and pebbles on brown dirt and so on. thank you...

 

Usually you would need to add different assets for the different vegetation types to the resources, then you would need to create spawners that spawn the type specific resources using an Image Area Mask. This will restrict the spawning only to a certain area of the terrain where you want the biome to appear.
For example you could add some snow textures, snow trees etc. to the resources. Then you would need to create spawners that only use snow resources, for example a "Snow Texture Spawner" that only uses the Snow textures and also uses an Area Image Mask to restrict the spawning to a part of the map.
In the example screenshot in this post above I spawned a green grass texture with an image mask, notice how the texture distribution on the terrain corresponds to the image mask. If you assign the same image mask for all your snow resource spawners you will have a snow biome on the terrain where the snow textures, vegetation etc. only appears in a certain spot.

If you want to make a real big terrain you could also use multiple terrains and use terrains as biomes themselves, e.g. have an entire terrain that has only snow textures, snow trees, etc., another that has only forest textures, forest trees, etc. and then use an intermediate terrain that has a bit of both resources to make the transition.

 

Gaia supports RGBA and grayscale image masks:



You would need to take that colormap and edit it in GIMP / Photoshop in such way that the desired color comes out as a suitable mask that you can use in Gaia as an image mask.

 

thank you

 

Hi all,

I don't know what I've changed in my settings but suddenly I get a terrible amount of motion blur when turning or moving the FlyCam. Any ideas how I can switch off motion blur?

Best...
Matthias

 

Sounds to me like maybe Depth of Field in Post Processing?

 

Under Gaia Environment > Ambient Skies Samples there is a "Global Post Processing" GameObject.



Select it and check / uncheck the various effects there. The following effects can contribute to blurriness:

Bloom
Chromatic Aberration
Depth Of Field
Lens Distortion
Motion Blur

You can also check the anti-aliasing settings on your camera in the Post Processing Layer component, the default TAA Gaia sets up is often perceived as "blurry" as well. Try comparing it against the SMAA / FXAA settings.

 

Ah, it was the motion blur setting, of course! Couldn't find it, thanks for pointing me to it, Peter!

 

Hi, I created a simple one-scene project with Gaia, with a few thousand trees on a 2048k terrain.

The problem: It's already too large for the web!

When I render this in WebGL (because I want to publish the game on the web), it needs 1GB of (total) memory in the Chrome browser. In the Unity profiler, it says that 700MB are needed for textures alone! The meshes themselves consume only 25MB.

The data file that is served over the web has a size of 287MB. This will cost my users a download time of 2.5 minutes at 16 MBit/s.

As a game programming newbie, my question is: How do you make sure that the users won't have to wait so long while still allowing for a rich gaming experience with those beautiful, Gaia-generated landscapes? Is there a way to speed things up?

Puzzled...
Matthias

 

You can check which assets contribute the most to the build size in the build log and try to reduce & compress, etc:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ReducingFilesize.html

Other than that you could look into techniques to load things dynamically, for example here is a thread on loading scenes dynamically in WebGL, not sure if the info there is still valid though:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/webgl-with-streaming-option-like-webplayer.316620/

But it is also a question why you want to publish your game on the Web - for smaller games WebGL can be nice since you can run it right away in the browser, but for the rich gaming experience a desktop version usually is more suitable, alone when looking at the performance gain from Desktop vs. WebGL.

 

Hi Peter,

thanks for the 2 pointers, I'll have a look at them!

Two reasons why I want to publish on the web:

• I want to be able to update the game regularly, directly on the server, without a new install on the clients. I do not know how this can be done if the app is installed on the desktop.
• I tried to generate a version for desktop (Mac OSX) but the resulting app always crashes on startup. With the latest versions of OSX and Unity, it does not crash any more but fails to display the scene.

Cheers
Matthias

 

You could publish desktop builds on itch.io and Gamejolt, both offer clients like steam that would update the game on the users computer automatically, (as long as they are using those clients, of course).
Then there would be publishing on Steam as well, if the publishing fee is not a blocking reason.