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

Screen capture. You can have a look. Thanks very much

 

Hello, I am using Gaia to make water. Should I choose AQUAS or R.A.M 2019? I am a novice, I hesitate. Thank you

 

Hello, when my camera is a certain distance from the tree, the tree becomes magical yellow. I think trees should always be green. I don't want LOD. I use Gaia trees. What should I do? Thank you

 

Hi - They are both amazing assets but for lakes and surrounding water Aquas is the best - You can also pickup Aquas Lite for $5 which will do the trick. R.A.M 2019 is used for making rivers, waterfalls (Moving Water) - again, the best asset for this type of work. Hope this helps!
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/aquas-water-lite-53519

 

Thank you for your advise.I am going to use Aquas make my project. Thank you!

 

Hey, is CTS compatible with Unistorm Weather System? I want to purchase it for wet ground after rain but im not sure

 

Hi- I use CTS in all my projects which some use Unistorm and others Enviro . Powerful asset and well worth the purchase.

 

Hi All,

I am using the default water object provided with GAIA! And I love it.
I have three requirements:
1. How do I make the Caustic reflect on my Characters and the fishes?
2. Right now the color of the water changes from Grayish to Blue as I go deeper. I want the initial color to be variant of blue too. Where do I make these changes?
3. When I enter water my Character looks pretty dark (even the fishes), what setting do I alter to make them more clearer in water?

Also can "God rays"/Sun Shafts be added into the water by GAIA ? Right now what I have is good, but its not the most optimal way. Especially when I am close to surface
Game is : https://www.facebook.com/DiveHardDave/


@AdamGoodrich could you please advise?

 

Hello,

I understand the current version doesn't directly support multiple terrains.
I am using Gaia purely for the stamp feature to transfer heightmap data to new terrains, but we're working in a multi-terrain project. There's nothing stopping me from using Gaia to stamp individual terrains in their own scenes, then merge them into a single scene after deleting Gaia GameObjects, correct?

Great tool, btw!

 

Nope you can do this or disable the terrains you aren't working on and just have one enabled.
Make sure if you do it this way to "Fit" to terrain etc every time you switch terrain tiles.

 

It's a little confusing that you first said "Nope", but I think you're saying that it will work just fine.
Thank you for the reply!

 

EDIT - I got it working..... See Bottom of Post

GAIA 1.9.5-c1
I'm trying to use Terrain Party data to create stamps and getting inconsistence results. The first one or two times the stamp is used it will work fine. Then it will only stamp a very small portion. After the problem occurs, any TP data Stamp will only stamp a small portion.

I have tried to import the TP data directly into the Scanner. Also tried converting TP data to RAW 16 in Photoshop and converting TP data to R16 in Unity before using the Scanner.

I have tried this in Unity 2018.14, 2019.1 and 2019.2, same problem with all versions and methods. All fresh installs of Unity with ONLY GAIA installed.

Is there a procedure for importing TP data?


Stamp created with Terrain Party data


After Stamping result



Edit - Working:
Unity 2019.2.5

Work flow -
1) Put Terrain Party PNG's into one of the Gaia Stamp Data dirs.
2) Use Unity Inspector to convert to R 16.
3) Drag into Gaia Scanner and put Base Level to ZERO before scanning.

All TP Stamps are now fully working with high resolution.

Note: If you drag the TP.png directly into the Scanner, you get a low resolution stamp (Base Level was set to zero).

 

i want GAIA 2, or i dont feed this bunny!

 

I created a new project with Gaia. I noticed Gaia didn't install under Procedural Worlds folder? I thought that was the new standard. CTS did though.

 

Hello, I want to know the release date of gaia2. Will it come soon?

 

You forget the ™ in "soon"
I think we are near to it, i read when 2019.3 is out of beta.

 

ya he might be waiting for the terrain hole thing to be out of beta.

 

- Feb 27 2017 Gaia 2.0 Pre-Release SALE!!

Procedural Worlds 'Here is a sample world- 15 x 2km square terrain tiles = 10km x 6km - created in less than 1 second with just 2 stamps!'

https://www.facebook.com/procedural...run-time-generation-smaller/1056111927854065/

- Mar 8, 2019

Brandon Stone 'Back in December there was a sale and I bought Gaia 1 mainly to support development for Gaia 2. Back then the ETA for Gaia 2 was January. Then January passed and here we are in March with no ETA on the horozon.'

Adam Goodrich 'Eta will be as soon as we can get it out. I would say in the next 2-3 months.'

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...d-scene-creation.327342/page-199#post-4296220


- Apr 13, 2019

Sickagamer 'Peter: You said a couple of months ago that Gaia 2.0 should be out in 2-3 months. I was wondering if that is still on track.'

PWPeter 'That was about one month ago, and yes I would say it is still on track.'

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...d-scene-creation.327342/page-200#post-4424716


- Aug 8, 2019

Adam Goodrich 'Hey there everyone - I thought you might like a sneek peek at Gaia 2 - we are targeting its release for end August!'

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...d-scene-creation.327342/page-203#post-4833707


- Aug 18, 2019

Adam Goodrich 'We will release both Gaia 2 and Gaia Pro at the end of the August in beta form and polish them based on feedback in September.'

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...d-scene-creation.327342/page-203#post-4869926

- Oct 3, 2019

???

 

Is there a list of what new features Gaia 2 will have? I'm patient was just curious. I only use Gaia for terrain shaping. I can't go back to doing vegetation the old way ever since i started using vegetation studio.

 

Haha I know right.

I used Brushify with UE4 and after that I'm disappointed in Unity's texturing.

 

Hi all, it looks like I missed a lot of posts in here since I did not receive notifications for new posts in this thread anymore for some reason. I will try to catch up and answer open questions asap.

 

I'm having a couple of issues with Gaia/Integrations and I'm not sure how to resolve.

One is that if I go underwater, my game stops, and I get these errors;
Assertion failure. Values are not equal.
Expected: 512 == 2160

Assertion failure. Values are not equal.
Expected: 512 == 3840

This is line 104 on TextureLerper.cs

I'm not sure if this is something to do with Gaia or some post processing effect change that isn't playing nice, but any input would be great.

Ther other is that I've converted my Gaia terrain to a polyworld low poly version; is there any way to create spawners on this low poly version rather than the true terrain values? otherwise I don't know how I'm going to populate it with plants and other terrain details aside from doing 8km manually.

Thank you for any input

 

Hello, am having an issue with spawning the texture on the terrain ut say's :

IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.

I already saw page 198 you mentioned why this error appears but I am not seeing any solution for it?

 

It sounds like something is set to 4K texture resolution when it's supposed to be 512x512. Investigate some scripts connect to the Underwater scripts to see if somewhere it's expecting 512.

 

Prefab tree spawner how to use?

 

Gaia Pro is on sale today.
However, I'm still using Gaia 1, so I'd like to wait for Gaia 2 to be a formal upgrade.
So the question is, what is the difference between GAIA Pro and/or GAIA 2?
If you can't wait for GAIA 2, is it a good idea to buy gaia pro at a preferential price?($77>$45, October END)
Please answer.

 

below is the list of new features in Gaia pro.
- Multi-Terrain Support!
- Powerful Preset's System
- Simple & Powerful Biome & Biome Mixing System
- Stunning Temperate Forest Biome & Plant Shaders
- GPU Accelerated Stamping & Spawning
- Real-Time Stamping with many modes
- Professional Profile Driven Water System & Shaders
- Profile Driven Skies, Lighting & Sound FX
- Revamped & Simplified User Interface
- Real-Time Visualization System
- Stackable filtering system

Gaia 2 will be a free upgrade to Gaia 1 as promised and will be delivered after we have stabilized and completed Gaia Pro. It will have the same key functionality, however, PRO assets like the advanced lighting, water, and our Temperate Forest biome will be at more of an entry-level.

when it comes to waiting for Gaia 2 or upgrading that is up to your needs.

 

when it comes to understanding and using the spawning system for trees in Gaia.
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/spawners-terrain-trees/

any another other Gaia related tutorials for systems and such can be found under tutorials here:
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/

 

Gaia follows interesting new approach. Software architects release software incrementally. Adding more and more features. Gaia Pro is released before Gaia 2. Gaia 2 is subset of Gaia Pro. Never seen the reverse way, curios.

 

1 word “money”, 2 wont make any money compared to pro. I would not trust anything these guys say every asset they do the next update is probably requires you to buy a whole new asset. Like cts, gena and now Gaya. Or gonna be packed with S*** nooone wanted like sky and water and get told it’s worth more because of it.

 

Thank you very much.
I haven't purchased GENE 2 which is on sale at the same time.
Because it is half price, I want to consider the purchase.

 

Hello,
I would like to know if it's possible to generate a completely new random terrain with Gaia every time I open the game / every time I load my scene in Unity. If so, any ideas how to do it?

 

it is really important to us that we resolve errors in Gaia, as of such if you could provide the complete error message that would be great. also, screenshots and how it managed to happen would be great to accelerate our capacity at fixing the issue.

 

I would not say that is unusual, it is common to have a new product in multiple editions where one edition has a subset of features, e.g. Windows 10 Home & Windows 10 Pro. The unusual part is that we are releasing the "larger" Pro rather than all editions at the same time. There are multiple reasons for this approach:

• We wanted to release something to show that Gaia is not dead and that there is an actual product that is being developed. There have been multiple voices in the past accusing us of just announcing it, but it not being developed or that it will be vaporware.
• The new Gaia versions are still lacking critical features that would make it a full replacement for Gaia 1, e.g. the random terrain generation and session system are not in yet. Since we want to release Gaia 2 as a regular update to Gaia 1, we should make sure you can do everything with Gaia 2 that you were able to with Gaia 1 to not disappoint people
• Releasing Pro first in a beta state will allow us to collect feedback from a smaller group of users which are willing to get Gaia Pro in its early state, which will improve the state of the free Gaia 2 update until it is released.

 

Runtime generation is not officially supported by Gaia: Gaia uses some functionality that is part of the Editor namespace and therefore won't run in a build. In theory you can call the Gaia Stamper and Spawners during runtime to populate a terrain. Try looking into the spawning and stamping buttons from the respective editor, if you look into the code you will find that they boil down to call a single function that applies the stamp or does the spawn, so you could call those from your own scripting as well.
But when you try to run this in a build, you might need to add a few workarounds though to either deactivate the "editor only" functionality or find a workaround to make it available in the build.

 

You would need to find out what "TextureLerper.cs" is (this script is not part of Gaia, must be from another asset) and what it is doing in line 104 that throws the error. When you enter the water, you enter a different post processing volume with different Post FX, and Gaia also adjusts things like the Fog drawing distance, I assume the Texture Lerper Script does not like that for some reason.

Is the terrain still an unity terrain? If yes, Gaia should still work on it, if it is a mesh or anything else then this is problematic because Gaia works on unity terrains only. In that case you could try the following: The Gaia Scanner Tool (Gaia Manager > Advanced Tab > Handy Utilities > Show Scanner) can read in meshes as well. You could read in your terrain mesh to turn it into a stamp, stamp that on a terrain that has the same dimensions as your mesh, spawn Game Objects with Gaia then get rid off the terrain again. It might not be 100% precise I assume there will be small height differences due to the terrain being heightmap based vs. the low poly mesh, but it might still be faster than placing everything by hand manually.

 

GAIA.Pro, I get this error, and all the materials become blue, the fbx are blue.

Could not create a custom UI for the shader ' Procedural Worlds /PW_GaiaPro_bark_base_pro'. The shader has the following: 'CustomEditor = ASEMaterialInspector'. Does the custom editor specified include its namespace? And does the class either derive from ShaderGUI or MaterialEditor?
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)​

 

So rather than work on the features that would make it Gaia 2, a bunch of completely new features were added that were so hard to implement and so awesome you guys decided to charge for them. Makes sense because keeping a promise at the expense of doing something that could make money is hard. I get it. I don't see that changing anytime soon. When presented with this choice in the past, Procedural Worlds has made the same one over and over. The release cycle of Gaia Pro will continue to follow the money.

My prediction is this: there will be MONTHS of updates to Pro before it's out of beta. At that point there will be months of updates unrelated to Gaia 2. There will be no motivation to release Gaia 2 until Gaia 1 sales start falling because people realize it's dead and all development attention is on Gaia Pro. This prediction is based on 20+ years in the software business.

 

I just read this review. Do I get a refund as well?

 

In my opinion it is a another idea behind.
If PW release a Version GAIA 2 for the much bunch of users, they have to support the crowd.
With the small team it will end in a disaster.

I have bought GAIA(1) at release date, and i bought GAIA-PRO (as a beta).

i have much problems with the new gaia-pro and ask much questions on the discord channel
But the support is great, and i see where the journey goes to.

So if the crowd receive the free upgrade for GAIA2 as promised they will be more satisfied.

PW do much better works than tons of promised other assets and kickstarter projects.

 

I'm experiencing some huge performance gaps in Gaia Pro between use of the Forest Temperate biome and the Gaia 1 legacy biome. I used the standard setup process and just clicked through the default settings.

Forest Temperate:
Quality Preset: Desktop - FPS: 30s-40s
Quality Preset: Powerful Desktop - FPS: mid 10s-mid 40s

Gaia 1 Legacy:
Quality Preset: Desktop - FPS: 230s - low 300s
Quality Preset: Powerful Desktop - FPS: high 200s

I think it has something to do with the trees, since I tested each spawner manually and the massive FPS drop kicked in once I spawned the trees.

I'm running it on a PC with a GTX 1080, i7-6700K and 32GB RAM - not the latest and greatest, but no slouch either. I've never experienced this kind of performance issue with the original Gaia, so it appears that there's something about the Forest Temperate biome's trees that slows performance. Anyone else experiencing this issue? I know it's in beta, but I'm a little concerned because while 30s-40s is not particularly terrible in and of itself, after adding in CTS, Enviro and Aurora 2, without additional optimizations I'm getting an FPS in the low single digits - and that's before running any of my own code. The forest temperate biome is gorgeous and I hope it'll be production-ready in the full release.

 

Greetings! I took advantage of the great sales to swipe SECTR, GAIA and GENA so I'm now buried like a tick onto the documentation trying to figure things out.

I would like to build a large "Antarctica" type landscape - I have a number of winter assets for the textures and shaders and such...



Did anyone have any ideas for how to get that super smooth surface? It would be great if I could get some tips from experts: most terrain tutorials seem to be about plains and mountains
Is that something achievable with the built in stamps?

Anyway thanks for some great assets!

 

I have not seen that error yet, could you please tell me which rendering pipeline you use (Standard, LWRP, HDRP)? When you select the "Synty Studios biome" or "Gaia 1 Legacy" biome, are you able to create a terrain, use the stamper and then spawn assets in turn? (Those biomes use rather simple shaders / materials, so I would be surprised if those would not work as well)

 

I'am use asset "Ambient Skies", and when I import it，the pipeline "Procedural Worlds Lightweight Pipeline Profile Ambient Skies" be seted.

 

I reimport the gaia.pro asset, the problem is still exist.

 

I found a compatible withx "Enviro Sky", I got this error "unreference Gaia.Utils.GetType"

 

Hi, your findings are correct, the new forest biome does indeed kill your performance. The new assets were added shortly before release and we are still in the process of optimizing things, there is still a lot of potential for improvement.

 

Regarding the smoothing: Are you using Gaia or Gaia Pro already? You could use stamps that give you a similar shape, and in Gaia use the "Smooth Terrain" function in the "Terrain Helpers" in the stamper.



Gaia Pro has a smoothing operation in the stamper, and you can use masks to only apply smoothing partially to your terrain, e.g. apply smoothing at a certain height or slope level only. I think by playing with this you could get interesting results, e.g. only smoothing the lower parts of the terrain where snow has accumulated, while leaving other features of the terrain like cliffs intact.

Before:


Smoothing out only the smaller details in the foreground to form the terrain as if it was snow covered (green preview means the terrain will be lifted, blueish means lowering):



Result:

 

Maybe I'm missing it somewhere, but is there a real explanation of the biome system in Gaia Pro? How does it differ from Gaia 1/2? Where does it overlap with Gena?

 

Hey Peter! Always appreciate the great work.
Went in and just did a quick terrain build with defaults with World size custom: Tiles: X=>2, Z=> 2
[4096x4096 Terrains => 4]
Seems to be dragging and have a seem (Attached). This Dev system is an I9,RTX 2060 6GB, 64RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD.

Can probably tweak this to get to work but just dropping in with quick builds. Don't know if this helps. Maybe Im missing something which is highly likely.

The water effects above terrain was a quick default build X1,Z1 1024x1024 T:1