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

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

 

I understand this as you are using the Lightweight Rendering Profile (LWRP)? The vegetation is not fully supported in LWRP yet, but this will change soon, can you please try if you are getting the same issues in the built in rendering pipeline as well?

 

The biome system in Gaia 2 / Pro works by grouping multiple spawners for textures, trees, etc. in one biome controller, which then has its own mask stack that allows you to define where the biome should appear on the terrain. It will then spawn all its things in this restricted area, while also optionally removing things from other foreign biomes while doing so.
An example:

Here I have an island with the default forest biome, so far so good:



Here I added an additional biome with the synty low poly assets and mask it to only spawn in the flat center area of the mask. The "Distance Mask" in the right side in the biome controller restrict the spawning distance, the "Slope Mask" applies it to the flat area only, the red area in the scene view is the visualisation that shows you where the biome will be spawned.



After spawning the end result is I have the forest biome on the outside, and the synty trees on the inside of the "crater" area on the map.

 

Y'all, I've got to be honest, though it's not the final version of what any level building system needs, this is such an obvious idea that is so rarely employed. I'm glad it's finally part of the package. Is this system included in GAIA 2 or only in Pro?

In fact, I still don't have a great idea of what is including in Pro that warrants the purchase. I'm definitely willing to support your continued work by buying in, but I need more clarity. Do you have a post about this somewhere that I missed?

 

Both.

 

Did the runtime procedural terrain generation ever come along? I haven't been following closely but it was one of the features I was waiting for for a given project that's on the shelf. Asking because I don't see it on that chart for any version.

 

We considered it, but its quite hard to do and we wanted to leverage the latest terrain tools and goodness coming from Unity. This version is a complete (and very different) re-write from our original Gaia 2 implementation. Unity and our world changed a lot since then. It's something I would really like to support, but there is no timeline on it at the moment.

 

BTW, we communicate a lot more in Discord than we do here.

Please go to this link to check it out: https://discord.gg/rtKn8rw

 

I'm having a problem with the tree spawner. It spawns a bunch of _GaiaCollider_Grass objects that are essentially empty. Now I did resize the terrain outside of Gaia so I am wondering if that was an issue. I also have enable CTS. I'm using Unity 2019.2.9f1

edit: I tried a working scene and the _GaiaCollider_Grass objects are exactly the same except the trees are there. so in the problem terrain above, the trees appear to have been spawned but are not visible.

 

This is normal behavior of Gaia, the colliders are used during spawning to make the trees detectable for other spawners, e.g. when the "Virgin Terrain" setting is activated. If you don't need the colliders anymore it is safe to delete them after spawning.

 

Thank you, sorry but the problem is that the colliders are there but the trees aren't.

 

Oh sorry, I misunderstood you then. Do the trees appear when placed manually with the terrain tree tool from the unity terrain inspector? Is the drawing of trees & terrain details enabled in the terrain settings for this terrain? Do the trees have LODs that might hide them too early?

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Turns out that I can't place the trees manually. I partly figured it out. I had added Vegetation Studio but then deleted it. It seems that Vegetation Studio locks out terrain trees even after it's been deleted from the scene. I need to figure out how to unlock it now.

 

Apologies if this has already been answered, but does the GPU acceleration in Gaia Pro work on Mac OS?

 

will the pro upgrade still be 45 after the beta? all ive wanted for the past years is multi terrain support. we've discussed in multiple emails regarding it and i was informed it was almost here you were just waiting on unity to release something. i really dont want to buy pro unless i feel like i need more. which currently i dont. it just feels so wrong that you arent making gaia 2 available till after the pro promotion is over.

 

You do not need to buy Pro. Multi tile support will be included in Gaia 2 as well. The upgrade will stay at $45 permanently, so you can upgrade at any time in the future based if you decide that the additional features are worth it for you.

I understand your comment about Pro being released before 2 and perhaps it might be interesting to understand why we did it this way.

Since it launched in 2015, Gaia has sold many many copies, and in the humble bundle we did another 40,000 licenses in a week. The impact of this was that we got absolutely smashed with support requests and development stopped because all effort went to dealing with support.

Gaia 2 / pro is a massive re-write from the ground up. It has many moving parts and it takes time to get these things right. If we had launched as Gaia 2 first, it would have smashed us as 000's of people reported issues. This would also have led to many many bad reviews as there are is a class of people who love to shoot from the hip, and don't care how or why something came to be the way it is.

So we released Gaia Pro first, and called it a beta. It is a paid upgrade and because of this we are we touching a far smaller group of people. The impact of this decision is that we have been spending the majority of our time fixing and resolving issues rather than going through the very time consuming process of responding to each and every support request.

So while the optics might look bad, I am still convinced that this has been a good decision. Gaia 2 will be launched shortly after Gaia Pro has been stabilized.

 

BTW - the next major update to Gaia Pro is planned for later today assuming we do not have any showstopper bugs.

 

Hi, Gaia Pro current not support lwrp, I'am really expect to be done in the next version.

 

There is a release going up now that adds more vegetation and fixes bugs.

We have planned to have LW and HD in this release, but our shaders are made with Amplify Shader framework, and there was a bug that did not get fixed in time for our cutoff today.

There will be another update next week, and we should be good to have it completed and tested by then.



This image is on the LW pipeline so we are almost there! We will release another update sooner if we can.

 

I'm appreciate your support!

 

I open gaia manager window, and switch to setup tab, select lwrp and click upgrade button, nothing has changed.

 

@AdamGoodrich Congratulations on the release of Gaia Pro. It looks very nice.

 

Thanks We have another version coming probably at end of week, maybe early next week with a bunch more art again.

Wait until next release - late this week or early next week.

It should - but we don't develop on Mac's so we have not tested.

 

Hi Team! - Rolled out a default quick Large, X:1,Z:1 Tile:2048 - All defaults with mountain stamp and have rocks on side of mountain. Unity 2019.2.3f1 - No other assets loaded. Let me know if I'm missing something. thanks!

 

Hi, MagiSoftworks

it sounds like your spawner or biome preset chosen has something funky going on.
could you navigate to the stamper?


under the stamper could you see if your spawners are all active and present?


if everything looks fine could you include some screenshots of your stamper set up?

 

Hey

Hi Dooly123, Thanks for getting back. Been using Gaia for years and just wanted to do a quick test build on GaiaPro because I'm sure many people will. The settings were all defaults - Quick Build. This happened only once though.

 

Hope you're enjoying GaiaPro!
if you run into any issues or bugs feel free to use our support!
https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/home

 

The GaiaPro create gaia gameobject in each scene automatically, that was very stupid, At some scene such as login, logo, that does not need terrain, but the gaia obj created. why???

 

We have had multiple users report this, this was caused by a script looking for the Gaia Session Manager on scripts recompile, and if it was not there it would create it. This will be fixed in the next update.

 

Hey Gaia team! What is the relationship between Gaia Pro and the Ambient Skies asset? GP contains a sampler of Ambient Skies, is that right? If I already have GP, what (if anything) would I get additionally if I also get AS? Thx

 

Hi, I created an environment with mountains etc using Gaia 1. I expanded and created an 8k terrain with mountains etc (36 tiles).

I like the terrain but some of the mountains could do with a rework/restamp.

My question is would Gaia Pro allow me to stamp over my current mountains?

BUT, exactly!

I say exactly because the old gaia displayed a stamp shape and then when you stamped the terrain was not very much like the original stamp. It was a much reduced version. But as suggested IU need to stamp over my existing mountains so would like a more exact idea of the result of the stamp.

I can do this using Gaia 1, but it means moving the terrain tiles to 0,0,0, to become stampable which isn't ideal.

Will the Gaia Pro allow me to do as I am suggesting I need here?

At 5,56 minutes into the demo tutorial in the asset store its suggested that the real time visualization is what you get after stamping but that wasn't true with Gaia 1....

So just want to make sure that Gaia Pro can refurbish my current terrain tiles and be okay moving the stamper over tiles to specific mountains that need revamping/restamping.

Many thanks.

 

Gaia 1 originally contained the "Ambient Skies Samples" which were example setups for sky and lighting that were created using Ambient Skies.

Gaia Pro has these samples as well, but you can now edit & save those presets with the introduction of Lighting Profiles (see the "Gaia Lighting System Profile" in Assets\Procedural Worlds\Gaia\Gaia Lighting and Water\Gaia Lighting)

The full Ambient Skies has more settings and includes post processing and light baking settings as well.

 

The stamp preview in Gaia 1 was based on a separate mesh which could divert from what you were actually stamping since the mesh would not represent the heightmap resolution on the terrain and would also not reflect settings like distance mask etc.
The stamp preview in Gaia 2 / Gaia Pro is based on the actual heightmap data & resolution of the terrain and should always include all masks and filters, so it should be very very close to what you get. when you hit the stamp button. Some examples:

Adding a mountain to existing terrain, preview:



Result after Stamping:



Cutting a river in the terrain, original terrain:



Preview:



Result after Stamping:

Yes, that should work, you can just move the stamper around freely to your terrains in the scene and it works also across terrain borders.

 

Thanks Peter.

I try not to complain about much but why on earth are people using that terrible discord website instead of unity forums? In my view its a mess and just posted there in an attempt to get an issue solved but left, I refuse to use it its complete crap. But I dont have a clue how to use it and Im not a fan of the DARK interfaces everyone finds so awesome. lol. Sorry, it had to be said. Ill post my issue in here and suffer the wait (if any).

 

It's funny because I thought maybe something was wrong with me for being confused as to why Discord is so popular. It really is a mess and isn't designed to easily look up relevant information. I don't see any positives to it over the forums.

 

It does what it says on the tin. Caused DISCORD.

Definitions:
1. disagreement between people.
2. (of people) disagree.
3. MUSIC: lack of harmony between notes sounding together.

Its l;ike a big room with everyone shouting. But also as you suggest and not designed well. From my perspective its about me and the developer and not everyone in the room? But Im selfish, I want my problems sorted. lol

 

how do i get this warning removed from GAIA? There are 10 of them thats why im wanting to get rid of them. Last Gaia update was way back on first of June.

Assets\Gaia\Scripts\Utils\GaiaPipelineUtils.cs(106,33): warning CS0618: 'Terrain.materialType' is obsolete: 'Property materialType is not used any more. Set materialTemplate directly.'

Code (csharp):

1. activeTerrains.materialType = Terrain.MaterialType.BuiltInStandard;

 

@Hawk0077 @StevenPicard

We are not affiliated with discord in any way other than using it, and it is just an offer to use it to contact us, not a requirement, so I don't think I need to defend or advertise it. As for the advantages over the forum:

• Discord allows voice chat & screen sharing & streaming which we sometimes use to look at tougher problems that are hard to reproduce.
• Native clients for different platforms that allow you to quickly switch between threads and conversations without constantly reloading a webpage over and over again.
• Reliable (!) real time notifications on web, desktop and mobile. On the forums you might get an email sometimes later in the day.
• You can tailor the notifications you get according to the server and channel you are interested in
• You can see when people are typing which makes it more suitable for chatting back and forth, generally the whole UX is tailored towards having multiple conversations in direct messages and threads / channels at the same time.
• We can add and remove channels on our servers as we see fit and this structure is immediately visible for anyone on the server. We you join the PW server on discord you can see what topics there are to discuss about. You can see at one glance if there is anything new in any of the threads that you are interested in.
  On the forums our product threads are scattered across the board and you need to dig them up to find them or you bookmark them in the browser to visit them one by one.
• The server being focused on our products makes it easier to do things like a wishlist or a bug report channel. A "Wishlist for procedural worlds products" forum thread would seem a little out of place.
• User roles: Allow users to do certain things on the server or access certain channels only, we use this for beta tests for example.
• Extensive rights management where you can define precisely what users and roles can do what and what not
• We can moderate ourselves and do not need to rely on external moderation
• Large, existing userbase: Discord is very popular in game-related communities, there is usually one to multiple discord servers for any game and also for game projects in development, so chances are high that game developers already have a discord account and can just connect with a click.
• A lot of additional bells and whistles that are not that relevant when comparing to a forum, but make the overall experience better: Adding reactions, custom emojis, seeing the status of the user, if and how they are online, bots, app integrations, etc.
  
  I can understand if you don't see those as relevant and / or do not want to use discord at all, but that should be no problem then - after all you can still reach us on the forum, per email or support ticket.

 

Direct messaged you a potential fix.

 

just reading waiting for Gaia2 and i must say congrats for your light speed support!

 

Theyre awesome me thinks too!

 

This weekend will you release new version?

 

New version will arrive very soon, we did an extensive test session for it today and there are no issues left that would make us hold it back at the moment. Adam will have one final look over it and if all goes well it should be available in a few hours, if there is still an issue we should be able to fix it quickly and it should arrive on the weekend.

 

The new version has an extra "PWS_SHADER_LIBRARY" folder， Can I delete it?

 

Hey guys,

I'm new to Gaia, but I can't find a way to do something to sounded simple to me. Here goes : I would like a texture to spawn only if it's within a given range of two different proximity tags.

More specifically : I have a texture that shows mixed leaves and needles. I want it to spawn only if it's within R1 meters of an oak and R2 meters of a pine.

What I did was set a list of 2 spawn criteria for the texture : one that does a proximity check for pines, and the other that does a proximity check for oaks. The result is that the texture spawn around each pine and around each oak. To sum it up, I need an "and" condition in the spawn criteria list instead of the implicit "or" condition.

Is there a way to do this simply ? Or will I have to write a "spawn extension" script ?

In the latter case, I'll need some help with that, because spawn extension scripting does not look very straightforward...

 

Please don't, this folder contains the water and vegetation shaders for Gaia. You should be able to move it somewhere else though if you don't want to have it sitting directly in the Assets folder. We are looking into making it so that this folder becomes a subfolder of Gaia in the next versions.

 

Hello,

I own the normal version of Gaia. I have a big sphere in unity that I want to shape into mountains to make a very tiny world. Does Gaia support stamping on custom meshes? If not is there a way to take the flat worlds that I generated in Gaia and then warp them around a shape?

 

You would need to write a spawn extension for this - the proximity settings are "OR" as you noticed, because adding another set of spawn criteria to enter the 2nd proximity setting is treated as another opportunity to spawn rather than "all the criteria sets must be fulfilled to spawn".

It is not that hard in my opinion, what you would need to do is:

1. Create a new script with a class that derives from SpawnRuleExtension
2. Implement the GetFitness Method with your own logic and return a fitness value between 0 and 1 (You could get a list of all the pine and all the oak trees in the "Initialise" method, then check for the distance to the trees during "GetFitness".
3. Put that script on an empty GameObject to create a prefab from it
4. Use this prefab in the Spawn Extension List for that mixed pine and leaf texture

The Spawn Extensions are also described in page 34 in the Gaia Manual. If you can wait for a few more weeks to get the free Gaia 2 update, you could also solve this with inverted collision masks in Gaia 2 without having to write any code.