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

Out of curiosity.. What asset are you using to build your roads? Your screenies look AWESOME!

 

Thanks, im using easyroads3D

 

Those screenshots really have me thinking, good work!

 

Thanks, glad that they inspired you

 

Is there any way in the future the texturing could be done via sliders, with a realtime visualization of what they look like? Forming the terrain is a breeze, but texturing is a different story. For example to blend, surely the best approach would be have a slider for each texture, the first number represents the start height and the end of the slider represents the end height, then the gap between the next slider/texture would indicate the amount they would blend.

I've been using the following asset for past month or so, which does the texturing like that https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/27340

If you look at the screenshots, you will see what I mean. It just seems a much more visual and artistic method of doing it, rather than base everything on purely numbers. I've just experimented and it is compatible with Gaia, but I'd prefer to use one asset for everything especially if in the future you add procedural generation/runtime.

The next step would be to spawn the trees using some sort of realtime visualization system too, which would show exactly where they would go before you click 'spawn', and then you could alter a slider(s) and to alter where they would go. The actual terrain forming is spot-on, it just seems that you have a little less control and more calculations using the spawn.

I appreciate you do have the visualizer tool, however, it only really gives a very rough impression, and obviously the results are dependent on the 'fitness' of the other textures/objects, so what you see isn't always what you get.

 

How did you do that?

 

Do what exactly ? the whole scene ? its Easy roads with Gaia magic

 

Click on the Visualizer and you will see a visual representation for each texture/grass/tree. Just use the drop down menu to change from one texture/grass/tree to another. It works wonderfully. You can change the resolution of the Visualizer as well but beware of making it too dense as it can cause lag in the editor. I usually keep it low resolution (to the right) and then go down to increase the density and check things out, and then back down to a lower resolution.

I found this much easier to work with than the TC type sliders. You can easily modify each texture while using the visualizer to fine tune your settings.

 

@jonfinlay interesting thoughts.

I will admit that I'm biased in that I've had access to the beta for a while and have seen the various iterations that the texturing side of Gaia has gone through, but I like how the fitness curves can really help you blend different textures onto the top of the underlying ones

As for the preview where trees etc would spawn - that might be workable but then you'd have to consider how much extra processing that may put onto the unity editir

 

I've been playing around with the visualizer, I'll have another look at it tomorrow. In my opinion what makes Gaia so good is the terra forming, you can see exactly how the terrain will look before you stamp it, and get it exactly how you desire. I would imagine a better method of texturing would be in the same style of the terrain forming, one which could colour the ground with a single colour which would represent the texture, and could be done for each texture. Then you could alter it by moving a slider in realtime, adjust another slider to change its intensity and blend amount, and then 'stamp' it when its perfect. This colouring layer would apply to the whole terrain, not just a patch as in the visualiser.

Regarding the object spawn, there shouldn't be lag if the trees or rocks were represented by a colour.

 

Always open to feedback on how to do things better - more visual and intuitive is always better imho - and at the same time this needs to be balanced with the potential performance impact.

This is the first iteration of many, and as I have with the beta group, I listen to and consider all feedback.

When my website is up properly I will create a feedback section so that we can capture all these ideas

 

Problem with sliders is that you lose that fine touch. With numbers, 2.0 is different from 2.3 and even 2.05 in some cases.

You are using the same textures on the entire terrain. Therefore, the small patch shows you exactly what you need and in detail. I can tell if I have patches of dirt in my grass and change that if I don't want it. I can tell if my grass is going to close to the edge of the beach. I can tell if my trees are going to spawn in areas where there is too much slope. I can easily, while looking at the changes in the visualizer, adjust the parameters to see how my changes affect what spawns where.

Like I said above, I have never been able to make such detailed terrains, using only 4 textures, and have it end up looking like I used 8 or more. The visualizer is amazing and works fantastically. Having it paint the entire terrain using sliders will lose some of the precision of a small area. If you want to check out the higher slopes, just move the visualizer. Other tools do it similar to what you want and they do not look like this.

 

Yes, QuickBrush by ProCore also uses similar dual sliders ... they work well. But they should be combined with numeric input as some prefer typing exact values.

While beta testing, I did put in a feature request to use these sliders to set object spawn height-range, so hopefully Adam will like them and consider more uses.

Realtime preview may be tricky as theres so many rules to consider and takes a lot of processing, guess thats why the visualizer is there.

The trees etc spawning is by a seed value, which controls the (randomness) of the locations, so manually positioning them would negate that. Possibly a manual brush - to manually place a few resources is an idea, although Unity (and tools like QuickBrush) do that well - so may be duplication.

 

I appreciate what you are saying with numbers. In fact I'd created before I bought Gaia a very flat African savanna terrain with TerrainToolkit, which was only 8 high. Then I applied 8 textures using TerrainPainter like so 0-1.5, 1.5-3, etc. The effects were great. The problem with Gaia is that this process is a little more complex, especially because of those fitness curves which you have to set up manually. Ultimately, the best terrain maker would be one which was entirely done visually. Nothing in a natural landscape is 'exact', hence why numbers are not the best way of doing things. Although I appreciate this would take a lot thought and time, and I'm more than happy with the results so far

 

Yup.. The problem you are describing is how the visualizer was born during beta. I had a rough time getting things placed the way I wanted and was really having a rough time understanding fitness. Since the visualizer was put in, things work tons better for me. The only problem with the visualizer is how heavily it uses resources. I've had Unity freeze multiple times if I try to get it too detailed or cover too big of an area. I don't even want to imagine what it would do to my machine if it was actually trying to draw the resources while I was making changes. At any rate, the visualizer was a solution to address the issue you are describing.

 

Fitness curves could not be replaced by sliders, unfortunately. They are more to do with the "fitness" of a texture or prefab to a specific part of the map, such as....how well a tree grows on a steep slope, or how much sand you might find at a high elevation. At least that is how I see it. The means that you can taper out the sand, so it is "thicker" at low elevations and tapers out and is not seen at high elevations. The edges of the textures are nicely blended, gradually, no hard value like with a slider or a number.

It works great for grasses and trees. You may want some species to grow in the fringes, evergreens at high elevations, willows near the lakeshore, and oaks in between but with the fitness curves, you can blend them along the edges to get a more natural look.

I had a LOT of problems with the curves. If you look in the documentation, those pictures with the little bubbles? Those were for me. lol I was Adam's worst nightmare and he actually worked very very hard to get me to understand how they work.

Sliders would simply replace the values...height, from min to max or slope from min to max. Right now those use numbers, which are very easy to use. I think maybe there were sliders at one time in the process but we asked for numbers. It works so much better. I get what you mean though since Terrain Composure uses the sliders...you overlap the different textures. But you can do EXACTLY the same thing with the curves once you figure them out.

Look at the docs, at the bubbles, and think of me. If I can get it, you can too.

 

To be honest, I only had a brief play around with the visualiser. I'll have another look tomorrow. What I didn't quite understand was the fitness. If you wanted to blend wet sand with a dry texture, wouldn't it be easier just to have a slider which adjusts the blending, rather than seeing which was 'fitter' and having to adjust the curves? But I guess it was that you felt Shawn so I'm sure after some time I'll get the hang of it.

 

haha ok Telia! I'm glad it's not just me then

 

Hang in there Jon - I will do some videos on this subject - it's dead easy and pretty intuitive once you understand it - and a complete slog when you don't.

When you do however its great because it doesn't really matter what you are spawning, it all works in the same way.

 

Nope, it is not just you. There were times when I was afraid to tell Adam that I didn't get something because he would kick me out of beta! LOL But he was always patient, well usually, except when he was overtired from working so hard to please us all.

I am very glad he kept the curves now.

 

Hehe - I get a -10 to personality when I am too tired

EDIT: @Teila tells me it is more like a -10 to Charisma - lmao

 

Not just you.. The curves were a nightmare for me to understand too.. To be honest, I'm still not sure if I fully understand them. But visualizer helped me a ton with the fitness stuff. It allowed me to see how my changes to fitness curves, height numbers, and slope numbers effected where things would spawn.. I haven't gone through all the new videos, but if there is a spawner one that talks about the visualizer then watch through it a couple of times. First time I watched the ones Adam did in beta, it still didn't click. Second or third time through, the light bulb came on. What can I say? I'm a bit slow on the take at times... heheh

 

Here are a few pictures of a terrain I made a while ago for our game and later retextured and re-foliated using Gaia. At this stage in the beta testing, the visualizer did not exist and I did not get curves at all. I just played with them until it look good. Even with my lack of understanding, I still think they turned out pretty good. You can see the foliage blending up the hills, changing with height and looking very natural.

 

Really gorgeous @Teila!

 

yeah really nice, well done!

 

Hi,

Since your tool is build over Unity Standard Terrain, i suppose there is no trouble to use this : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/38742 ?

Just checking.


@Teila.
Very nice.

 

Yes exactly ... and that's why I find Gaia's "randomness" so powerful. Nature is "controlled randomness", which is why Gaia fits so well ... you lay out the control rules, and apply them with randomness.

I'm looking forward to Adam enhancing that, and there's already been a lot of ideas put in as feature requests that he's looking at ... for eg. Similar to what you were saying earlier about ability to manually place trees / grass etc, I requested the ability to control "density near objects" ... for example, in nature you find grass randomly placed, but then you find a rock and there's a lot more (greener longer) grass around it because it traps surface water when raining etc ... so there is ways to do that with Gaia, but looking forward to enhancing things like that.

Those are absolutely brilliant, well done!

 

I use ats Colormap Ultra which has been around for ages and has something similar built in (only $10), so imagine it should be fine.

Enjoy

 

Good to know. Thanks.

 

Just a word in case anyone gets offended - the launch of Gaia has been way more successful that I could ever imagine - and there is a lot of discussion here which is great.

The beta group is brilliant (thanks guys) and I think they get most of the questions - however if they don't and I miss your post - please message me privately so your question doesn't get lost.

 

Yes - it works with all the platforms that Unity supports because it is 'just unity'. Unity in -> Unity Out. No unusual scripts or shaders, and nothing left behind as you can delete Gaia when you are done.

You do however need to be mindful of the limitations of the platform you are targeting.

 

Still reading manual but I plan on using the spawner during runtime. Do you have the ability to control the number of spawns easily?

For example during setup there will be 3 players, thus I want to spawn only three starting units on the map in random locations a minimum distance apart. Perhaps on the map I want to spawn just 1 diamond resource randomly, and lets say 4-6 gold mines etc...

 

Mr. Adam, I just want to say... THANK YOU!!! Amazing job! :-D
I've been looking forward to this, and it meets all of my high expectations! :-D
I also want to thank all of the beta testers for shaping this into what it is today, and also Mr. Cobus... or I would never have known this project existed.

I just finished reading the manual, and I've been playing quite a bit! It's very fun!
Still trying to dissect everything, haha!

I do have a question... for whoever may have knowledge about it.
I'm quite new and inexperienced when it comes to heightmaps.
Sometimes, when I stamp a terrain, the changes in elevation are very pronounced. It almost reminds me of Minecraft "hills."
I don't know if it has to do with my heightmaps or if I'm missing a setting... or if I"m simply doing something incorrectly.
Is there a setting in Gaia that can "smooth" the changes in elevation automatically?
I've tried the Stamp smoother (and actually see no change in anything), and I've also tried smoothing the terrain after it has been stamped... it smooths the corners, but the terrain is still clearly faceted.

Thank you for any and all assistance! And again, thanks for the epicness that is Gaia! :-D


P.S. This is one of the heightmaps I've been playing with. It's PNG, so I use Gimp to export into a PSD and a JPG.
www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52675/

 

This is an issue - particularly when you are using highly compressed jpg files as sources for your stamps. You can pre-smooth the stamp before applying it if you want - or better yet - use something like photoshop to do this. I did find some ways of improving this and will do a video tutorial on it in the next week or so.

The best stamp source is a 16 bit windows raw file or world machine r16 file.

 

It will run one spawner iteration on the timer you set. If you want more iterations then lower the timer value.

 

Thank you so much! I'm actually extra hungry for more videos! :-D

 

Its quite important the bitdepth is 16bit for the image or you get that stepping because theres so much less tonal range in a compressed 8 bit image (like a jpeg. Jpeg is maybe the worst common image format to use in anything like this because it clips tonal information as part of the compression, generally jpegs are good for a finished image of something used on the internet).

When converting a jpeg over youll want to make it a 16bit greyscale image, you might need to tonemap (in photoshop the exposure tool is useful) or blur it to generate the tonal range and then save it as a raw or png, although as said, raw is your safest bet (in photoshop considered a single channel 16bit image with byte order specific to your os).

PNG compression is lossless so no need to worry about that, in comparison to jpeg

You might have already known all that but maybe this information is useful to someone. Assuming i got everything right

 

Just to expand on this ... the limitations Adam mentions has nothing to do with using Gaia or not ... they apply to using std Unity terraforming too, ie. its just good practice - specially on mobile. So Gaia has no affect using Android runtime other than making said terrains interesting.

I'm just wondering if by "minecraft hills" you mean they're too "high" compared to width ... I assume you found and tried reducing the stamp height before stamping if thats the case.

 

Thinking about it again ... do you mean the changes in elevation between the stamped and existing terrain ... as theres a curve you can change to control that - so it blends on the edges - check Adams videos if its that.

 

It may have been the way I was bringing in the heightmap. I'll have to do some more testing.

What I meant is after I use a a stamp, the terrain sometimes looks like "stairs" instead of a slope.
Basically, instead of smoothly going from Point A to a higher Point B like a ramp, the terrain will be flat on Point A's level until it reaches Point B, then it will go straight up vertically.

That's what I meant by the Minecraft example. A mountain being simply several layers of cubes stacked on top of each other. Basically, think of a diagonal line on a computer screen formed by pixels with no anti-aliasing. Like this...

...........__
......__|.....|__
.__|...............|__
|.........................|

 

Wonder if it is maybe the resolution of the original heightmap. If you want, you can send me a PM with the heightmap you are using and I can see if I get same result. If I can get a working stamp going that looks good, I can package it and send it back to you.

EDIT: Actually, I just scrolled back up and saw you are the one that was trying to use the heightmap off the Nexus site.. Is that the one you are having problems with? If so, I downloaded it earlier to check out. Just let me know.

 

I have to say the data is really low quality and therefore not worth much, I have WorldComposer, I have tried everything the data is simple too low, I've increased the resolution and then used the Smooth tool 5 times in a row to get the steps out of it (in TerrainComposer) anway that's a different forum. I don't think you realize how big Australia is, the heightmap you showed is so far out it would only suit a flight sim at best anyway, nevermind I will need to do them by hand.

I'll take another look at terrain.party later. Thanks.

 

Yes, thank you. I was using Gimp to convert it from a PNG to PSD and JPG files to try. I was also trying smaller sections of the heightmap (it seems to be quite large), and then I was playing around with enlarging the stamp compared to the size of the terrain. Between all of that craziness, perhaps that's what caused the issue. I'm looking forward to testing more... especially now that I've found where Photoshop was hiding on my computer

P.S. Does that heightmap appear to be a decent one to get good detail with? Again, I'm new with terrain and such. Thanks!

P.P.S. I believe Gaia's default terrain is 2048 in size. What would you say the best size/resolution for a heightmap is for that size terrain?

 

lol.. Yup.. I realize Australia is HUGE. The heightmap I showed wasn't far out, it was a far in 60km capture from a very small part of southern Australia. At one point I had wanted to take the Hawaiian Islands or even something like Puerto Rico. Both areas a small fraction of what Australia is. But still huge when it comes to Unity terrains. At any rate I think I was more pointing out that if you are trying to get all of Australia, with it being so huge that might be quite an undertaking. The data is there though. Not sure at what scale it would be usable though for the resolution. I don't think you are going to be able to get anything that looks good though if you try to capture it all at once. Would love to have someone prove me wrong though.

 

To be honest with you, I'm not sure. I just tinker and try to find what looks good. I'll let some of the others who are more savvy with the heightmap stuff to answer on the size recommendation. I downloaded that earlier.. I'll pull the heightmap out and see what I can do with it. Was you stamping into a default sized terrain?

 

Thanks! Yes, I've been using a single default terrain.
When I tried larger terrains, I got errors. I may have to adjust Gaia's default data... I haven't tried that yet.

 

I have not been able to buy the asset tonight. In Firefox there is a buy button but the sale will not complete. In IE there is no buy button for Gaia at all. Other assets in the store do have buy buttons just not Gaia, so it seems to be a issue with Gaia specifically rather than a storewide problem.

I'll try again tomorrow. Just letting you know there are still issues with buying the asset.

 

Yes I'd like to know that too. An earlier terrain I made which was 500 x 500 with the default revolution seemed to be better than one at 2048 for displaying the textures.

 

Just bought. Do I have to wait for jobs to complete on bottom right of screen before going to next stage in terrain creation? Jobs seem to take ages...?

 

Hehe. Be thankful that Adam was able to put those jobs into a coroutine so that unity didnt "hang" whilst they were being processed. early betas were stuck without that feature

As for the jobs taking ages - which ones are causing problems? Most should complete fairly quickly, with the texturing and detail spawning perhaps the two most intensive ones.

Unless the progress bar actually stops, I'd refrain from any alterations to the terrain you're working on as it may give unexpected results