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

I develop on a quad core desktop. End to end group spawn on a 2048 x 2048 terrain finish in less than a minute.

 

Ok. Understood. To be fair, the end result was worth the wait.

 

My PC is top end so must be something else? I had also imported other terrain assets but not threaded them in....

 

Hi, quick recap on a question posed during the "downtime", if you generate the trees etc using a specific seed number, will the same terrain on another PC be exactly the same using the same seed? Think multiplayer shooter, would need to have trees in the same place to hide behind.
Thanks

 

We use Quad Core 3.4GHz, 12gb ram, Nvidia 980 ftw.

Last nights test came in at under a minute for reasonable count landscapes.

We whacked up the fail rate on the trees and the gameObjects to get more sensible counts overally.

I may have missed it but after skimming the posts I see no notes about optimising results.
(I appreciate this is technically a General Unity Terrain point but meh, this is a good place for it.)

Anyone got any tips to share about getting the draw count down to sub 500 for everything?
I actually don't see any numbers on any of the examples and - in the end - this is all about making games/places that people can actually play/visit right?

I will post what we did to reduce the counts so far. Once we have something solid.


Nice system, Fun

 

That appears to be the case - the manual TOP POST alludes to such a fact.

"Its replicable, adaptable and rule based – all aspects of terrain texturing, planting and object placement is done procedurally and is seed based, which allows it to adapt to new terrains, and makes it perfect for networked games;"​

 

Yeah that's what I had read as well but wanted clarification on if things are painted in the same location or placed in the same location, painting being more "there or thereabouts". If it is in exactly the same place then great

 

a very reasonable question.
Not sure.

 

I do have a Feature request.

Please can GameObjects have the ability to optionally flatten the area around their base in the heightmap upon placing?

Not sure how much source code is actually available, will go dig now and see if I can help in this area.

 

Any reccomendations of weather systems to go with this?

I've checked out UniStorm so far.

 

I am quite sure that all the questions will get some attention soon.
The crowd that normally answer are all asleep now I think

 

Damn Ozzys.

 

My first quick test Gaia using the included detail and object assets. Works great with Rtp too
http://gfycat.com/KnobbyHalfFrog

(The fgycat compression didnt do miracles with the depth of field effect, though the gfy size is 500kb!)

 

@moure I know it is my 3DForge buildings, but they really look nice in the dry arid landscape. Well Done
It actually looks like a painting

These included in Gaia are single mesh buildings, the ones in the package, all these parts are loose so that they fully modular and can mix and match how you want to

I love these extreme places,one mostly see lush green forests, but scenes like this looking really stunning, well done
I am sure one could end up with nice Martian and other such landscapes

 

That's a beautiful scene!

 

haha, actually only Adam is from Australia, the rest UK and US

 

I actually made that terrain with Mars in mind Here is a gif of the tiled mesh version of it (i really hate unity terrain to tell you the truth). Though since i didnt have much time and wanted to tested Gaia asap i used the same heightmap on the above scene!
I wish i could use Gaia and a terrain-like shader with standard meshes instead of terrain

 

I am going to ask here as the other threads are kind of dead regarding this issue.
I am trying to get a nice sky happening and recently bought Nuaj which does look good but has a number of issues and no support whatsoever. I noticed a couple here using TrueSky with the landscapes created with GAIA so I was wondering if a user might be able to tell me how it's working out for them.
Does it overcome issues with particles that plague Nuaj?
Is it cross platform Linux, Mac & consoles or only Windows?
64 Bit?

Thanks for any help.

 

I really like the extreme atmospheric fog and lighting.
What is so cool, not even one tree and this one not even grass and it looking great
the erosion in the geometry very nice.
Can play around now with water, with the very strong oranges do like lime green acidic water with thin vails of fumes coming up

That is what is nice about Gaia, even all the cool Sci-Fi type scenes possible

 

Lots of the other users including @AdamGoodrich love their skies, so sure when they come on they could guide you with that.
It is something that really adds to great looking scenes and make them look so much more real

 

I personally don't like sliders as I can never get them just right.

 

For Players, I would suggest you handle that separately. Then you can put the spawners where you want and maybe create a big radius. I always try to be careful with too much randomness when it comes to placing Players.

 

I use TimeOfDay for my skies. Can't help with Nuaj I'm afraid as this is the first I've heard of it.

 

I've been busy building fences around my houses and sorting out the paths This is the first chance I've had to come and check what's going off

 

Is this @moure's gfycat image? (Which I thought was really great btw @moure )

Looks like a mixture of TimeOfDay/Tenkoku/some other sky system and a depth of field image effect

 

This is Unity, not Gaia. Even if you tried to change your jpg to a raw map, it will probably give you this and this would happen even if you were importing directly into Unity through the terrain panel.

Your height map must be a quality image. It must be 16bit as some have said and jpgs, while sometimes can be turned into decent height maps, often fail. You can try blurring your image in Photoshop, changing the mode to 16bit and then exporting as a raw, but you might still have issues with it. Sometimes I can get them to look decent but not always. I have tossed a lot of images I found in various places due to this, well before Gaia, btw.

Images you find through google are especially bad as they have been compressed already for the internet.

How exactly how you bringing in the heightmap?

 

How did you do the path?

 

also on mac you need to keep the windows focus to have the bar progressing else its paused if you put unity in the background

 

I use Time of Day for my sky, very nice scattering effect. I also use image effects in some of my screenshots and find they help as well. I highly recommend ToD, simple to use, no major issues, and looks good.

 

It's Aussies and not Ozzy's btw - and I'm from Australia (not that i am one answering questions!)
I guessed Adam was from New Zealand myself?

 

Painted the path on the terrain with a spare texture slot.
Then used the mask option in the stamper to work with texture slot 3 (in my case) and then with Stencil Height selected, set the value at -0.7
Then when I stamped again (after I set the transform height curve to a flat value of 1 everywhere), it sank the paths into the terrain slightly. I then went back over the areas covered to tweak the overall results texture-wise to get the results I was after.

 

Sydney I think.

 

Did you have to hand paint the actual path on afterwards?

 

Nope. I just touched up some areas for my own tastes.

 

@Shuttle099 since im not sure to which of the two gifs you refer to:

1. http://gfycat.com/KnobbyHalfFrog
This one uses a free hdri sky as a skybox and a directional light for the sun. The fog i use here is a modified version of global fog which i found on the forum.

2. http://gfycat.com/IdioticElatedBluetonguelizard
This one uses a gradient procedural skybox found here. For the fog i modified the unity global fog to make it a bit more stylized. It could use a gradient as input to have different fog color on different depth and also you could make it affect the horizon and blend it with the skybox until whichever height you wanted. I would be happy to share it, though i lost it in a very stupid way (i never saved it with a different name, and when i imported the standard effects package i forgot about it and it was overwritten ) Also a directional light for the sunlight. The ocean is Ceto.

In both scenes realtime gi was used and iirc i had cranked up the directional light bounce a bit

 

I played around with the heightmap in question last night. When I finished, I didn't get the squared slopes. However, I didn't get the clean island look I was expecting either. Not sure what the deal was but I'm suspecting it is the quality of the original heightmap. There might be some tweaking or photoshop magic you could do to it to improve it, or maybe spawning it on another tile. Unfortunately I don't know enough about heightmaps to know the answer. Here was my workflow that I used prepping the original HM and making the stamp.

1. Open the file in Photoshop
2. The original was rectangular. First order of business is to make it square. In this case, it doesn't really have a black background so I cropped it
3. Next I changed my resolution to 300 and the image height/width to 2048 to match my terrain size. In Photoshop this is done through Image -> Image Size. I always change resolution first and then change height and width. Seems to work funky if I do it the other way around. lol
4. Next I covert to a 16 bit image. In Photoshop this is done by selecting Image -> 16 Bits/Channel
5. Next I convert to black and white. In Photoshop this is done by selecting Image -> Grayscale (Here I always get a message regarding losing colors. I simply click Discard button.)
6. Save the file. Here I was originally saving to a 16 bit Windows jpg until Adam told me Gaia could use a PSD file. So I now do File -> Save As and select Photoshop (*.PSD).

At this point we are ready to scan the file. I copy the file into a folder within my project. I currently have a folder within the Gaia folder structure called imports. I simply select that folder in Unity and then drag my PSD file from Windows Explorer into that folder in Unity. The scanner will need you to be able to drag the file from within your project into its drop area.

Following is how I set my scene, create the stamp, and stamp the terrain:

1. Open a Gaia Manager Window. Click Windows -> Gaia -> Gaia Manager
2. Create a new scene (if you aren't already in a new scene). Click File -> New Scene (follow the prompts)
3. Within the Gaia Manager window click Standard and then click Create Terrain & Show Stamper.
4. At this point we will ignore the stamper and create our stamp
   
5. Within the Gaia Manager window, click the Utilities button and then click Show Scanner
6. Find your heightmap you want to scan. In my case it was the PSD I dropped into my Gaia/imports folder. Once you have it displayed on your Project tab, click and drag it to the "Drop Here To Scan" box in the Scanner's Inspector view (Unity Inspector tab).
7. If you want to change the name of the stamp, update the Feature Name field
8. Select the Feature Type (this will be the stamp folder the stamp will be created in)
9. Click Save Scan to create your stamp
10. Once done, you are ready to pull the stamp into the Stamper!

One note about the Stamper. For me, for some reason, it always has a huge height. With stamps I create, I always seem to have to drop the height to 1 to make it look normal. For this heightmap, I had to bump it to 2 to get any kind of height at all, but the hills ended up pretty pointy. BUT after following the above, I had no problems at all with "Minecraft" hills as you originally posted.

 

Along with @smada luap, this is the first time I've ever heard of Nuaj. I've been playing around with Environment Gator for my sky / weather system. I haven't quite got it tweaked to a point I'm totally happy, but I haven't spent much time with it either. I know Adam has used both Time of Day and Tenoku (I think I spelled that right) and both worked well. Several of the folks in beta used Time of Day and I think recently a couple mentioned True Sky. ToD seemed to have been the dominant one between the beta users.

 

This is something that was requested in beta as well. My thought was if we were able to make a stamp for the object's base and then have it be spawned along with the object. I was mainly looking for a way to stamp house/building foundations to make interior basements accessible. We bounced around some thoughts but never really cracked it.

 

This has been a feature I have wanted to add for ages, but felt there was a lot of other stuff to be added first. Definitely on the roadmap.

 

Yup.. Was mainly mentioning it to let @twobob know it was being thought through. I think when we talked about it, it was one of those things that wasn't going to be an easy nut to crack, at least to crack right. And we all agreed that it could wait post-launch. Glad to hear it still has its place on the roadmap!

 

no worries.

 

I got this a couple nights ago and have been using UNIStorm with some great results.

 

Just want to thank you for such a great tool. I have spent a couple hours so far with the tool and am having a blast.
I also purchased the the exteriors package and have been using UNIStorm for atmosphere.
At one point my 17 year old son (a big fan of survival games) came up behind me and asked what game I was playing. When I told him it was simply an area I was using to test my new assets, he nearly lost his mind. Very enthused by the fact that it already looked better then games he has been playing on Steam.

I look forward to years of using your fantastic tool set.

 

Yes good idea. We did discuss this in beta group but I don't rem putting a feature request in and don't see one, i will add it. A few days ago I added a similar one to allow (the optional) spawning of objects to be affected by the slope - as a slider value - ie how the slope affects the angle, and ideally randomly applied too.

EDIT: Added feature request
EDIT2: Just saw now this has been dealt with by Shawn and Adam already. Anyway, added FR earlier.

 

Yeah ... lazy bums always sleeping when we hard at work!

 

That's probably the bulk of the reason ... its tricky using gimp to create good heightmaps, its one of the few things Gimp is bad at. I use Gimp, but use other tools to create RAW heightmaps from my Gimp tga files ... as LazyGun said its to do with the file format.

 

Just saw this on the asset store, read reviews, watched Youtube videos, and now I cant wait to get home so I can play around with this... Your piece of software may be a groundbreaking improvement to unity's current terrain system, and I'd like to congratulate you.

Edit: Time to dust off my worldmachine skillz, going to be making many many many stamps.

 

Just for the record, Nuaj is an old Unity sky system ... from 2011. But it has been updated. Last update was July 14, 2015.

IIRC, Nuaj was in its time a very high end system, and I think it used to be priced in the $100-$200 range. (?) With more competition in recent years it has come down to $50. It was in the past known for being the only sky system with realistic clouds, and it still has very nice volumetric clouds that you can fly through.

I think some of the older Unity users might have it in their archives. I don't know how it compares to other, more recent sky systems. Time of Day has been my choice, as from the beginning it has been highly efficient, and support has been good.

 

Gaia has no preferences, so just compare the features and use what you prefer and suits your game style.

Many in beta group use TOD I think, personally I use and prefer Tenkoko which is beautiful and deadly accurate as far as star-system goes ... u can use it to navigate in-game. But some don't like that there's not much volume in their clouds.

My only gripe is its a bit heavy on processing .. .that said the author is improving it all the time and just released an update with some performance improvements.

 

@FyreDogStudios -Technically, TOD is not a weather system. It is just day and night, with some tricks to get heavier clouds and fog. But there is a free weather system for it on the forum, which I have not tried yet.

Environment Gator, TrueSKY, and Tenkoko all have some built in weather effects, I think.

As far as realistic behavior for sun, moon, and stars ... I think TOD, Tenkoko, and TrueSKY are all intended to provide accurate celestial timing and position. Not sure about Environment Gator, though it says it has "date, seasons."

Generally speaking, though ... they're all so much better than what we used to have. Any of them should provide a good canopy for Gaia.