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

Thanks Adam. Will definitely give this a shot soon!

Question...
Am wondering what might be the issues with building in an 'Image Mask' for each terrain layer, as an option, rather than within the Spawner Settings? So if we had 8 layers, we could actually have a different mask for each layer, which get processed one after the other, with just one button press.

I'm just thinking in terms of using this within a 2 hour class. When we're doing 3D Movie Making session, we don't spend long generating terrain, so what I'd love, is for the students to be able to press 'Spawn Textures' and for that stuff, (textures and randomness), to happen, without having to delete/reset/add any resources, masks etc. So if we have set things up before hand, it's a one-click process for them.

Just throwing some thoughts out there.

Thanks!

 

Gaia brings a whole new meaning to "I'm going on a walkabout"

 

It does have a adventurer type ring to it. We'll need S4G4N to set up a ye old café and cake shop for post walk snacks

 

@Capital E MediaLab You could preset all the textures and each of the masks you want to use in their own individual spawners and then use the group spawner as a one-shot click to make it run through each one in turn

 

Cool with me

 

Hi Adam,

Just adding my thanks for this asset- it's a beautifully elegant way to link World Machine with Unity, really simplifying handing data between both programs. Definitly a game changer in terms of how I'll contruct future environments.

 

Thank you

 

Thanks, guys! This group is very helpful! :-D

And yes, Ms. Teila, I think I was doing a "no-no" by using JPG's and Gimp to bring the heightmaps in. I'll use Photoshop with 16-bit from now on.

 

Seeing as how we are doing names, I like the ring of 'The Gaian Explorers' or 'The Gaian Explorers Group'

 

Hello,

Product looks great from the videos and reviews. Good job!

I have some questions. Iterative workflow and possibility to use, add, edit and update manually placed stuff with generated stuff at the same time is very important for me.

Working on biomes, spawners, spawner groups etc. and ability to edit them and regularly update/testing scenes without losing handcrafted locations and parts of the scene would be just awesome.

I know that some things are not possible and not everything can be automated. Like when you edit a part of terrain heightmap in a place where you have a lot of manually placed objects like buildings, props, trees and details (let it be a completely handcrafted village), you would need to update them and adjust their placement.
On the other side it would be great to make iterations of biome (for example) that is placed around the village and update/spawn/edit it with GAIA without erasing things that were placed manually for the village.
It is a great workflow when you can update the rules, add new elements to the spawners, iterate them and work on them at any time without fearing that they would destroy/edit things that are already fine or you don't want to change at the moment. So in effect you can have a handcrafted location and set of custom spawners for the terrain. Get back to it after few months, add new trees, bushes and details to the spawners, play with the spawner settings and update your 'biome', update the scene with the new settings but without editing/destroying the handcrafted location and things (trees, details) that were placed manually for it.

And it's not only about the manual placement. Let's say that you want a forest with a small swamp in the center of it. You could use two different spawner groups, one for the forest, another one for the swamp, placing the swamp spawner in the center of the forest. Then you can edit and iterate each one separately at different times. It would probably require a mask for one of them to achieve smooth transition.

I was hoping for system like that for Unity and I'm wondering if GAIA is designed this way.

So here comes the first question.

Is it possible to erase only the trees/details/objects that were created by a specific spawner? Are thing that were spawned by a specific spawner somehow marked so the system knows which one actually spawned them so it can refer to them later?

Maybe the 'reset' button that is placed at the bottom of spawner (spawn controller section) would clear everything that was spawned before by this spawner without touching trees/details/objects that were spawned with other spawners?

1. Let's say that I would like to place some trees and details manually and the then start working with spawners. Is it possible to clear only the results of a specific spawner without losing my manually placed trees/details?

2. Another case is if I would like to have two different tree spawners. Is it possible to clear trees that were spawned by only the first of them without losing the trees that were spawned by the second one?

 

Using the defaults and hitting the group spawner twice..

 

Defaults again, group spawner twice and a decrease in ambient light..

 

Hey man, these screenshots are looking good, makes me think of Skyrim

 

Hi sqallpl,

So far my experience is that manually placed objects are not affected by the spawners of cleared by the reset button, the spawner for GameObjects in any case as the spawner places the objects under itself and only works with it's own group.

I'm probably not the best person to answer these questions but i hear what you're saying and they are very valid points, masks sound like what required, or maybe you could move the objects out of the folder to separate them. but not sure about trees or grass/details where they are stored.

Best wait for Adam or one of the dedicated testers answer these question.

 

Only if that spawner is dealing with GameObjects, in which case when you click on Reset it simply deletes the cloned child objects it previously spawned.

Clicking on Clear Trees or Clear Details removes all of them from the Unity terrain data, regardless of which spawner created them.

 

Hello everybody and thank you very much for this great tool
i'm unable to locate the water4advenced prefab and FPScontroller prefab , can you please tell me where i find this asset please ?

 

These are in the Standard Assets that you'll need to import into your Unity project (apologies, but I can't remember exactly which menu option it is under)

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-InstallStandardAssets.html

This should help.

 

thanks for the helps smada

 

This is a neat way to work with terrains, and I think it adds a good set of tools.

But, I do have a set of suggestions...

1. The stamping process is cumbersome to adjust. It would be easier to use if it had mouse controls -- Display a big translucent box, and then move that around with the mouse cursor and stamp - for example, look at "Erosion Brush" how they override the terrain edit process.

2. Need to be able to turn on tiling for brushes - for example, I'd like to start out with the whole level being "dunes", but I'd like the brush to scale down and tile, so the dunes cover the entire terrain, but are also not giant.

Anyway, thanks for releasing this cool product.

 

Hello,

I'm not sure what I am doing wrong, but what the visualizer shows me and what actually spawns are 2 entirely different things.

I've fit the spawners to the terrain, but they seem to only be spawning in a very high and steep location that goes against what is configured and what is represented in the visualizer. I am planning to take another stab at it, but as of right now if there are any obvious suggestions I would appreciate them.

Thanks!

 

Check your sea level. What do you have it set at? What is your highest and lowest elevation on your terrain? Where is the surface of your water, if you have one.

 

I've tried putting the sea level at the default, 0, and negative numbers with no noticeable effect. I don't actually have water in my scene currently. Even if I remove all height, slope and texture checking from the trees they still only spawn in this one corner where the tallest point of my terrain is. I also noticed that the spawner seems to ignore the range that I set for it and literally only spawns in that corner.

I have a terrain layer that I use for my terrain, and I configured both the visualizer and the spawner to use that layer for collision testing.

Within the same project, if I disable my World Machine generated terrain and create one from scratch using Gaia things seem to behave closer to expected. I see in above posts that World Machine is fully supported and it shouldn't matter, but that's the only thing that I can see that is different at this time.

 

Question - How did you achieve those wonderful looking blocky rocks on the mountains here? Geometry blend via RTP?

Also, just a small tip for future - the JPEG compression on these images really spoils the edging of what is a beautiful scene. If you put less compression on it looks WAY better! Might help with advertising

 

Yeah, must output them 1080 x 1920 so I use them as wallpapers, seriously

 

As long as you are using WM to create the height map and then either importing it into a Unity terrain or using it for a stamp, that should not matter. I do that all the time and it has not been an issue.

So, the visualizer is showing green in areas and then won't spawn there? Did you reset the spawner before trying again? Also, are you using the heights and slopes that you get with the visualizer? There is a place at the bottom where you can point to an area with your cursor, hit control, and get the height.

Check your curves. I had this issue. Make the height curves all straight across at 1.0. See if that helps.

 

Do all your settings in Gaia match that of your terrain you created in WM? Even though you aren't using Gaia to create the terrain, Gaia may still be referencing that info for the spawners. Not 100% sure, but there seems to be some issues with folks who are using Gaia on non-unity terrains. I didn't have this issue in my test, but I went through and made sure all the settings of the terrain (height, width, etc) were entered to match within Gaia.

Also, if you have your sea level set to 0 it is operating as it should by not spawning anything set for negatives. there has to be something else going on somewhere. Just not sure what or where..

@AdamGoodrich, maybe a video taking a terrain created outside of Gaia and applying Gaia to it would be useful. Maybe it could help click with something that folks are maybe missing or doing differently that is causing this issue?

 

OK, bought this today. First of all - fantastic terrain modeling! So easy.

My question is, how come when I apply the texture spawner only one texture is showing? It's meant to work out of the box right? Everything is default settings.

 

I did a dialog box that detected this and gave you a warning message along with instructions.. did it not display ?

The only thing this currently works for is the GameObject spawner. It was a feature that was asked for in the beta, and it is technically possible to do, however the amount of memory it would require Gaia to hold onto might cause issues on lower end machines. I will look into it.

Not currently - when you use the terrain helper it will clear all trees. Had added this to my list of things to do / investigate.

As above

Thanks for the feedback - the stamper currently acts like a 3d object so it can be sized, rotated and scaled with standard unity controls. It also supports doing this in the inspector as well. I will take a look at erosion brush as well.

Hmm.. never thought of this - interesting idea.... The stamper has an API which I have not promoted yet because its still early and i don't want to break peoples code by changing it. I will see if i can overlay something on top of it that would allow you to do this. Added to roadmap.

Have you by chance replicated your Resources file and then not selected the correct one ? When Gaia Manager creates a stamper or spawner it passes the resources file it currently has selected through to the stamper / spawner so that you don't have to. Just make sure you have the same resources file selected in stamper, spawner and visualiser.

The root cause is that when you restart / re show Gaia Manager it reverts back to the original resources file. @ZenMicro had a similar issue and I have added a remember settings feature to stop this from happening to others. The next release will be submitted today hopefully.

Thanks for the tip - the rocks are actually just a texture - that's all done with the standard unity terrain shader.

Been busy on some time critical stuff - hopefully will get to do some more videos today.

 

Thanks. It does work out of the box. Can i suggest that you create a new scene and follow the Quick Start guide in the Gaia / Documentation directory for your first run through. This will give you a good starting point for how to use Gaia.

 

Thought i would share a WIP of an environment that's been created with Gaia.

 

may I ask - what is the draw call count on that scene?
Lo-ball guess:
10ish for ethan(no textures)
Terrain 300 -> 600 base,
foliage circa 300 (best case)
Trees 1000
Gameobjects 300

something of that order?
We are attempting to get our heads around best practices and seeing what other people value as important benchmarks.

 

Not sure - and can't find out - its in the middle of an asset server update. No attention has been paid to optimisation yet. Will get back to you when that has been done.

I am very interested in hearing about what techniques other people are using to get the best performance out of Unity.

 

Exciting news - Turboscalpeur, the author of the beautiful Photographic Ferns and Grasses series which I have used in a lot of my screen shots has agreed to provide a sample of his work free for use with Gaia, and this will be included in the next release.

I have also tweaked both the detail spawner, and the clustered spawner to take best advantage of them, and hope to have some more news next week about some other great additions coming to Gaia.







These images were generated entirely with the assets provided with Gaia, with the exception of Time of Day which was used for lighting and clouds!

You can see more of his awesome work here.

 

Hi Adam,

Happy to hear that Resources and Defaults file will be loaded when reloading GAIA +1 for that

How can that be standard Unity Texture? it looks so cartoony and handpainted type deal and when I post my pics of what I've managed to do (i don't really like my work as it is) there is no comparison and i am using RTP as well! tell us your secret

ie. I think they must be on a 45 degree angle because my cliffs don't look good

 

Hehe - in my previous post I am using the standard unity terrain shader. The one prior to that is using RTP

 

I've been having some issue with Unity Editor locking up on me to the point I have had to End task. I notice the Visualizer when i open it makes a huge difference if i set it to the left it chugs.. but still getting some lock up and lag while working, Light Baking is off, Oh what's more interesting is that my CPU and Memory usage are NOT at 100%.. Windows doesn't have a GPU window i think so that could be it. So i have had to remember to save often. And i have a new Video card as well so not sure the cause.

 

I'll post some screenies now as promised... These should do GAIA more justice than the ones i had here before. This is all GAIA and RTP, no special lighting or anything like that yet. Can you tell? and while i don;t have a Deer i have a Camper lol





EDIT: Replaced all 3 pis as they were not so good.. I've since utilized more of RTP power and i'm feeling it's getting there... I thought i was stuck with the same scaling for the cliff texture as the rest but then RTP magically allowed me to add a Vertical Texture which just works so well Also dealt with the boulder texture was not tiling - it was stretching. Can't wait to fix the van so i can go for a proper drive !

 

The Visualiser is very CPU intensive - as it runs every update in order to draw the visualization. I will find a more efficent way to do this in a future update, but for now, don't overdo the resolution and you will be fine.

NOTE: The visualiser runs only in the editor. It does not have any effect on runtime performance.

 

Yeah in game mode i was only getting a lag issue when i turn towards a certain point, so i was checking everything in my code.. not sure but after a restart (of my pc) and clear/rerun of all the spawners that went away.. had me stumped.

Anyway I'm working on an Australian Outback game.. can you tell *Feels no can would pick it* lol - Anyway artists out there if you can tell me where i am going wrong - color (or palettes/or even contrast?) mismatches for starters maybe?

 

That can sometimes be to do with your water settings. Do you have water in your scene ?

 

Yep you could do that - but would need to set it up.

Use one spawner per layer and assign your mask to the relevant layer.

Then add all 8 spawners to a spawner group - this allows you control the set of 8 spawners with a single click.

 

I did actually place a water 'circle' in.. and then forgot about it (it was slightly under the ground) and it makes sense as that was the general direction i was looking!... I've disabled it now, i thought it might have been my high poly trees but not so.

How does one use water then?

And yeah i realized the issue was not just in game (check all of my camera modes) but it was doing it in the ditor at edit time.

Good catch! - but makes me wonder how to use water if it's so heavy resource wise.

 

I am not an expert at this but I know who is. It's to do with setting up which layers reflect water. I will ask him to post some advice here.

 

OK, I created a blank project and used the quick start guide. Still no dice, I'm not getting any working spawners. See image:



Also, I am trying to set up a GAIA terrain in a scene already using other terrains and the stamper will not work (stuck at 0.0%).

 

turn your real-time lighting update off for a start. That annoying blue bar in the bottom right. LIGHTING panel, disable real-time. My machine sometimes refuses to do anything useful when overly busy. (So do I, come to think of it)

So are you pressing the GROUP SPAWNER spawn button? Or the Texture one (I see the texture one in the screenie)

 

First of all, where did you get your texture? Is that one included with Gaia? It looks to me to be a low resolution texture, not a very good one. It is not easy to find a good rock texture, especially one for decent cliffs. The ones included with Gaia are just standard assets. I would attempt to find a better one.

You might need a very good texture for your purpose. Make sure it is at least 1024 in size. Do not increase the size but make sure the download size is at least 1024. Do not take your texture from Google Images. Not only are these not royalty free, but they are usually created for the internet, not for use in games, so poor resolution and not the right size.

To get a decent one, you will either need to buy textures or get a subscription to a place like CGTextures so you can download larger ones or find one of the few free places out there with royalty free textures at least 1024 in size or larger. One place I like is Episcura http://episcura.com/textures/rock/sediment/.

Find one you like, make sure it is seamless by clicking seamless at the top of the page and only choosing one of those. Episcura has a daily download limit so find the one that is at least 1024 on every dimension, so if you were to choose the red sediment one, download the M size. Then take it into Gimp or PS and undo the dimension link and change the size to 1024 to 1024. Do not crop it or you will lose the tiling.

You will need to make a normal map and there are numerous ways to do that, with free plugins for Gimp or Photoshop or tools like Crazy Bump or BitmapMaterials. I will leave that up to you to figure out.

See if that looks better. With RTP, you are limited in tiling size since all textures have to be the same size, one reason I am not fond of RTP. If it doesn't look good, try flipping the texture or try another rock texture. Eventually you will get something acceptable. Note that if you use 2048 instead of 1024, you will have to download the L size in Episcura. You might get better results with a larger tile size but again, with RTP, all will need to be the same size. NEVER make a texture larger than it's original or you will lose quality.

Hope this helps. You may know all of this, I don't know. But to me your texture looks to be of poor quality or the wrong size.

Another note...Adam uses image effects in his scenes so that will give it a very different look than yours.

 

Thanks for that link Teila

Grabbed some there which I'm going to experiment with later to see what they look like

 

Thanks for the Tips, The texture i am using is royalty free from i thought Deviant Art by Nobiax, but maybe not.. in anycase i recolored many trials and sometimes not so good (specs of bright colors) also it was 512 and yes because of RTP i tiled it again to make 4x4 = 1024, I've booked marked the site you mentioned, looks like the seamless ones are often not square.

 

No, but you can make them square by just resizing them and they should work fine. Try it.

Yeah, 512 is way too low and by increasing the size to 1024, you lowered the quality of the texture.

I find it tough to get a texture to look nice in Rtp without good specs and normals. Make sure you follow his directions because I think he adds gloss into the alpha channel of the diffuse. He does tell you how to do that I believe. If you don't follow his directions for setting up the textures, you will have issues with specular artifacts.

BTW, really good idea to find some tutorials for setting up textures in Gimp or PS, whatever you are using.

 

Does it really matter if the texture is square? Surely is the overall size in the X and Y (with one of them at least 1024) and the overall art quality of the texture?