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

First off to Adam: Great looking product. Congrats on what appears to be a successful launch.

To anyone that has first hand experience:
Is anyone using Gaia to tweak localized areas of terrains that are still under the control of TC and RTP? This looks like a really nice way to setup areas of interest quickly using custom masks.

My concern is TC and RTP tend to be pretty unforgiving and get testy quickly at times when you introduce other tools (not bashing them, we love both products, but they are so flexible that shooting yourself in the foot is the easiest part of using them). It would be great to hear that this has been tested before I buy yet another terrain editing tool and it doesn't play nice in our workflow.

The multiple terrain editing that is missing in Gaia wouldn't be an issue with our use case, disabling the other terrains while fixing up localized areas with Gaia's stamp system is completely reasonable in this case as long as we stay away from the edges of the terrains. Even if we did get a little to close, we could fix-up any gaps once we imported the height changes back into TC for re-splatting. We would just have to remember to not stay on the Height map layer in TC or click generate until after we exported the modified height maps and imported them back into TC on one layer again.

Any experiences someone could share would be greatly appreciated.

 

Gaia just creates regular terrains, so RTP will not be a problem with it. Several people have used them together already and you can see screenshots in this thread.

TC basically does the same thing as Gaia, generates terrain and allows you to place textures and landscape the terrains. So you really don't need both to do this.

It has the added benefit of allowing you to slice your terrain and add normals/colormaps. You should not have any conflict with slicing Terrains with TC after using Gaia. You can simply remove Gaia after you make the terrain and place all the textures, resources, etc. Then slice, and you have your multiple terrains.

I have not done this, but I do know that Gaia's terrains are like any other Unity terrain and the terrain is not affected after you remove Gaia from your project. All your decorating will remain as part of the terrain, like any other Unity terrain.

 

@Ralack as @Teila comments, you should be ok to do this.

I have used GAIA with RTP myself with no issues, but not TC so I cant comment there.

The one issue you might get with stamping will be due to the location of the terrain. There is a known issue with the stamper in that it expects a terrain where the central point of the terrain is x=0,z=0.

The next release will offer to move the terrain before stamping as a temporary work around until multi-tile is supported. Just move the terrain back when you are done.

BTW. This issue only happens for stamping - all of the spawner work as expected wherever you put them.

 

For those of you that use twitter - I am trying to spread the word out there about GAIA - and it turns out that GAIA is such a well used term that anything i post with #gaia gets lost in the noise - so I have started using #madewithgaia.

I will be putting up a gallery on the web site soon - to show off and celebrate the awesome talent here - and if you happen to tweet this way it will make it easy for me and others to find your work.

Sample search : #madewithgaia

 

Thanks for your thoughts Teila and Adam. I think I will buy a seat and give it a try this weekend.

 

You won't be disappointed!
Gaia is so awesome can't wait to play around with the update.

 

Hi Adam,

I'm am officially a new proud owner of your terrain creation product. I have some questions regarding its usage before I set out on my journey.

1. Am I right in saying that the stamping is editor based only in unity? But the spawner can be accessed from runtime scripting? If this assumption is correct, does the spawner use coroutines or multi-threading?

2. Is there any mileage in adding in an easy RTP integration into your workflow similar to what TC does. It simply configures RTP Relief component to the workflow (if you have it) setting up default diffuse, normal and heightmaps.

3. Does the growth system work on all terrain detail and tree assets? or are there exceptions to the rule?

4. Can you give some insight into how difficult it would be to modify your codebase to get the stamper functionality working at runtime? Not necessarily all the editor based GUI stuff but the transformation blending processes?

5. I noticed the spawner system uses spline curves. Are they also available for adjustments in scripting runtime? What are the CPU performance costs of using this?

6. I noticed a lot of beautiful terrain creations with a splendor of tree's and other assets. Can you do a little Batch Count and FPS chart based on the sizes of your terrain and asset counts used in these scenes. Some idea on how the post processing eats into FPS would be useful as well.

7. Does your spawners have any strategy of turning on and off colliders? Maybe even based on rules such that very high up in the scenes where stuff is untouchable possibly would not have colliders on them etc stuff like that? Other ideas would be a dynamic spawner which spawns stuff as you become inside the radius distance for it.

8. If your using blending with stamping. Have you considers applying this blending tech to assets such as rocks in the scene. I know RTP can do this kinda stuff, but not everyone will be using RTP?

9. The pommes still rule over the cricket though !

Thanks
Mark

 

Take any of the pics I've put in this thread and elsewhere that you like of mine

 

love the placements rules of gaia !

 

Hi Mark, Welcome

Stamper and Spawner can be accessed at run time via scripting. They use co-routines. The API is subject to change and I have not featured this yet because it is still a work in progress.

There is no specific RTP integration yet, however GAIA works nicely with RTP. I have contacted Tom to see if there is anything I can do to make this simpler.

It works only with Game Objects. It is not a core feature of Gaia, just a nice to have value add that I threw in because I thought it was sort of cool.

I will do a properly documented interface when it is ready. In the meantime I have already started on the Stamper interface - the methods and variables is already documented in code. Go there at your own risk

You can modify them in code. While efficiency is always a consideration, GAIA does not advertise itself as a runtime focussed product - if I was focussed there I would have gone pure multi-threaded. However it is co-routine based, and you can choose in code how many milliseconds you want GAIA to run between yields - so you can tune its cost.

This is dependent on so many factors that any comment I make is largely meaningless.

No collider control. You would need to define what you want and maybe I can look at supporting it. The runtime spawner already has a trigger distance mode.

I have stayed away from shaders - better to let specialist tools like RTP to do their thing. I would be happy to collaborate with shader authors if they need any special data to support features like this.

Hehe.. dream on

Thanks for the questions !! If you have any feature requests feel free to send them to me via email or PM so they don't get lost in the forum. I am actively listening

 

STUNNING !!!
The glowing windows is a nice focus
What Trees are you using ? , love GIANT TREES

 

Agree with Cobus - looks awesome!!

 

thank you ! The trees are https://store.speedtree.com/product/colorado-blue-spruce-unity/ from speedtree

thank you! Gaia is great!

 

I've created a terrain with four texture types. Now I want to restamp it with more textures to give more variety. I've tried changing the Resources file to add another Texture Prototype then creating a new Spawner, but when I try to Spawn it hangs with:

IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
Gaia.SpawnRule.Spawn (Gaia.SpawnInfo& spawnInfo) (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/SpawnRule.cs:286)
Gaia.Spawner.TryExecuteRule (Gaia.SpawnRule& rule, Gaia.SpawnInfo& spawnInfo) (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:1547)
Gaia.Spawner+<RunAreaSpawnerIteration>c__Iterator1.MoveNext () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:904)
Gaia.Spawner.EditorUpdate () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:347)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication.Internal_CallUpdateFunctions () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:264)

Have I missed something or are you unable to increase the number of textures once a terrain has been created?

 

After adding the new texture to the Resources file, did you then click on 'Apply to Terrain'? Unity's terrain data needs to be in sync with the Resources file and vice versa when it comes to textures, terrain trees and detail textures.

 

Thanks @smada luap , that's fixed it.

 

I think that this is what I was running into a while back when I posted about my existing World Machine terrain that wouldn't spawn things according to what the visualizer showed. I am planning to build another world machine terrain soon, so I'll know for sure.

A question for the thread at large - what can I do when the detail prototypes spawn above the terrain after fitting the spawner and grounding it?

Edit: that is definitely what was causing my issue.

 

I'm running into an issue with trees that don't have colliders. do I need to manually ad them to the trees and spawn them as gameobjects intead?

 

The trees need to have a collider on them before they're either added as terrain trees or spawned as game objects

 

Guessed as much, thx, bud.

 

Playing with Tenkoku Dynamic Sky and Gaia.

What's cool about Tenkoku is that you get weather and sound as well as lighting.

 

Well done on Gaia Adam, this is a wonderful asset. I had posted a longer message but somehow it messed up. I'll post a longer message after I have worked with this some more!

Good post about Tenkoku, I'm using BHS Unistorm which I'll also add screenshots of later.

 

Thanks - next release with its new and optimised grasses from @turboscalpeur will give a much nicer out of the box experience as well - the scene above all assets out of Gaia except for Tenkoku.

Am thinking i will also pre-configure some camera effects as well just to create a nicer initial experience

 

I'm certainly looking forward to the next release. I've been lurking here for about 2 weeks until I finally made up my mind to purchase and I'm glad I did. I do however have a technical question; and if the question has indeed been asked, I apologise, and please point me to the explanation.

My map will like others feature many tiles that will be stitched together. If I choose stamp "Valley 1", but want to create the reverse of the slope on the left hand side of the mountain range so that a similar valley appears on the next tile. Is it possible to create a mirror image of the Valley 1 stamp that it matches?

 

Hmmm... you could rotate it 180 degrees maybe ?

 

Worked out how to add the flowmap mask from worldmachine2 and apply the sand textures too it, also played with some camera effects

 

Very pleasing realistic looking scenes
It is really nice to see that you do not have to place millions of tress and rocks to get good looking scenes and that the items that gets placed procedural with Gaia comes out so good looking

 

All very good things to have in the one package.. that is a major consideration for me (as i have not yet invested in any effects system apart from RTP) is that if you are not careful you may purchase something that lacks something.

I would like to get a day/night cycle, with a day/month/year system and a weather system for the seasons with lighting and effects all in one.. and also not something that doesn't translate well to different environments.. i am concerned with some assets available that all look cartoony that it might not work well for realism. One feature i have not seen anything about although i can't imagine that it is that unusual or hard to do is heat distortion on the horizon.. never seen a video/screenshot or read about it..(OK i lie, i found this one post - but nothing in Unity) but as that effect is available within Unity for a campfire for example, surely it can be done in a strip across the horizon. Something i may need to do myself.

I've seen so many lush forests that it gets a bit hard to realise my project with these assets etc. if you follow. There is this tutorial, but it is for Blender.. I am not a 3D animator unfortunately so would be looking for a package to do it or a script to work with.

EDIT: Umm... so that said, anyone know the closest asset on the store that might fit my desires.. and on top of that a Dev that is awesome in responding and open to new features?



I better reveal the original link to this gif... http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-create-heat-distortion/

 

There are some pretty awesome effects packages. I will take a look and see if I can recreate this.

 

Right, sometimes I leave the Tree Spawner out, landscapes often don't have trees. They may have bushes, the details are often enough to enhance a scene.
That last image by jaimepollard would probably be improved by an absence of trees, the detail looks so good.

 

How do you remove the gameobject spawner the houses and stuff I cant get rid of?

 

You would need to move the game objects out from under it and then you can delete the spawner. If you want to delete everything, just delete the spawner and it will delete both the spawner and all of the gameobjects it spawned.

 

Or go into the resources and set the gameobject array to 0, if they are already in scene, do as Shawn67 suggested.

 

I thought I would confirm that TC appears to be happy sharing control of the terrains with Gaia. I generated a 8x8 terrain set with TC, laid down a base noise with it, and then started adding details per terrain with Gaia.

I also wrote a little utility that automatically translates a terrain and the sceneview camera to the origin, deactivates it's siblings, and puts it all back in place when you are done stamping in Gaia. If anyone wants to use it, message me and I'll share it. It's meant to be a stop gap until Adam has time to implement the feature, so I really don't want to release it publicly, but I don't mind sharing it if it will do someone some good.

Jason

 

I was just contacted by Justin from Tenkoku fame.. he said he is looking to add this feature he didn't want to seem rude by posting here but i told him you wouldn't mind because you are all about community - will have to take a good look at Tenkoku me thinks!

 

Cool - I know Justin @chingwa - I would love to see more of his work in here - GAIA and his assets complement each other nicely

 

Hi Adam,

I just had an idea (yeah they come and go lol) for your screenshotter, what if there was a Timeplapse option? create a folder when using this mode so it doesn't spam the root, then have a setting whatever you want for frequency of shots and either max shots or time... then i am just going to assume with all of these shots you could easily in some program make a video of it, say something like this http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub/?source=directory

Just a thought but after watching some videos of day/night cycles i thought it might be useful. - Tell me if it's a bad idea (like running out of disk space and crashing ouch! maybe do a calculation of total disk size required before you start...

 

Easy enough to do

 

Adam, well done on Gaia. I love it! And you've done a wonderful job. I can't wait for the future updates like terrain tiling! =) I would encourage anyone who hasn't bought this yet to pick it up. It's really worth it. =)

Here's some early shots of our Re-boot of our art direction of our Game "Rise of the King" We're using Gaia now with it and having a lot of fun!

 

So you'll have it create the video at the end as well just kidding... I would however just make it so it is obvious and safe so people don't activate it and then complain about performance etc. I guess you might want to add a 'select camera' field (in case you have set up a special one to do a rotate around or follow a course etc.)

 

As requested above... Heat Haze effect, coming to Tenkoku version 1.0.8


The effect is rather subtle, but you can overpower it if necessary. I also plan to hook into a temperature control so it can automatically appear seasonally as the day temperature rises. Thanks to @ZenMicro for the inspiration. I've been meaning to incorporate this for quite a while

 

Nice scene, I've been watching Dynamic Sky for some time. I'm thinking of buying and trying when/if it goes on sale.

I've been a user of Suimono since the beginning.

 

@kurotatsu I'm sending you a PM

 

Hmmm... I am experimenting with creating a basic camera and light setup - nothing as sophisticated as Tenkoku - but enough for people to get started with until they decide to get more sophisticated. This will be in the next release as well

 

@chingwa you are the best. Happy birthday to you too!!!

 

I'm using GAIA, and TC for mobile right now no issues.. I do have RTP, BUT I have not tried with GAIA yet since i'm making a mobile game at the moment.. But TC and GAIA are fine, with large maps and slicing terrains in chunks etc..Yes I use both, because each tool does something else better.. So I love them both now.. used to use TC and World Machine, so I hardly use WM anymore .... no need.

 

Mine was the 20th of this month..!

 

Happy late birthday, mines today!!!

 

Happy B-day!