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

I hope Billy is not allergic! Thanks Teila

 

A couple more, these are a mix of grass textures by Turboscalpeur and Marcurios, my favorite grass creators. Marcurios makes lovely meadow flowers and very nice grasses.

 

Been playing around more with how you can use Gaia in conjunction with other great tools like TC and Mountain meshes to produce cool looks. Even if you use other products in conjunction with Gaia, it's another wonderful tool in your belt and I love it! =) Having fun.

 

Totally love seeing the talent on display here

 

Man, you make it look so easy.
AAA quality here

Can not agrea more @AdamGoodrich

 

Thank you both so much for your kind words! As Long as I'm improving one piece at a time I'm happy lol. Gaia inspires me. =)

 

A little OT, but everyobys trees look real and awesome. All my trees including speedtrees look really basic and "cartoony". Are you using some special shader or something?

 

I am not using a special shader, but am using image effects, same ones Adam uses. AO, AS, and Scion. I imagine that helps. Some speedtrees look better than others.

 

hmm.
well here are my mobile speedtrees, super minimal settings, no light probes or anything.




Do they look like yours?

I sense that the proper answer is going to be "Lighting"

 

Lighting is everything. Am planning on doing some how to articles on it after the next release is out.

The next release will also include some camera and lighting FX. These won't be the same as the high end FX from specialised packages, but they will certainly improve things visually.

 

I´m looking to buy some camera and lighting FX, Scion looks pretty good, is it? I´m also considering time of day to boost things visually.

By the way, I´m using both RTP and HorizonON with gaia and it works perfectly!

 

I just put RTP on mine and it looks amazing. I used to use it a while ago but had lighting issues. Those seem to be fixed.

I use Scion and ToD. Both are great and simple to set up and use with fantastic results. I own Horizons, but haven't used it yet. Is it difficult to use?

 

Horizon is actually pretty easy to use, and the results are simply amazing!

 

Scion is pretty awesome - its ista pretty for Unity

 

Screenies or it didn't happen

 

A simple scenario. I wonder if it will be posible to extract just the cliffs as a .obj file to edit them in a 3D editor.

 

It would require a rework of the obj exporter I think to respect angles/rules.

 

Nice

Nope. You would need to edit the export with a 3rd party tool.

 

@AdamGoodrich I edited my answer to show the exporter I meant.
@Quique.Martinez Warning: The re-geometrising may not be trivial.

 

You can do a lot with just the built in Unity lighting. I think a few of the screenshots are just using that. You would need to really dig into learning how the Unity lighting works though and build a lot of the things the paid assets give you. Most of the time the paid assets are short cuts of people who have developed the solutions for their own games offering them to others to help cover development costs. But pretty much anything out there you could do yourself at no cost to you other than time if you can dig in and learn how to code it.

I think Adam was working on some tutorials for getting decent environment setup using just the Unity standard assets along with Gaia. Not sure of the status though but I know he had been talking about it.

 

I am including some lighting with next release - capable of doing things like this :

 

It's Saturday in Oz, and being the weekend I had fun with 'bright shiny things' instead of focusing on pure release...

So I added some significant new functionality - spawners and spawn rules now have the ability to mask via a Perlin filter!

It also has an invert function - so you can have one species / thing happen in one physical space, and another species / thing in the space left over. Being generic this means that it can be applied to anything that can be spawned - textures, details, trees and game objects.

Here are some quick and dirty views of it in action!



Original tree layout - a combination of clustered and perlin masking.



New tree layout - a combination of clustered and inverse perlin masking!

By looking at the high level pattern you can see the perlin masking in action.

 

That is "Flippin" great man

 

wooo aahhhh looking forward to the new release

Great work Adam

 

I know. I would definitely pay for a decent cliff editor (just in case there is any developer around).

 

Two Screenshots more from Gaia:



Just experimenting some tweaks from Unity5 Natives Scripts, ToD, Scion and my Grass in Gaia.

 

Turboscalpeur, I have purchased one of your HQ grass packs thanks to recommendations in this forum; and it is great. Tell me, what tree pack are you using? I simply must have those assets old boy

Do you have any advice on blending your grasses and laying down grass in general? Mine always looks too sparse and always looks like straight lines even when billboard is removed?

@AdamGoodrich, rightio old bean, it's time to put your cup of tea and biscuits down and stop teasing with this "new functionality". Some of us have been holding our breath for 3 straight weeks!

 

The trees above look like the free SpeedTrees that come with Gaia. I can highly recommend their Desktop Trees Package - it has a good set of trees.

I have been quite surprised at how much you can do with so little in terms of assets. The screen shot below was made with what you get out of the box with Gaia (in the next release) - Gaia Lighting and Camera FX (new), Gaia ScreenShotter (new), Turbo's grasses (new), and some of Turbo's ground textures (woo - did I mention ground textures - if ready in time maybe - shh!), 3DForge's Village exteriors and some of Motuproprio's rocks.



Hehe - almost there !

 

Thanks Adam, Speed trees My speed trees in my scenes are very similar, but are missing the colour and contrast that are shown in these screenshots. I guess what is missing from mine is that I don't have a lighting and shader package yet.

As Shawn87 mentioned to someone else earlier in the forum, I need to spend some time learning about lighting and shading

Well done Adam, have a good weekend, and thanks for the suggestions.

 

Hello TheSeawolf
About the Trees, they are all coming from SpeedTree^^, i have currently only 3 Models.

About my Grass, it depend of what you want to obtain.
If you expect to "spam" a lot of grass on your terrain, i suggest you using grounds covers first in large widths as 3.5/4max. and little heights as 1.1max..
After adding isolated or dispersed textures being careful to have differents widths/heights for making something better in space. Then, you can too use some grounds covers more higher.
Moreover, you must often playing with the different brushes, with their sizes and target strength (i use mostly the first, and the four last brushes).
For straight lines, you have to break this rendering by not spamming too much grass stems vertical on the same place and adding others models which have others forms as bushes and/or flowers little and/or highers.

About lines above some grasses textures, it's fixed right now , i'm going to update this week my 3 assets. They will not appear anymore.

In my new Update, i'll add a ReadMe, with more explanations, screens and settings i suggest to use with my Grass.
Note: The 2 screens above are made with only some textures from the HQ1.
Hope it help.

 

More goofing around with Gaia and mesh mountains. A fun combination.

 

Nice, looks like a watercolour.

 

Thanks Turboscalpeur for your suggestions, this is great feedback for newbies like myself to learn from. You'll have two more asset purchases this week

I need some more advice on detail object placement like rocks. Whenever my rocks spawn they only spawn in small clusters instead of a generic spread. I have tried altering the size of the spawn box, terrain placement and heights, but for some reason they continue to spawn as clusters?

Does anyone have any ideas of how to have a uniform spread?

 

A nicer example of Perlin noise being used to separate both tree and grass species.

 

Having too much fun!!

More usage of the new Perlin masking.







These assets are all included in Gaia (except the lighting - in this case Time of Day).

 

Hi @tango9jeff,

Looking good, can i ask what rock assets those are?

I also notice in a lot of these screenshots that these houses are placed but with a look of being abandoned.. ie. tall grass all around.. but i know that's due to not having the refining work done. Is everything in this scene GAIA placement or did you manually place the rocks for example?

Is that Tenkoku you're using (I'm guessing as the fog colors are a give away i think)?

 

Yeah, it is lookng great.

I think it is K4's Boulder & Rocks & Boulders & Rocks 2 - He made them FREE a little while ago

I big help for placement are the plinths on each house.

They were added so that no matter how uneven the terrain is, that the houses should be able to live where ever you want them too. Many people leave them quite a bit higher then I imagined them to be.
Basically you can take the whole house and just sink it deeper into the terrain, it is really a 5 second task.

Gaia helps create such lovely organic landscapes that you did not want to go and have to flatten small areas first to make buildings work. The FULL Village Exteriors Kit comes with the full modular Plinth system that you can make them whatever size you want, use them ad pier structures, even city walls out if them.

Most houses assets, force you to HAVE to have flat "platforms" to make the assets work
With this Plinth system you can stagger them and place them against a steep slope and just paint some pathways to connect with texture.


The staircases are loose items with the and as you push the plinth in, it will just meet and cut into the terrain and give you perfect excess to the house entrance.

With both these examples you can see as well, the plinths were made large then the house footprints, allowing a porch kind of area. Could have made that wider right around or whatever and have a walkway right around.

Cheers
Cobus

 

Here's another update using both Gaia and Village exteriors. This time the distant mountains and tree's are Gaia too. The only thing not is the grass placement. I added a few custom tree patches to fill it out as well for the shot.

 

Hey Zen! Yea those are what Cobus said. The free rocks and boulders 2. Also I'm using Tenkoku for base lighting. Thanks!

 

Very nice farmhouse setup with stables, pens at the back and a storage shed on the right.
the wild grass,rock formations and mountains just comes together so lovely

This is for a game project, and with visuals like this, I would pay for it any time

Well done !!!

 

Two Screens with the 6 Grass Textures i providing for Free to use in the next Gaia Update:




Taken basically here, no DoF and very lite Shaders.
Can't wait to try out the new Gaia Release, Perlin Mask, Lighting, New Spawners Features ect ect..
Adding too some Houses and Rocks from Partners, and more!

 

I'm watching this thread since it started. Unfortunately I didn't find some time to play with Gaia so far. But one thing I want to note is how cool it is how the different asset developers work together to show and promote their stuff.

It's really a win/win situation for everyone. The customers and the developers. Therefore: thank you to everyone for this great stuff.

 

Hi,

It makes me very excited to be part of this.

At the end of the day, me or any other publisher can not do everything and if we could, different projects have different look and feel requirements and final results according the the dream the developer have.
My assets is complementary and give the users the advantage of seeing them in action in another great product.

The way I personally see it, the more successful publishers there are on the Asset Store, the better for all of use, publishers, users and Unity.

Cheers
Cobus

 

I've been watching this asset for awhile -- really fantastic stuff. I've held off on purchasing, as I am in need of multi-terrain support for a project that uses several terrains stitched together.

Any ETA on when that will be implemented?

Thanks, and awesome work!

 

In the next release (imminent) the spawning system works on multi tile terrains - with the caveat that you just need to enable and disable the terrain tiles as you work your way through them. Gaia will prompt you to do this.

The stamper works - but is slightly more inconvenient - Gaia will re-position the tile so that it can make the stamp. You can put the tile back where it was after you are done.

I will do a video on how to do this after I get this release out. In reality I think multi-tile support is probably 4-6 weeks away - the first release was about getting it out there and observing any issues, and the current release (imminent) adds a bunch of new features, and fixes some usability issues and bugs.

I want Gaia to support 80% of the typical use cases before I launch into pure multi tile. Multi-tile should get that final 20%.

 

A question that comes up quite a lot is - what assets do you use... here's a refresher

Tenkoku or Time of Day - for lighting and atmospheric scattering
Scion - for stacked post processing - instant pretty
SE Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - for AO - also bleeds colour - superior imho
Super Sampling SSAA - Anti aliasing
Suimono or Ceto - for water
SpeedTree Desktop Trees Pack - trees
SpeedTree Desktop Ground Cover Package - ground cover
Turboscalpeurs Grasses - grass
MotuProprios Rocks - rocks and trunks
3D Forges Kits - exteriors, props
Emerald or ICE - animal AI

 

I was going to suggest adding that list above to the bottom of post #1. When I went back to the beginning of this thread to see post #1 and started scrolling down, it's apparent how far and well things have come together.

 

Yeah Wow! that's quite a scene!, there is a free horse model on the asset store in case you wanted to populate your stable

And nothing wrong with a little artist manual touch up, no generated scene will ever be able to completely remove the artist... (though getting closer )

The dirt there, how is that blended, I can see cracked earth and some not so, is that manual painting?

 

Thanks Zen! The cracked pieces are part of the whole texture its self. It's designed with certain spots to create more variation. =)

 

More experimentation and tweaking of the noise capabilities - in this example the trees and the grass have been set to grow in same noise function... meaning that the grass and the trees are perfectly matched. The lighting is Tenkoku!