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

Even if users use these to learn from and examples.
I see my DEMO scenes acting like that, so users can open them up and learn from them, see how a scene is assembled and then the results that is obtained.

 

Okay going back to the OP, may I please know what beautiful water you are using?

 

It is Suimono - and yeah - I have fallen in love with it :
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4387

Tenkoku delivers great lighting :
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34435

And you should check out Cobus from 3D Forge's packs as well - I used this in some of the screen shots and can confirm that they look great :
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/38045

I will also be highlighting some other lighting and weather systems closer to release as well.

Because this system generates plain vanilla Unity terrains, it will be compatible with a wide range of solutions.

 

The intention is that it will be - but it doesn't need to be

 

Ditto.. I scrapped struggling trying to relearn TC last night and decided to just wait for my terrains. Building out buildings with Cobus' exterior kit on flat terrain is boring, but I'd rather be doing something productive than wasting time to figure out TC again knowing that next time I have to use TC I'll again have to do it all again.. lol

So anxiously awaiting..

 

Me too

 

Just went back to check OP.. Features at release look perfect!

Wow! The above quoted additions on the updates roadmap have me drooling!!!

 

yep - going to be the terrain system of choice I think

 

@Shawn67

I am glad that I added the plinth system, even the stilts section can be helpful for building villages on terrain that is not flat.
When I started to design the Village Exteriors Kit system I picked that up that all the current building sets that you could get are meant for plat terrain, flat terrain is boring when you have nice rough 3D terrain creation at your fingertips, and now with this package @AdamGoodrich is developing here it is going to be so much easier, intuitive, and fun without the steep learning curve.

Mantioning he is also going to implement a "blueprint" type sharing method, will be great, so even if just learing from it, could have users have their hands on many well shaped terrain.

I am looking forward to this myself, for building web demos myself, for it is one of the parts that take lots of time.

 

Totally agree.. And I hadn't thought of the stilts on uneven terrain.. I'll have to work up some prefabs of those.. Or maybe build out some foundation prefabs that I can easily add to my buildings! Should have a bunch of them ready to throw down on new terrain when Adam hits the release button!

 

Could this be expanded to allow you to place splines across the terrain that then become paths/dirt tracks/etc. with configurable textures and settings to determine how much the edges blend into the terrain, whether the path causes the terrain to deform (ie. imagine roads cut through a hillside) between the spline's end points or whether it's just laid upon the terrain itself and the width of the path itself?

 

That same idea could be done with a collaboration with the EasyRoads3d developer. He has been pretty good about working with other devs on their voxel terrain projects so he might be willing to work with this one too.

 

@Shawn67 That way actual village planning will be done is by making small or larger platforms like I did when showing the harbor pictures, where I used nice large platforms, then you can add the buildings where you want and "hint hint" start with the cool underground tunnels and rooms under the city

 

As far as I have read from ER3D-Developer EasyRoad v3 will be usable for runtime as well. Depending on the inital setup and the interfaces, maybe Adam and raoul could work out how to integrate ER and this tool. Would maybe make the work for adam a bit easier Hope ER v3 willl come out of beta anytime soon

 

I'm not planning many actual cities.. Most of mine are going to be villages with dirt or cobble roads.. Majority will be dirt.. Underground tunnels and rooms will be caves/mines and not finished sewerlike systems. That was why I put in request for transition to caves from basement entrances when you get to that point..

 

I am making cities!

 

I am looking at generating small worlds with dynamic towns as part of it. Anything to make road connection, river pathing, and later town generation, easier is a win in my book.

 

I might end up making large-ish towns

 

Picture or it didn't happen XD

 

I am so ready to start building, but want some good terrain to build upon first.

 

That would be awesome! I would love to be able to do the same, at least for my initial world creation. Not really looking for runtime creation of my main world for players, but runtime creation for development purposes would be a huge help. Especially for a one-man team.. lol I guess my preference though, after losing my fight with TC this week, is that so much not be added at the cost of ease of use. I still have Easy Roads that I can use to do some of that stuff. But if it can be integrated intuitively and all be done with one tool, I'm game for that too.. lol

I'm in the same boat. But figure I can at least start building blueprints for buildings to use when I can do awesome terrains with Adam's terrain tool! Playing Lego building the houses/buildings now and then will get to snap them to my terrains once I'm able to build them after Adam provides our next toy to create magic with.. heheh

 

For me I need runtime creation as I want a sandbox mode with random worlds. I want players to select size of world and perhaps % of water and maybe a few other parameters. After that the rest is auto with biomes such as desert, forest, marsh, flatland, hills, mountain range, snow region, rivers, lakes etc all done by the system. Even more if I could have one forest consisting or pine trees and other forest in the world being of another type of tree would be an added bonus. Then during game play the player places buildings, builds roads etc...


if you can do this at runtime and it is hard to tell the difference from a world where someone spent hours touching it up in the editor, you then have an awesome system.

 

This is nearly exactly what we are aiming for as well. The ideal of having a 'seed' that can allow the world to be replicated is our final goal so that players can share their worlds with each other.

 

Something like this but of course a 3d world creator.

https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/

 

I came across this semi random phrase generator in C#, and wondered if you could also use that to generate the base parameters for a scene or even an entire world.

Would be fun to do, but plannetary generation is massive, and not the nut I am trying to crack here

For those of you here who are trying to do that, you could go up a level and randomly generate spawners.

Not sure if I mentioned it, Spawners can be round or square and only effect their contained areas .. So chain a bunch of square ones together and I suppose you could shoot for big worlds. Then you run into the issue of floating point problems.

I am a little worried that I am over scoping them. More capability comes at the cost of more complexity and more time, and fitting a round peg into a square hole can be bad news.

No screenshots at moment as am busy coding the new Spawner framework.

 

My worry as well.. Right now I'm just happy to get an easier to use terrain generation system that I can make decent looking beach areas and mountains with. Anything else is icing on the cake.

 

This is a cool idea

One of my drivers was to get the beauty of fractal landscapes but with high control so I was exploring other ways of making them.

One of those ideas was about driving shapes across the terrain, and I prototyped this with a mountain generator that was ridge driven. The concept was that you drew the high level ridge and it generated the sub ridges and slopes around it. I got it to the point that it worked reasonably well, but then i had a better idea and that is what underpins how this system works.

You could choose one of the terrain textures, and use the same concept to do trails.

Easyroads does this and a whole lot more, so collaborating sounds like a good idea

 

Easyroads never did work for me. I would get weird artifacts and no matter how much I tried, and honestly, the developer was great about working with me, I could not get it to look good. It is very sensitive. I ended up just flattening the terrain around my roads. I realize a lot of people use ER but I just don't like it for multi-tiled terrains.

We initially worked with Torque 3d some years ago and the rivers and roads were fantastic there. The rivers especially...very easy to do and had physics as well. I really miss those rivers...and the easy roads.

 

A network of waterways make a terrain. It's rare to see it done really well. From tiny mountain streams to slow flowing wide rivers and estuaries; even canals. I'm looking forward to the post release when these extras are worked on. I'll be saving room on my terrains to add the waterways in later

 

Been busy developing but read about Filmic Tonemapper Deluxe again this morning so I purchased it and tried it out - very nice

 

very good results Adam

 

Cool Adam, I was looking at that too. What's your impression of it overall?

 

From the quick play I had its quickly gone into my 'keeper' bag of effects for test shots

I also added their eye adaptation script as well, and when you turn around you can see it doing its thing, but not as harshly like some of the others.

It's more subtle and when I experimented with enabling it and disabling it in the scene while playing it the results of before and after were far more dramatic.

If it had been $100 i would not have bought it, but at $27 i figured I could take the risk

 

Cool, thanks for that Adam. I'm on the lookout for a good tonemapper and light mapper - but also one that doesn't introduce glitches when moving, as some seem to.

 

Nice.
Did you notice any performance degradation / drop in FPS etc?

 

Its gota quit lately

 

Not much new to show visually however the new spawner is progressing nicelly and I should be able to get it up and running today.

What the spawner does is manage the process of bringing new things into the environment in a procedural way... its both deterministic and rule driven.

It has some cool features, I mentioned size (area of effect) and shape and extensibility already. Another one is the concept of rules and fitness.

You can add as many rules as you like to a spawner. A rule is something that can be spawned, plus the criteria of when it can be spawned and a mechanism for spawning it.

The spawner will choose a location in the world, and gather information about that location... things like height, slope, and what's there.

It then passes that information to each spawner rule and asks it to assess that location. Each spawner rule assesses that location and gives it a fitness. Fitness is a value that indicates how good this location is for that rule.

After all the rules have been run the spawner assesses their collective fitness, chooses which one to actuate, and then asks it to actuate itself.

While this might sound a little complex (and working out how to do this in a simple and extensible way that takes advantage of unities composability took some time), it actually plays out very nicely and its a hugely extensible and powerful system

 

Will have a quick look today

 

The spawner system is sounding amazing.

 

Totally agree! I'm imagining trees dying off and new sprouts coming up nearby or setting criteria to check for stumps from where trees have been chopped down for new nearby growth. At least that sounds possible from the way I'm interpreting what Adam is saying. That about right Adam or am I over-dreaming? lol

Also I'm curious about restarts. Wondering if it is possible to log the seed state so if server is restarted, the world doesn't look totally different than it did when the player was last in game. Is that a possibility at all? Would also be good for online games where the player might lose connection.

 

Ok, new Spawner up and running This scene was from flat terrain to this in 10 minutes. Just wanted to try it - so there is only 1 grass texture and one species of tree. On this 2km x 2km island there are 2000 trees and 1.6m clumps of grass. There are 2 Spawners - one for trees and one for grass (as they both need to cover the terrain in different ways)

Can't wait to get this into your hands !!








Every island lair needs a volcano!!



The grass generation

 

WOW! Beyond amazing!! And you did these in 10 minutes?!? Not to repeat myself, but WOW! lol

Was the volcano something you added or just a happy accident in the generation? This is exactly the type of islands I need! lol And love the beaches.. I'm assuming with the beach nibbler thing you was talking about earlier in the thread that we can make them various widths? Also, the steep sides in the second picture. Are the shadowed parts part of a texture there or are those a product of the erosion capabilities? Wasn't sure if that was some rock texture or a combination of texture and erosion.

Keep up the awesome work! Is it in the asset store yet? *hides*

 

This terrain didn't need the beach nibbler.

The apparent detail is just the texture - but it sure does look nice.

The volcano i added as an after thought because every island lair needs a volcano. It's overkill i think

 

To provide a sense of scale here is the island these screen shots were taken from:

 

Wow... I'm in awe! Amazing work.... And this was done without creating color splatmaps and such like you seem to have to do to create a centered island within TC? (At least I think that is how I remember him doing the islands in his demo videos) I always end up with terrain that goes off the edge of my tile instead of a nice centered island.

Loving the little straggler island and the erosion coming down the island just away from the volcano. Excellent!

 

10mins ... compared to hours in WM/TC combination and not getting such a nice island (as I'm no pro anyway).. Can't wait getting my hands dirty

 

By foook that's jaw-dropping work Adam. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

 

Looking awesome.

"beach nibbler"!.... that beach tool definitely needs to be named after me

 

A whole new terrain, with a bit of beach nibbling for good measure

 

Getting close?