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

It's really good to hear advice from someone more experienced than me, they are always useful (y). I'm gonna consider doing some research on the developer before buying an asset, because it is fact that many assets are deprecated or its support is not as good as it should. Anyway, thank you for your time, and wish you a nice day!

 

Hi Shawn!
Yep my current is based of that U5 3rd person... Im a bit new to U5, another project stopped me upgrading for ages, so Im not used to this set-up yet. One thing Im having trouble with is sliding... I cant find the setting to limit sliding on inclines, so my character, although PERFECT during the Photon set-up stuff I did (on a totally flat plane DOH!) didn't work when I got it into a scene with hills, she's slowly sliding down, almost the whole time, has to be totally flat for her to stop... Plus I don't like the "wait till you've stopped moving before you update rotation" lag the multipurpose camera has.

I have tried so many controllers over the years (of the cheap variety) and the main problem is often that you need to spend alot of time SWITCHING OFF functionality... Anyway, wrong forum for this discussion. Although controllers IS INFACT probably the most important discussion of any game dev. I know alot of folk who are just making lovely environments just use 1st person, but for me, the next step after a lovely looking terrain, is to get "life" into it, that means people and animals, and weather and "world logic". Maybe if after that you squeeze in a fight or a puzzle, who have a game, but that last bit is not so important for me ha ha, I just like to wander about!

PS, RE this VR/AI talk above? has anyone tried walking about in a Gaia terrain with Google cardboard set-up, its awesome!

 

Assign physical material to it. Rubber will stop sliding for sure

 

@AdamGoodrich I was under impression that 1.1 was out a long time ago, but I had a little time yesterday to check all this buzz about it and was surprised it is not in asset store yet. When do you plan to release it?
Also, when do you think multiple terrains will be available?

 

Can someone tell me why I'm not getting the same result as the visualiser says?
See here, this is AFTER I have run the texture spawner, and this is the Visualiser for Sand... As you can see the red balls show there should be NO sand on the bank on the right, but there is...

 

Hello guy's !

I use Gaia for my project and i have a little question, can we make 2 / 3 / 4 terrains (for make a really big map) with GAIA ?

Thanks for you'r reply

 

yes you can but it require some optimization on your side to make them run smoothly

 

The sand (texture slot 0) is usually used as a 'wipe-out' texture in that it covers everywhere and then the other layes are placed on top of this as it goes through the spawner.

This looks to me like there's nothing set for textures 1-3 that actually cover that area you've got highlighted in red and that you've updated your spawner rules to only have the sand go to a certain height but there's still residual sand texturing left over from a previous spawn operation. Have you lowered your grasses starting height to cover this area?

 

That sounds about right... Is there a way to COMPLETELY RESET and start a new spawn, without the old one having effect... I have 2 grasses, I lowered them and it helped a bit, but the sand was still somwhere there, in the mix. Also, and using the visualiser as my guide, one of the grasses needed -22 as a low point to get any effect other than red, thats -22 meters below sea level right? Or is the -22 refering to some other arbitary ,measurement?

Where would be the STRENGTH setting? as in, how strong the effect of a textire should be given that its fitness is OK. Im assuming that this exists, as it does in the standard Unity terrain Painting, how you have to juggle the opacity and target strength.

Also, Im not totally understanding the rules thing, thru testing a few things (to get the grass to show up) I noticed that within Spawn Criteria in the Visualiser, there are check boxes for each type of check, EVEN if I have them all turned OFF, I get a result, wheres it getting its check from then?

IN RELATED NEWS: Again not really this forum to ask in, but suddenly Ive lost ALL SHADOWS... I didnt notice when they disappeared, but now NOTHING casts shadows at all, no trees, no characters... this is probably a standard Unity issue rather than a Gaia thing, but it happened while doing Gaia stuff...
Incidentally My lighting is from UniStorm, that is just 2 directional lights (one for moon and one for sun) they are both ON; and set to make shadows... Any clues?

 

Thanks montyfi, that did the trick, almost completely, she still slides ever so slightly, but now she seems to trip and go into jump when going down a not terribly steep incline, I guess Rubber stops a slide so, she thinks its a fall?
I still feel like theres a better, simple 3rd person controller solution out there...

 

I usually leave the sand (or dirt in my case) in texture slot 0 to cover everywhere on the first pass through the texture spawner and then overlay grasses, rock textures, etc. in subsequent texture slots rather than have the texture slot 0 stop at a specific height.

The -22 is a reference to whatever you've got your sea level set to, so yes, it is meaning 22m below sea level. Try altering your sea level value down to where it actually does intersect with your terrain - it may be that the sea level setting in Gaia is actually higher than where you've got your own water level set. This may help make the spawn rules more understandable.

As for strength - this is directly tied to fitness, so that if you have a fitness of 90% for a texture then it spawns in at 90% strength so a little of the underlying textures will still show through.

 

I've decided to rework my first island and go up to a 1k x 1k terrain rather than a 500x500 as I previously had...

When stamping the terrain, I had a play around with the 'lower height' option which gave me a happy accident in that it created sections that I later moulded into inlets


Current view from the starting location




The first inlet

 

Then went for a run around the island to find the other inlet that I knew was there and came across a small bay that seems the ideal spot to put in a small fishing jetty



I continued around to the other side of the island and found the other inlet



Then I reached the opposite side of the island

 

Nice

 

Is it possible to make one layer always be on the edge with another layer? E.g. rocks should always merge with rocks and grass etc.
It would be nice to have possibility to define global pattern: rocks -> rocks&grass->grass (3 different textures)

 

Try either setting it to always use a specific texture slot or try the proximity settings

 

Need to sort out the water at some point

 

Spend most of the day playing with Gaia (thanks Unity for broken again UNET)
Texturing works pretty good, but Detail Spawner looks buggy.
I have added 13 grasses, and one of them suddenly covers all the others, so I set failure rate to .99 but it do nothing, one grass yet prevails over others.
Maybe I'm not understanding how spawner works?

 

Try using Random instead of Fittest or Weighted Fittest. That might solve your issues - assuming each grass is set up with the same rules and has an equal chance of appearing in any particular spot

 

Where I can setup this:

I thought failure rate responsible for that.

 

What I meant by this is that each grass has the same rule applied to it and thus any of them could theoretically appear at any given spot on the terrain and the spawner would then randomly pick between those available

If you set the failure rates to different values in the spawner then you're partially controlling the distribution of each but if the failure rates are all set to be the same as well then you're leaving everything to Gaia and its procedural nature

 

Hi, I've just updated Unity to 5.3 and I'm getting the following error messages:

Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Utils/Utils.cs(304,47): error CS0117: `System.IO.File' does not contain a definition for `ReadAllBytes'
Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Utils/Utils.cs(395,18): error CS0117: `System.IO.File' does not contain a definition for `WriteAllBytes'
Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Utils/Utils.cs(406,18): error CS0117: `System.IO.File' does not contain a definition for `WriteAllBytes'

All my other assets are working fine, but this error in Gaia is preventing the game from starting.

Any suggestions on how to fix would be appreciated, Thanks

EDIT: Don't worry too much, seems my project has automatically switched into Webplayer mode after the update, probably the issue is related to that.

 

That's the issue Had a similar thing happen to me month or so back when I was preparing a submission to the asset store

 

Hi @Teila,

I was about to correct you or at least ask if you mean Mauricito 4 but there is indeed a Marcurios on the Asset store doing grasses... so NOT to be mistaken for each other!

I just bought turboscalpeur's vol. 1 which is pretty nice.. I was wondering if yourself (or anyone else for that matter) has purchased this pack https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/46798 from SilverTM and what they think of it?

Also what shaders are you using for foliage, and what are people's thoughts on grass models?

 

Nope, didn't purchase that one. Good luck with your stuff.

 

Anybody made a sucessful navmesh on one of these terrains? I can make one that's 1/16 of the normal terrain but it
doesn't fit the full-size terrain.

p.s. Thanks for this tool, it saves texturing time, still have to load up my lo-poly trees yet.

 

Yes this is web player related. Just change to desktop. Next release will remove that error.

 

It works as designed. You need to tune your fitness to get an even distribution, or as Paul suggested change your spawner selection to random.

Personally I like to have different grasses in different areas so I use multiple grass spawners, and either delete or deactivate the grasses I don't want to spawn.

 

It's been a while since I have made a navmesh but should work as expected. Gaia just creates vanilla unity terrain. Drop me a message if you don't manage to get this sorted.

 

You can do this if I am understanding you correctly. If you want very specific selections you may also need to mask your layers.

 

Could you please elaborate on that. How to assign spawner to area?

 

Nothing specific, sorry for my stupidity but could you please explain how to put one texture next to another texture?

 

I can confirm that NavMesh works with terrains generated Gaia. We used it for our Emerald AI system tests. Our terrain was 6000X6000 so it should work regardless of the terrain size, within reason of course.

 

Couple of small questions:
1. Whats this? Looks like some kind of black Z fighting... Its not showing all the time, and mostly in the Scene view (but is visible in game)


2. How do I find out WHICH Water4Advanced(clone)ReflectionSceneCamera is actually being used by the water object?
I have of course made a few waters, while reworking the scene, but a few seem to be hanging about not doing anything, Just for tidyness Id like to delete them but cant find how to track the correct one...

 

Hmm just checked this, my actual water is set to 10m and the setting in my Gaia defaults is 100, but the setting in Gaia resources is 10. Ill try setting the defaults to 10 too, but both of these are the standard Gaia defaults files... havent changed them!

 

1. Forgot to disable spawner?
2. You can delete all of them. It will be recreated.

 

1. Oh! didnt know I had to.. that was it
2. HA! genius!

beer... owed...

Mark

 

Hi I'm getting the same issue I mentioned a few weeks ago. Basically, when I add a tree to the resources file, the width, height, bounds radius and seed throw are not automatically generated. I got around this before by using regular game object spawner, but is there any way of getting this info auto generated so I can use the tree spawner? Thanks

 

Hi Adam,

Any voucher plan for Christmas ?
i'm really intrested.

++

regards,

T.D

 

I have a similar issue to markfrancombe.
I have set texture slots 1-3 (0 being default) and the visualizer is showing that the texture should spawn, in the screen shot below you can see texture 1. Note, the other spawners (detail, tree etc) appear to be working fine).
Could it have something to do with the terrain size (10x10 km)? I have double checked the size in the "GaiaDefaults".

 

Hmmm - it uses the size of the model and its colliders to generate this - the same routine is called in both instances. Not sure why this would work one way and not the other.

If you are asking is Gaia going on sale - no, not in the near future unless Unity select it to go n sale (I have no control over this). It's been on the store for about two months now, and spent much of the first month on sale.

The process is:
> Defaults creates new terrains and new resources
> Resources works within the terrain. Spawners are associated with resources, so any changes to the sea level in your resources file will influence and existing and new spawners.

Annoying Unity thing - you can search the forums for ways of getting rid of this. I would tell you myself but have never really nailed what causes this to happen. I typically operation in Linear / Deffered mode and rarely get it.

Not really sure - if your water level is correct in your resources file then delete them all and get Gaia to re-add it for you.

Create several texture spawners - make then less than full size, position them next to each other. Have a look at about 7:17 in the following video.

 

There is a bug in the first release that causes the instance limit on resources to be prematurely hit - you will run into this on a 10km x 10km terrain. If you PM me I can send you a fix.

 

I know the navmesh works, I'm just wondering how to make one that fits and doesn't hurt framerate too much. I'm using MeshMaker to tweak the
1/16 one. The real terrain will have to be flattened to fit the navmesh, bad guys will be on the flat areas and some
slopes like the games I've played. There's another pkg called meshtoolkit, only $10, not $55 like Meshmaker, it says it edits verts but I don't have it.

 

Argh! I had just made a video to show my Z fighting more clearly, as I'm afraid montyfi was not sorrect, (thanks anyway) So its a normal Unity prob... OK Ill check the forums, but if you can just let me know what you mean by "I typically operation in Linear / Deffered mode and rarely get it."

Heres the vid anyhow... N totally SFW... if work is the hyper christian bookshop...

 

I wanted to make a comment about the latest update - as per usual I got side-tracked by bright shiny objects - but the same things I love, I think you will love as well. It's actually turned into a pretty massive update.

Here is what is currently in progress:

* Turboscalpeurs grasses and flowers
* New noise based spawner masks - perlin, billow, ridged - integrated into all the default spawners
* New camera and lighting effects
* Gaia Compatible / Gaia Extension System - GX - with one click integration to some of the best art assets and tools on the store - i will announce these over the next week - it will take Gaia to a whole new level
* Non destructive composable resources to support GX system - just pick and use the bits you want from any compatible packs - no need to worry about whether its in the terrains or not
* Screen shotting system - capture those magic moments
* Stamper and Spawner Party API - Runtime generation
* A lot of usability fixes and enhancements.

 

Hehe - take a look here - there are plenty of articles on this around the place. Try adjusting your camera near and far clip planes.

Oh - i usually run my scenes with the player settings:

* Rendering path : Deferred
* Color space : Linear.

I see the same issues some times when I am in edit mode, but when i hit play they generally go away. It would be great to get a definitive answer from someone in the community.

 

Right, the bigger terrain the bigger value for camera near clipping plane must be. For 4x4k terrain the minimum is about 0.3 which is pity but acceptable. For 8k I don't even know.
Actually, not a terrain size is matter, but a difference between near and far clipping planes.

 

The process I'm doing to add trees is to add 2 tree prototypes, then drag over the tree prefab (with a collider) into the Desktop Prefab slot. This doesn't auto-generate the height, width etc info. I've also done it using other prefabs but the same issue happens. When I press the Get from terrains, the trees are not add either, I've just checked.

Should it be tagged 'tree' or something like that?

EDIT: Fixed it, I just made sure I added it into the Unity's tree placement tool, then used Get from terrain.

 

If you want to use your trees as unity terrain trees the best route I found was to add them to the terrain in question using unity's inspector for the terrain and then click on 'get from terrain' in the resources to sync the two together (which will also update terrain textures and grasses in the resources file at the same time)

 

Thanks I did that and now it works perfectly. I hadn't thought of it earlier because I stopped using the Tree placement tool because it removed the colliders.

Just another question, I saw this in the manual:

Tip: Because Tree prototypes leverage tree prefabs, you can also place trees with a game object spawner, and using a game object spawner enables your trees to gain additional placement and rotation options and behaviours (although generally with the impact of greater performance cost).

Does this mean that all vegetation (bushes, plants, logs, etc) should be placed in using the tree placement tool in order to get an improved performance, provided that it is only spawned around its Y axis?