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

Hi everyone,

For those maybe interested

For another 6 days till Dec 31, the Village Interiors Kit & The Village Exteriors Kit are both on a nice -33% SALE





Other kits also on SALE are
Cave Adventure Kit
Tile A Dungeon - Sewer Kit
Fantasy Treasure Loot Kit

Cheers
Cobus

 

Kia ora

Is there a way to blend a full normal map into the texture material along with the normals for each texture layer?

 

I don't really understand your question.

 

Kia ora

When one sets up a terain they add Grass/Grass_n Dirt/Dirt_n Rock/Rock_n etc, when you export a heightmap from World machine you have an option to export other maps eg: a Colourmap, Slpatmap, Flowmap and you can do a normalmap too this is in essence a normal map of the whole landscape which give more detail of the landscape you created blebding that with te standard normals give you the best of both worlds, you get the deatil of the texture layed in with the detail of the terrain landscape adding to the over all quality of the terrain.

Clear as mud mate?

 

you need a special shader like RTP to do such things, its a bit out of the gaia's scope

 

Gaia uses standard Unity Terrain. There is no API to apply normal maps to a terrain. There is only the ability to apply normal maps to individual textures.

Are you using a non standard shader to paint your terrains ?

 

Not yet I just brought RTP only to find it has out dated API's, not good for a $60 app. Not sure if I should load it or not,
had the same thing with the Lux - Physcally Based Framework shaders and that broke stuff. I'm jus trying to get passed the boxy flickering lighting that the default scene gives out. I got Profi Skyboxes quite a while ago but not sure about loading them either its was done with Unity 3.5.6 back in 2013 so might be way to old like me lol

This is a bit tipical of me I jump in the deep end and flounder till I get my feet on the ground.
am jus aiming for the best setting I can get without taking a mortgage on the hous

 

I got put off of RTP after reading the reviews, there seems to be a steep learning curve attached to it. What I'd really like is a simple shader which just allows for mixing of multiple splatmaps on a terrain which also boosts FPS like RTP appears to do. The LUX shader doesn't work on Unity 5, tried that one too.

 

I just tried dropping a Third person char (the standard Default) and he just wants to rounin circles. I feel they need by default properly woking First Person, Third Person and one the pop from first to third in the standard pack hen you install Unity, yheres a lot to learn without having to try code chars just for testing

 

there is cheaper shader that can do that with good performance: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17334

 

Thanks I'll take a look at it. I also found this one https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4722

Do you have any experience of either or could recommend which one?

 

I just checked out the one you sent me, it doesn't support Unity 5 terrain, only meshes. Which means I'd need to convert the terrain to a mesh before I use it, and then I couldn't edit it after. This wouldn't be a problem if Gaia supports the spawning objects on meshes, but I don't think it does. Looks nice though, and fast.

 

i use ats Colormap ULTRA Terrain Shader https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4722 its easy to setup up you can use normalmaps and color maps

 

Yeah that one

Thanks that's the one I was looking at, does it work with the unity terrain?

 

yeah works fine for me, took less than 5 mins to setup,my map is 2048x2048 . Getting to colormap to work took a bit of fiddling as it was imported from world machine used photoshop to tweak it.

 

I keep meaning to play with that as it looks nice

 

It's working now, just delete the tree spawner if it doesn't work.

Question: do I edit the resources file or the spawner file to add/delete items? They don't seem to sync.
Other Question
I have the same default spawn rules for every tree but got 34, 108,
2, 108, 94, 761, 97,2753

jajack
beuttree
daenamoo
mogwua
sonamoo
birch_duion_dead(actually from blendswap)
sansuyou

shouldn't I get the same amount for each tree?

 

those are free Korean trees on the asset store.

 

No. It's all a combination of random numbers and fitness. Random numbers are by definition 'random'. Hence the difference in numbers between species

If you want a more even distribution of trees either set up individual tree spawners... or change the Rule Selector in your tree spawner to Random.

 

Playing around with using satellite imagery in a Gaia environment.

The problem with satellite imagery is that it looks terrible when you zoom down to ground level.

Is there any interest in this as a feature?

 

Could something like this be used to apply texturing from something saved out of World Machine instead of normal unity texturing? Is there some type of color map or other type file that World Machine uses to save its texturing of the terrain to a single file, similar to how a satellite photo would be of the terrain?

 

If I had satellite imagery available, in general I imagine I would want to use it to produce things like realistic shorelines, establish real world distances and proportions for simulations, and give horizon details for games that allow high altitude views. It could also be used as a guide for placing the game's urban and natural objects that would be used in closer views. Maybe it would even allow an aerial camera view where at first all that is visible is the satellite map, and then as you zoom in the game's models are revealed on top of the map.

 

I could definitely see it being useful for anyone developing flight simulation/air combat type games where details would look good from the air.

 

I think it would be interesting to do some image processing on it and use it to help drive placement.

 

I just bought GAIA, love it - I will post some screenshots later!

 

I keep telling people, it is really hard to conceive how awesome Gaia is until you actually play with it. Especially if you have ever struggled with other terrain tools!

Can't wait to see what you are able to make with it!

 

There was an interetsing tutorial done for UE4 using sta images as the diistance view material and a normal texture for up close but I'm not sure Gaia supports that style of work flow. You have a base texture normal etc blend (made from the stat data) and a set of HD textures for close view

This is the video series might be a lot over kill for the info your might want but hey its choices

He starts in World Machine and works through the whole process may not be somit your into

 

World machine has macro's to out put the different maps you might want, BTW if your not aware youe can use it free with a 512x512 limit but hey gets you a look at a node based world builder and has a bunch of example the other one I have is L3DT (Ladscape 3D Terrain) from bundysoft

 

Kia ora

I started over and noticed the Gaia menu not showing up is there another way to start Gaia and get the working menu?
It seems depending on what others assets you load some kill off Gaia

 

I've played around with the free version and just couldn't wrap my head around it. But definitely a good thing to note for others who might want to give it a play with some smaller terrains before laying out the cash for the full World Machine! Definitely an awesome tool if you can figure out how to use it. One of these days when I'm not trying to learn so many things at the same time, I plan to give it another go. heheh

I've had this problem with other assets that use custom editor menus. Typically this behavior is caused when another asset has errors. If you have any errors in your Console, that could be blocking Gaia from running its routines that add itself to the Unity menu. Other than that, I'm not sure what else would cause it.

EDIT: For clarification, you are talking about the Gaia menu accessed via Window -> Gaia in the Unity Editor and not the Gaia Manager window with its menus that is its own editor window... Right?

 

Yep thats the one, I'm gonna try again with less load up at the start

BTW this maybe suit you better has some sulpting tools for rditing

http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

 

Lets not forget that Gaia has MANY stamps... and you can rotate and scale and blend them together to create virtually unlimited permutations and combinations - external software is not actually required to gorgeous results.

 

Yup.. That's pretty much what I'm relying on right now.. Included stamps and stamps created from imports. I do have the L3DT link bookmarked from someone who was in the Gaia beta group, can't remember who. But plan to look at it later when I have brain power for it too... heheh

 

Can't remember who suggested it - but the screen shotter component now also records the x,y,z and rotation of the location of the spot where you took the shot in addition to date and time and resolution - this makes it quite nice for pinpointing spots in your scene so that you can revisit them later !

 

Kia ora

@Shawn67 I was just thinking,.. the stamp size in Gaia is not that big and you set the terrain size in the terrain settings
so maybe a 512x512 exorpt of heightmap would not be to shabby by the time you bring the pixil size back to 1

 

You lost me there Kiwi.. The stamp size can be as big or as small as you want. You can stamp an entire terrain with one stamp or make it a much smaller area and just stamp features - mountains, hills, plateaus, volcanos, etc. Not sure I'm understanding what you are trying to suggest. Of course it is almost midnight and brain power gauge is approaching empty, so that might be it... Ok, who am I kidding? These days it seems to stay on almost empty... lol

 

I was aiming at the size of the free WM outputs for creating stamps, a number of 512x512 stamps would work well I think if you didn't want to buy WM

 

Oh yeah, definitely. I don't have a problem with buying WM. My problem is I wasn't able to grasp the workflow. Dealing with brain fog issues related to taking chemo a couple of years back. Used to be I could code and work on several different parts of my apps at the same time. Now I have problems following the logic sometimes when only working on one module at a time. The whole node concept with WM was a little rough for me. Doesn't help that I'm still learning the whole graphics/game programming at the same time. So I kinda shelved WM and put both it and the other you recommended on the back burner. What I'm working with now is working well. Between free stamps Adam included with Gaia, the islands from Super Terrain Collection (a steal for sale at $5 - I think I gave more for it when I bought over summer) which I've converted to stamps, some land features from Red Planet (which I lucked out and was able to get one of his free Christmas vouchers), and a few islands from sample scenes in other packs, I have plenty to keep me occupied for now. Plus I created around a dozen different islands during different phases of the Gaia beta.

Hopefully by the time I run out of that stuff, the docs will have figured out something to get my marbles working properly again so I can put some thought into figuring out WM. From what I've seen people do with it, including Adam and @Teila from Gaia beta, I'd love to be able to eventually integrate it into my workflow as well.. But baby steps.. heheh Right now the coding stuff is a bit of a higher priority for me.. heheh..

DEFINITELY appreciate the suggestions though!

 

No worries mate I understand I got sober at 20 but stitched up a lot of cells before I did and now at 66 I meet new friends every day my recall is so bad and I'm great at jumping in the deep end man, trying to sort out UE4, Unity and cant code to save myself lol as well as sunstance and modeling too. I'm really just after getting a char into a world that can pop first to third person like the Elder Scroll chars to run about testing with, then I just happaly build a wee world using what ever assets I can lay my hands on, I wou't be selling or publishing it I dout, just keeping what left of my brain active at this point. I sell have my modding of Skyrim to keep me happy too

 

Today I successfully recorded a terrain creation session which consisted of a number of different stamp operations blended together.

Then I flattened the terrain, and recreated it by pressing "Play Session" in the session recorder. Was very cool seeing it just assemble itself.

Because each step is automatically recorded, you can try stuff, then deactivate and bypass or delete individual steps if you don't like how it looked.

The session itself is written into a scriptable object which can then be stored as a backup or exchanged with other people.

Have not serialised and played back spawners yet but they should be comparatively simple as I have cracked the hard stuff.

 

I noticed that when playing with terrain.party, though it's a great way to get "Minecraft styled levels" like in your tutorial . Generally the better scans are to be found of the United States (which sucks because I wanted to recreate parts of a Canadian National Park that I love camping in). I've been getting okay results from areas around the Grand Canyon. I don't think automating satellite scans is a particularly useful feature since it's already so easy to just grab something from TP (or other sources whose names and urls escape me right now), resave it in Photoshop (only required for TP) and then make it a stamp.

Speaking of making stamps, I found this tutorial on World of Level Design about using the Clouds filter in PS to make heightmaps. It has some Unreal Engine specific steps at the end that can just be ignored (WoLD tutorials are for UE right now but there's still great information on that site that can be adapted to Unity with little effort): How to Create Landscape Heightmaps with Photoshop Clouds Filter. I've not tried it myself yet but I just saw it while catching up online after a vacation and wanted to share.

Haven't touched GAIA in awhile as I'm working on a platformer with a friend but I plan to return to it this week just for fun. Hope everyone had happy holidays!

 

I see this as a BIG milestone for future features

 

A friend of mine is using Gaia to design his terrains, and then imports the heightmaps to UE.

 

I just realized this is basically what Macros in Office applications are, that will definitely be a powerful tool for users.

 

I'm having issues with the scanner. Whenever I create my own stamp it always looks blocky like Minecraft. All I'm trying to do is create a mirror image of an existing stamp for seamless terrain. What I've tried (I'm not pro with Photoshop) is exporting the heightmap as a png, flipping it horizontally and saving it under a different name. I open the scanner, place in the png and save it where I want it. I'm not sure why it comes out blocky as I don't change anything but the horizontal flip on the canvas.

 

A walk along the river

 

I'm getting a simalar result I notice if I don't bring th pixel error back from the default 5 to 1. at 5 the detail I have in the heightmap I made in World Machine it lost. don't know if that'll help you tho jus a guess

 

Very cool, like the weeping willows and the bullrushes. Something I have noticed is that grasses that are not clumped can look unnatural. Like a hair transplant that is spread evenly.

 

Where/how are you adjusting the pixel error? I'm not using World Machine if that's where you're doing it at.

edit: I hopped into world machine using their default starting terrain and exported a height map .raw file. It worked just fine. Is PNG the cause of this? interesting.

 

Hehe - comb over

You need to treat this with care - you are increasing the terrain poly's and therefore potentially decreasing performance by doing this.

@jaimepollard Gorgeous!