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

My bad.. @AdamGoodrich, I thought you were talking about processing the actual satellite images to put down on the terrain, not spawn the actual objects from the images. Is that even possible?

 

<engage_reverse_psychology_mode>
well, I'm not sure that Adam can do it... </engage_reverse_psychology_mode>

 

Yep it is - but not without a bunch of work.

 

Gaia and PolyWorld Woodland Low Poly Toolkit playing together.

Very simple to set up - Import Gaia - Import Polyworld - Generate your scene with Gaia. Attach the PolyWorld script to your terrain and click update all!

 

Kia Ora

Just up thr road,. Briasy? I know you guys,.. flyfrom Brisy to Sydney for a weekend skyin

 

(as created by World Composer

Just up the road from Sydney myself, and as I sit here it is pouring down. So much for our long hot dry summer

I see the Hedgehog Team have released an "Easy Scatter" asset to complement Gaia.

@Shawn67, thanks for the reply, I appreciate all the feedback I can get. I gave up on Terrain composer after 6 months of trying to work it out. It seems to be a great asset for those that have a lot of time to sink into learning it, and find they are instinctive with problem solving and can regularly perform the dark arts to even remotely get anything similar to the tutorials.

And then along came Gaia, I simply sat down beside her and immediately I was able to eat all my curds and whey

I'm using World composer to get the height data no problem (although the quality at times in Scotland is average, especially the Outer Isles). I am having troubles with getting the spawners the right size to work on either a 2.65 x 2.65km or 5.27 x 5.27 terrain (as created by WC)?

I create the height stamp at 1024 x 1024 no problems, and change the stamp size to 4096 x 4096 for the 5.27km terrain. But then the spawners (even when I change the box size to anything larger than 1024 - 4096) never spawn correctly, and only in patchy areas?

I will try it the way you suggest Shawn67, and simply add Gaia to the Unity terrain, but would appreciate other ideas and clarifications too.

@Kiwi-Hawk, I've never tried skiing, I've never seen snow

 

Hi,

how to you guys get more performance on generated terrain?

its terrible when i make a 3000x3000 terrain with textures. gras, and trees.

i can only hit 80FPS ingame without having other stuff in it.

We want to make mmo levels.


with my good graphic card 970 i get almost 150 fps



but with the 650TI its going under 30 when running around

Dont know what im doing wrong.
working with some textures.
1 is a base texture over the ground then im painting over it with gras or dirt. Looks pretty nice.

also added some gras to get a nice look. Lot of gras. But no trees and stuff yet

 

If you look at your stats how many draw calls are you producing for your scene that runs at 30 fps on the 650.

Politely suggesting (whatever your response to that question) that the workflow could be optimised via increased sparseness, this is influenced via the rules, Adam was talking about implementing a sparser - limit based - ruleset yesterday but we missed his timezone for the hookup.

When a pre-randomised list of locations are available it will be easier to get a thinner spread of objects without clumping. So, how many draw calls and can we have a screenie please?

 

Hi,

heres a screen inside the editor from the mainpc (have60fps) in the editor:
http://s11.postimg.org/cr7ottahf/screen_world.png
http://s30.postimg.org/rqnwjv1m9/screen_world1.png

 

Totally understand.. I had pretty much given up on creating terrain I was happy with until Adam started posting info on Gaia's development. Now I can get results in under an hour that I was unable to get in weeks of fighting with other tools! (Terrain Composer, Limestone, and I think there was another that I can't remember name).. I doubt I'll ever load them again but may still use World Composer from time to time in the way you have mentioned if I ever need more islands or want to covert some terrain features that I can pull out of the US or France (I believe those are the only two areas you can get the really high res satellite heightmaps from)...

As for the patchy areas with the spawners when increasing the size from 1024, I wonder if that is because when you increase the size it screws with your heightmaps resolution or something. I would love to find a good way to edit heightmaps to increase both size and resolution without destroying the heightmap's quality. Still kind of a newb when it comes to dealing with them.. lol

 

Kia ora

@TheSeawolf Never seen snow and your just down the road from the Snowies mate?

 

quote
Best way is to drag the terrain object itself from the hierarchy into the scanner
unquote

Thanks for the tip.

I dragged it in and got an 8K jpg stamp, is that correct?

I've always wondered what these 'New Terrain.asset' things are in the project root, they have a splatmap
somtimes, but importing .asset on them doesn't seem to work.

 

the .jpg, this terrain is all rolling hills, doesn't have a lot of craggy details anyway

 

For anyone that is interested, I figured this out. I was pretty sure that it wasn't anything to do with Gaia, and it wasn't. It ended up being an RTP user issue.

I use the tessellation feature which requires that you prepare a special texture from the TerrainData. I made a few subtle manual edits to the terrain that was stamped, which updated the the collider correctly but not what was being rendered. I regenerated and reapplied the height texture to the terrain data (a button on the tessellation height & normal map settings) and voila, what was rendered matched the collider so no more floating trees and grass.

I've never seen this happen before, so it was a little tough to track down but it's pretty easy now that I know about it.

 

When you create a new terrain with Gaia, in addition to the terrain information that is added to the hierarchy, Gaia also creates that terrain object. That New Terrain thingie also contains your terrain collider. If you click on the terrain in your hierarchy, go down to the Terrain Collider component, you should see that name in the Terrain Data field. If you click that object, it should highlight that New Terrain.asset in your Project list.

 

Thanks for sharing your findings. You had me at a total loss when you posted. I wasn't even sure what to suggest looking at since I hadn't seen anything like that happen with my load. heheh

 

Poor Ethan doesn't know he's going to be replaced soon.
Added trees and detail spawners.
Used stuff: Gaia, Scion, RTP, Unistorm.

 

Sunday GAIA test - first steps


+ little touch of life

 

Beautiful, what sky/fog is it?

 

Gaia + Tenkoku + Suimono

 

what trees are you using, these look great.

 

Really lovely!

 

The trees that come with Gaia - they are SpeedTree's.

 

Nice!!

 

@impactit, looking really good. I 2nd montyfi, could you please outline the assets used, such as the trees and skies? Also are the birds used from the Bird Flock Bundle by Unlock Software?

@Kiwi-Hawk, no mate I'm north of Sydney, no skiing this far north.

@Shawn67 , I'm about to give up on WC as well and use terrain.party or something else to create Gaia stamps and augment the low quality real world height data. The landscapes of the world 1000 years ago were slightly different anyway, so artistic license and creativity are ok Plus I'll use Erosion and Noise brush to alter the landscapes further.

@AdamGoodrich, I may have missed this in all the posts, but are you adding any additional stamps to the asset?

Also I see you are adding support for SplatTerrain. The increase in fps using this is absolutely astonishing. Can this be real, or is the Unity gizmo stats showing a potential false positive fps increase?

 

My plan is yes - but not in this release - focusing purely on increasing and improving capability.

Good point - i never did end up comparing true apples with apples. It was very good without anything in the scene - but dove considerably when i added stuff - by comparison I got 600+ real fps in a compiled app - not editor fps from a compiled unity terrain. I think you could do some optimisation - but ran out of time.

I will do an apples with apples comparison at some point. I think the use case will vary per game - and I guess what I was able to demonstrate was a way of using Gaia to generate meshes for those that want them.

 

Yeah.. As long as your game isn't requiring real world accuracy, this should be more than fine. I actually used terrain.party to grab the western half of the Galapagos island chain creating a base stamp that I used and then stamped several more stamps on and around for one of my islands. It is no longer anything like anywhere in Galapagos but my world is a fae/elvish one that really has nothing to do with Earth so it doesn't matter... heheh

 

The one thing missing from almost every terrain system that pulls real world data is water depth. If you could pull that off, it would be a godsend to terrain creation.

 

That is one thing that sea level allows for. If you set your terrain height settings to 1000 and put your sea level at 500 (or anywhere above 0), you have between 0 terrain height and your sea level to raise/lower your terrain. You just need to make sure to show water level when you stamp to make sure you stamp your above water terrain above the water line. That was one of the big things I wanted during the beta testing because it was so frustrating before Gaia to try to build underwater content. Now I can stamp my island and then go in and use stamps set to invert or subtractive in order to lower my sea floors.

 

I just mean the pulling real world data always has any sea as a 0 level, regardless of depth of the water. At one point Bing Maps had Bathymetric data but has since removed it. I don't mind modeling the sea floor, but I just don't want to have to spend days trying to match it to real world values when that info should be pretty readily available.

 

Oh... Gotcha.. That would be awesome if that information is available... The feeling I got from other terrain tool folks was that it wasn't, which I always felt was kind of odd. You would think it would be available in a heightmap form or maybe even the reverse being some type of depth map data. Would be very cool to be able to integrate that into sea type projects!

 

Very good point Shawn67. The one thing that reading through all posts, is that there is always another way to problem solve, and another perspective to consider. Well done, you convinced me to stop using WC, I had already been wavering for some time.

Thanks Adam. It does look like the mesh terrain significantly reduces fps lag and will help stream large terrains and multiple tiles. I have downloaded World Streamer and I see Shawn67 has Sectr. Have you given any thought

One thing for a future update, can you look at increasing the font size and change of colour for the terrain ruler please, especially the height as it always blends in with the sky background. Maybe even if the font is only increased by one level would help

 

lol... That wasn't the intent.. I think it is still a good tool to have in the toolbox. I have found use cases for both. Larger islands are almost impossible with terrain.party because of the small size of areas they let you export. So in those cases, WC would probably still be a better solution. But for smaller areas that will fit within those limitations, I definitely prefer grabbing straight from terrain.party. And you never know what features Nathaniel may add to WC down the road. That is what I love about Gaia and it using standard Unity terrain, even though you switch to Gaia to handle all the heavy lifting your older tools can still be useful in your toolbox on a case by case basis.

 

Hey Cap, Not sure if youve tried, but you can generally get bathymetric data from official government agencies. (eg, here in Australia you can try the NEDF Portal run by Geoscience Australia). Non-government users can order the 1 second (DEM,DEM-S,DEM-H), 3 second (DSM,DEM,DEM-S) and 9 second (DSM,DEM,DEM-S) elevation data as well as bathymetric data. Its all for free here too, which is a good price They also have LIDAR, but that is only available to government users. Other countries will have similar agencies Im sure.

Im in a similar situation, as my project relies in part on generating realistic sea data as well as the surrounding coastline. At the moment Im still working on generating realistic heightmaps and trying to place vegetation and landmarks accordingly, and Im really hoping I can work out a procedural route, as its going to be massively time-consuming if I have to place everything manually. I was working with WC for the placement of assets, using its pixel colour positioning system, with varying results. The problem with realworld locations is that you start off wrong, and try and make it right. Whereas with fictional locations, you can never really be wrong!

When all thats done I'll also then be working with bathymetric data, sourced from the portal above.

 

Kia ora

@Shawn67 I take we had a wee look at "Kingdoms of Amalur" shame that game fall over and is un mod able in Skyrim terms of modding.

So going by your we instruction info but up a bit. I have a crater if I stamp it without cutting of the bottom of the crater I have to raise it about 30 or 40, If I make my landscape about 45 above base I can the do an invert stamp and sink that sucker into my landscape. World Machine swollowed both my Volcono and my crater when I tried to blend them, remember my ealier post https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AoWYX it's the bottom on under the island I have nice clean 8192x8192 16bit R16 Heightmaps of both

 

Been awhile folks, but jumped back into GAIA recently so here's some results:





And keeping with the old format we were using:

Assets shown:

3D forge Exteriors samples.
Grasses and flowers in Gaia.
Tenkoku Dynamic Sky System.
Scoin Post Processing Camera Fx.

Expect some more Pics coming and a video soon.

 

Is it already possible to import PNG heightmaps for example generated by Terrain Party?
Or will this come with the new version? Because I am pretty sure that in the current version I have to convert the PNG to 8Bit Raw using Photoshop to be able to import it and make a stamp out of it.

 

Can you please outline your used assets?

 

If Unity recognises the image then Gaia can scan it (i did not also want to be writing low level image decoding software).

However, there is something about the terrain party images that Unity doesn't like. The way i worked around it personally was just embedding the image into photoshop and dragging the photoshop file into unity so that unity saw it as a texture - no intermediary raw step needed.

I did find that there was a knack to reducing the precision errors that cause the nasty leveling - and that from memory was to modify the levels... i went from jaggy terraces to nice and smooth.

There is a link to before and after on the procedural worlds fb page here.

 

Just doing some testing to help prep update for release. Here are some screenshots of my terrain using Gaia's new default spawners, minus the houses. (Sorry Cobus for omitting houses this run, but I am using your Fast Travel Portal's pads for my dimensional portals as in the one screenshot.. )

Assets used in the scene:
Gaia's textures, new grasses, and the free speedtree trees that ship with Unity/Gaia
Fast Travel Portal by Cobus / 3DForge
Free Stonehenge asset for around my portal area
Scion camera effects
SSAO Pro camera effect
Time of Day's day/night system and camera effects
Suimono
Minimap is UGUI Minimap
and the old Mixamo character Alpha

Portal area spawned with Gaia default spawners (need to adjust texture spawners a bit but everything else spawned pretty nicely. And not bad Gaia settings, just a large area that is a bit too close to sea level.):


Mesa above the portal area that is shown in picture above. Portal is actually below and a little to the left of where Alpha is looking. The terrain itself was originally a stamp I created from Isle_01 demo scene from one of the Big Environment Packs. After stamping it, I added a few more stamped areas and then saved the terrain. Where Alpha is standing below is actually the mesa that the castle/fort area was located on the terrain in the demo.


Oh and excuse the bit of a blur on Alpha. I think I need to adjust my depth of field settings a tad yet.. heheh

 

Thanks a lot for the fast reply Adam. So saving the png again from Photoshop already did it without converting it to raw format? I did not try that. I was just wondering because in your new video you talked about importing a PNG but the Terrain party PNGs never worked for me like you mentioned already. I will test that.
I am also really interested to see how you use Gaia with RTP. Lot of people asked about that and also lot metioned that it's not a problem. I video how to "connect" both would be great. But perhaps there is already a video out there and I did not find it in the 60 boardpages

Cheers
Ronny

 

Hehe - yeah when the new version is out I will do a bunch more videos - while its in flux it doesn't make a lot of sense to do them...

I will however do another preview video - probably tomorrow - just got an absolutely cracking new feature working

These images we created with this new feature - an entire 2km x 2km scene from scratch in 2 mins - are assets are included with Gaia except for lighting which is Tenkoku:

 

Kia ora

I got the blending working a little better now, at one edge, when I'm having a weeeee problem is with something thats in essence a band at agiven level eg: I have a stoney, rockey grass the starts at lets say 500 meters and covers a slop of 20 to 35 and doesn't go above 1000 meters as it's bare rock way up there to high for grass to grow it's getting those blends both top and botton that seems to be the trick,if it's at all possible, maybe Gaia system wasn't desgined to do that.

Question, I'm looking at my terrain ans seeing the island is quite close to the edge of the map. Can Gaia handle me making say a 8192x8192 terrain and putting a 4096x4096 stamp in the middle or creating that height map in L3DT or World Machine importing it then attacting Gaia's spawners set to 4096x4096 and moved to the crrect location on the central area of the map. I'd like to great the impression of a varst sea with nothing but fog and maybe the odd slight hint of distant mountains.

I'm thinking a project to try things out and when I get them working go to my main project and put them into practice.
Oh and regioning comes to mind, Do I creat a wee tree grass spawner for each region or usethe default ones and reset them and move them after each spwan run so as to get the different trees grass's etc for each area

 

Hello,

This has probably been answered before but excuse me as I skip the 60 pages of forum thread and skip right into it.

Performance wise for mobile, how does GAIA compare with TerrainComposer?
Are there things that TC allows you to manipulate performance wise that GAIA does not?

I've recently purchased GAIA and have had very little time to play with it, however so far it looks fantastic. I need it mainly for mobile, so any other hints / tips, tricks, that I can do to optimize mobile performance that would be appreciated.

Thank you!

 

All Gaia and Terrain Composer are doing is creating terrain and spawning. Your optimization and performance is will be gained on how you tune your scene, the models you use and if they have LODs setup, and the amount of things/how thick you spawn things. So my thoughts would be there is no difference at all between the two.

In the future that may change though. Adam has talked about some stuff with the beta group that he would like to add at some point. But not sure that it has been mentioned publicly, so I can't really talk about them. Not sure about mobile specifically, but just performance overall.

 

Have you checked out HorizonOn - it's great for letting you fill your terrain, and yet have it go seemingly on into the distance? it's really good.

 

As @Shawn67 commented - Gaia just creates terrain (and makes it pretty).

I am not an expert with mobile - probably other people in the forum could provide better advice. You really need to lower the amount and type of content you spawn into the scene.

Current Gaia also has the ability export meshes, and soon to be released Gaia can export splatmaps, so you could export a low poly mesh and use a shader like SplatTerrain to texture it. I showed some screenshots of this the other day.

Hope that's useful - would love to hear what other people have to say as well.

 

Yep Gaia can do this. Just export your heightmap as a 16 bit windows raw file (.r16) from world machine. The create a Scanner from the Utilities tab in Gaia Manager. Drag and drop the r16 file onto it - name it, drop the base level so that it as at bottom of your stamp and choose which folder you want to store your stamp and save it.

Not just plunk your stamp in the centre of your terrain. About 2 mins of work.

 

That could be cool. Maybe a pooling / spawning solution for tree colliders, stuff like that.

 

Kia ora

Ok I'll have to go look this up I'd probley know what your talking about if I have could remember what I read in manuals, thnaks for the head up mate.