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

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD I can literally just disable all but one, and it will load in the resources to that terrain? See thats the complicated part in my logic/thinking... is how will Gaia react if the terrain does not have the required splats/trees/grasses on the terrain. Does it automatically know to add them? I'm going to try this now, if i break anything ill let you know lol...

Edit: Or should I simply make sure the resources match when forming them in Terrain Composer, then that glitch should disappear if it exists?
Double Edit: I'd use terrain composers spawners but they make me want to pull my hair out which is where Gaia succeeds where TC fails...

Third edit! Got it working! Thanks!

 

You may change your thoughts on the stamp system after the next release. Adam is working the kinks out of the stamp randomizer. I am the opposite as you, I loved the stamping system and the amount of control it gave me. "It will be cool but I doubt I'll ever do procedural stamping.." is probably pretty close to feedback I gave to Adam when he had talked about runtime stamping and procedurally placing stamps. After doing a few tests with the randomizer and automatically generating a couple of terrains with it, IT IS AWESOME! Still some fine tuning to do, a few things to finish out, and such.. By the time Adam gets it ready for release, I think you'll actually start loving stamping!

 

Okay, so I got it mostly working, the only issue is for some reason, its not completely texturing one of the resources and I have no idea why. The visualizer shows that its supposed to be occuring, additionally I've set the correct height in both the defaults, and resources but still not sure why its doing it. Tried deleting and recreating the terrains, as well as the spawners. Anyone have any advice? I'm using Terrain Composer to tile 4 terrains, then leaving one active, fitting to size, and texturing and its only not texturing the grass, so I think its all right? but the grass freaking out for some reason or another...

 

You are doing things exactly right - the issue is with the first release of Gaia.

It's a combination of things. In the first release of Gaia, the instances that are allowed for each spawner rule is defined by the defaults file - and chances are the resources file defines a default terrain that is smaller.

The next potential issue is that for for some reason I chose to use signed int's to control the max instances of 'texture' being spawned. This fails on big terrains as it runs into max int.

Increase your max instances per rule to 2147483646, This should sort it. Failing that PM and I will send you the latest version of Gaia - it picks the instances from the actual terrain, uses an unsigned long, and I also by default disabled instance checking for textures,

Instance checking makes sense for some things such as say animals or trees - but not for things like textures.

 

Kia ora

I think I lost a post,..

Anyway Adam I was asking what Unity hight your set your third person char to? I'm still un sure if I should be scaleing the building up or the char down when I load "Eva Adventure" or a char I created on eithr the Mixamo or AutoDeck sites. the 3D max one wher set at 1.6 1.7 meters on export, which I figuer is not bad for a female but I don't know if the building that are uploaded are set to a scale size or just dumped up there. Is there a way to mesure stuff in Unity?

 

For me, Cobus' houses are pretty much to scale with any of my humanoid characters. Looking at the one currently loaded, it is 1.8 (Alpha from Mixamo). Collider on my Elven ladies (Mr Necturus) which I'm using as NPCs has a Y center of 1 and it appears collider is a little above her head so I'd guess she is 1.6 or 1.7ish. The only characters I've got so far that were really weird scale were the Ratkin Army ones from Mr N.. For some reason they were HUGE.. But I purchased from his website and may have actually loaded the ones for graphics program and not ones scaled already for Unity. I can't remember.. But at any rate, I'm pretty sure Cobus buildings are set for 2 unit high doors. I'll have to pop some other buildings in scenes and see how they are. I'm pretty sure Michael O and Big Environment Pack buildings were similar. I've never had issues with them either I don't think.. But once I started using Cobus buildings, I've kind of leaned toward them. lol

 

Hey there,

I model and keep things to the best all round scale to work with other available assets.
When I created the Village Interiors Kit I had to determine a workable scale.

I bought some characters on the Asset Store and experimented with them and pretty quickly realized that the general size of these are not real-world correct, shoulders are a bit wider, heads a slightly bigger, the way they hold weapons are good looking but not accurate.

There is no purpose to designing architecturally correct, to the dot perfect scaled walls, doors and windows that I can say they are correct but to developers they are useless, I started there and realized that the tests showed that the characters can not walk through doors, windows were too small and it really looked bad when the character stick through walls and get stuck at every point in the level when the user would run around in the web-demos.

At the end, you building a scene and the player ultimately playing your game, it is about user experience.
I picked sizes that gives you that, a balance between as close to real-world sizes, but above all the best user experience, becasue that is what is going to cause your player to keep playing your title and have fun.

I also retain that scale across packages so that they can easily be used with each other.

Cheers
Cobus

 

In addition to what Cobus said, it was pointed out to me that the grass was a little high on the default ethan character in the first release. I have made the grass a little shorter in the next release. This should work a little better with the default Ethan character.

 

All things? Or just grasses?

 

Made the trees a little shorter, left houses as is I think. You can increase or decrease their spawned size by changing their DNA.

 

Kia ora

Thanks Shawn67, I have the Eleven girls and Eva also and thay are close to the freebies you get off Mixamo and the ones I got of Character Creater when I had my student account on Autodesk

 

Kia ora

You Guys seen Prisim?

 

Haven't heard of Prisim, what's that?

The stamp randomizer sounds interesting.
I was working on generating mountain peaks once, and thought...it would be neat if you had a generator for each specific type of terrain feature, and you could have randomization in that. For example, you would have a "Peak Generator", you could specify a few properties (number of sub peaks, ridges, etc), and walla...generate endless varieties of mountain peaks that you could stamp in.
Same thing for a mesa, low hill(s), etc.

 

Prism is a post processing effects system for Unity:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50819

 

That one cannot do a sphere. So the answer to original poster - no.

 

The biggest problem with it - you can forget about Alloy, RTP and such stuff. Making custom modification to all used shaders is way to much work, including constant support.

 

I'd like to do the following, but I'm not 100% sure how:
Change the texture beneath certain spawned objects, for example trees or rocks.
Example: Wherever a tree is spawned, I'd like the texture beneath it to be blended with a leaves/grass/branches texture.

How would I be able to do that?

 

I have both, Scion and Prism, for me Scion works much better at the moment. Maybe Prism will improve over time, it is quite new.

That's a very good idea! @AdamGoodrich

 

Give the tree prefab a tag, and then set up a texture spawner that looks for this specific tag using the proximity option and have a rapid fall-off so it's only affecting the area close to the tree prefab.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that this is just an idea that's come to me right now after reading your post. I've not tried it but the theory is sound(ish)

 

It wont work on terrain trees I'm afraid. Do proximity works on textures at all?

 

Yep. You don't need to spawn the tree as a unity tree you can spawn it as a gamobject prefab. Have a play with it in the visualiser.

Spawner is largely generic. Same techniques apply across all spawners. If you are still stuck I will do a little video.

You do need to be careful setting this up tho. You will probably want to make another texture spawner for this specific job.

Something like. Do first pass texture spawn. Then spawn other stuff including the tagged object. Duplicate resources file and make new rule for proximity texture. Then do second pass texture spawn that only uses new proximity resource rule.

 

Sounds perfect. I'll try this tonight or over the weekend. I'm using SpeedTree trees so I'm spawning them as GameObjects already.

Thanks!

 

This is great for Speedtrees which seems to be used by most now ... You guys must be rich
But for all the great Tree Creator trees out there you will lose the billboarding and tree distance options of unity terrain?? Or is there a nice workaround for this that some of you know of... Ofc you could have tree LODs but with a lot of trees I would say billboarding is imperative... ??

That's actually a recurring dillemma for me.... For instance I really consider buying

Easy Scatter - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51269

which seems so great on the video - anyone tried it??
But since I almost entirely need to place vegetation/trees I reconsidered because again: They are placed as regular Gameobjects/prefabs and not normal terrain trees.

Any views on this??? ... Or perhaps I should just get on with it, close my eyes, and press buy on the Speedtree packages

 

Increasing the spawn instances worked like a champ, now to make my terrain not look ugly.

 

It's a nice product - however Gaia already does this for you via its spawning system if money is a consideration. I would consider Easy Scatter as a local area customisation system. Its quite nice.

This is still controllable via the unity terrain system. I don't tend to use them though as SpeedTree so much nicer. There also seem to be issues with them in U5.x - cant comment personally as I have hardly used them.

 

Thanks man,. that why I asked to see if a waste coin or not, this is getting to be a costly hobby lol

 

I got Horizon [ON] from the Asset store to try and work with Gaia, have not got it working yet. Anyone else try this?

 

Gaia is really nice tool. I really like the stamp concept it is so intuitive. Looking forward to your future updates.

Hope you do get time to sleep. Based on this thread it looks like you and your beta team do not sleep much.

 

Terrain Stage 1 complete!


Stage 1.1 - Increased the map resolution for height and splat to 2k.

 

Kia ora

BTW is the next version gonna have a way to sve/export a resourse file that can be pasted to the next project and maybe the same for stamps to make a Gaia libaray?

I keep forgetting to ask,.. One of my default trees show as the full plans like theres no aphla tranparent alpha lay sor somit is that normal for the default setting?

 

How do I use Time of Sky and not get this using the default GAIA demo?

 

Time of Day... I think the developer answered you in the Time of Day thread.. Here is the link to his response..

 

Hi, this asset is beautiful! Before purchase it, I'd like to know can it generate terrain for mesh? Say I want to build a "little planet" on a spherical mesh.

 

I wondered about this too. Have a look at Curved World apparently it will work with Gaia, but is shader based.

 

Yes, I bought it yesterday, CurvedWorld has a staring feature is that it actually CURVE a plane-ish mesh in your camera, that means whatever it looks like, it's still a plane-- w/o faux gravity and cycled position. So it doesn't quite fit my need for now.
If Gaia can generate things on a spherical mesh, that would be great lol

 

Gaia produces standard Unity terrains, which are really just 2D planes with displacement added. As such, you'll never be able to wrap one around a sphere without a lot of work. But you can export terrains to mesh just fine, and Gaia even includes an exporter to help you do this. Once you have the mesh, you can do what you want with it in a 3D modelling app. If you can find a way to bend it into a sphere, great. If not, as Daniel mentioned above, you can fake it with a shader based solution like Curved World: It basically creates the illusion of a curved mesh or terrain from a flat one, like looking at it through a fish eye lens.

 

hm... That's a good idea, handling seamless boundaries during runtime is not easy though. I'll have a try.
I like your portrait LMAO

 

@FargleBargle pretty much addressed this. But just wanting to restress that Gaia creates standard Unity terrains. So any tools out there to wrap a Unity terrain around sphere, you could use those. I think I've seen a couple over the couple of years I've been around Unity. But I have yet to have the need to try one of them. What you are wanting to do is pretty specialized. So you might be hard pressed to find one. I know what I've seen some folks talk about for space type games with planets is to fake the planet and actually transition to a cut scene and switch to a scene with actual terrain when landing. It appears they are landing on the same planet they had been looking at prior to the cut scene but it is actually two different scenes on each side of cut, one with a mesh planet that looks similar to where they land and then one with the actual terrain.

At any rate, if you don't want to go that route then the shader option listed above which was on sale yesterday or some type of mesh to sphere conversion tool would probably be the best things to look for.

 

For me, the best would be to have an 'infinite, seamless terrain' of the quality that is being generated by Gaia. I think something like this is what is planned beyond the next release. Maybe someone could tell me, does tiling create an infinite world?

 

Tiling just lets you work across multiple terrains, as if they were one big terrain. But it doesn't automatically create an "infinite world". Do you mean one that sort of goes on forever, like minecraft, or one that wraps you around so that it just repeats?

 

If it was an interesting set of terrains then repeating would be enough, I imagine that say you had nine small terrains and the player was at the center then as you move forward the far rear terrain would appear far in front of you and if you turn left then the far right terrain would appear far in front of you or something like that.
The idea would be that the player could move forward or in any direction and never come to the ocean (maybe a lake) or fall off the flat earth or bang into an invisible wall. He could proceed forever through an interesting terrain. I wonder if this will be feasible with Gaia?

 

You should be able to code something like that once Adam finishes support for tiled terrains. Sounds like something that is going to require quite a bit of code though. Personally, once tiled terrain support is in I'd like to see him working on other stuff that he has talked about for Gaia already. I see infinite terrain more as a specialty product or add-on for those who want such a thing.

 

There are lot of infinite runner assets in store that works that way you described. Just use any of them using terrain tiles and it should work.
But I see no point of doing it with terrains. Random runtime generation is more feasible solution, just one step to Daggerfall

 

Just updated to the latest patch release, mistake? I have Gaia imported as an asset, but it is not listed in the Windows menu?

 

If this is not going to work, what version of Unity would you recommend?

 

I've been thinking about this, and there may be a reasonably simple way to get your terrain onto a mesh. You'd need 2 Gaia terrains that could be stitched together side by side. Export them both to Raw files, and use the Raw files as displacement maps on each hemisphere of a mesh sphere in your modelling app. You'd get distortion at the poles, so you'd need to create your terrains accordingly, basically like a map of the world as opposed to the actual world. You'd also need a lot of subdivisions on your globe to reproduce the terrains reasonably accurately. You've probably used similar methods to texture planets from published height maps, so doing it with a generated one shouldn't be much different.

I'm not sure how this would work in a game though. You'd probably need to chop the finished planet mesh up to to get decent performance, so it might just be better to go with @Shawn67's suggestion.

 

I'm trying to use the latest patch release, 5.3.1p2.
If this is a problem, what version should I be using?
I have Gaia imported as an asset, but it is not listed in the Windows menu?

 

'Random runtime generation' would certainly be the ultimate, I thought that was what procedural terrain generation was until I played with Gaia and found that all of the maps are square and have boundaries like oceans etc. That is what made me think of tiled, infinite terrains.
If terrains were generated randomly 'at runtime' as you move into range and then deleted as you move out of range and have the quality of Gaia to look at it would be better than finding 'edge of world' solutions such as oceans etc. If there was facility for placing objects at specific locations as well (at ground level) then imagine the worlds that would be possible. A feature also for remembering worlds so that you could revisit locations, similar to the session files that Adam has been deploying.

 

Check console for errors, after fixing those menus will be back.

 

What is the current work around for tiling/stitching multiple terrains together? I'd like to try something with a 2x2 or 3x3 tiled terrain. I've seen it mentioned that there is a workaround but haven't actually heard what it is. @AdamGoodrich

BTW, the proximity for adding a leafy texture around trees worked perfectly. Here's a picture with no grass details on the terrain: