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

I recently got sidetracked on a different project, but I cannot wait to get going again with Gaia. Lovely screenshots by everyone!

 

As I commented earlier - there are no issues that I am aware of with 5.3.x (with Gaia at least - they broke particles and other things). If you have any issues then please PM me and we will arrange a Skype session so I can see what they are.

 

I'll be trying it out in a few hours. If I have any issues I'll let you know right away. I don't use Skype though, but e-mail should be sufficient.

 

Actually that stamp base option was what i was describing. Awsome.

 

Make sure you take some time to have a look at the video's - between the videos and the quickstart in the documentation you should be up and running in no time.

 

Thanks. I will do that definitely.

 

Kia ora

A long mess around, textures look not bad, best I got so far, not sure why The Elven Building set is screwed up like it is, emailed him or why she runs into the ground an pop out and I think I over did the touchup at the last house where the ground go patchy and black. Trees/grass come when the ground is right, so ye I know thyer missing

BTW I need hide the bow so I don't get that weird back step jump thingy when getting hung in the roof, was trying to check building scale with the Eva Adventure

 

Looks like progress. Having the 3rd person camera go through walls needs attention.

 

Hi Adam,
Using the latest Unity3d with the patch, everything working fine along with Time of Day. Really nice.
I saw you gave a good rating to the HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol.1.
So I got it.
Tell me again what I need to do to use those assets properly in Gaia?

 

Just got Gaia, everything is working, but the vegetation seems larger than I expected. When I run around the terrain, I feel like I'm a rabbit scurrying through the weeds rather than a average height human. Any suggestions on how to adjust this?

 

Funny you should say this. I just got mine up and running too and that was the exact same impression I got about the vegetation. It just feels way off. I'm going to place a character in the scene to check the scale, but something is definitely not right.

 

Yep the grass scale is large for 3rd person character in first release. I have updated this for the next release, and feedback from test group is that it is much better.

You can go into your terrain settings and reduce the size of the grass - the image below shows an example from the next release.

 

All of Turbo's grasses are awesome - they are well priced and great value- and featured on the asset store home page today!!

Here are some scenes I have made with them while playing. I like to mix them and SpeedTree

 

Hi Adam,

when it will be available for upgrade to version 1.0.0?

Luigi.

 

Does anybody have any tips on great looking trees that is possible to have in an actual game? Speedtrees looks absolutely wonderful but they are pretty much unusable to have in a large scene in an actual game. I´m making my game for desktop PC but having lots of speedtrees is simply not a good idea :/

 

I'm assuming you're using the Desktop and not the Hero versions?

Perhaps you need to look at the LOD levels to tweak where they change to help you get better frame rates. Either that or go for a lower density of trees?

 

I´m using the desktop-version yes. On my computer Speedtrees is not an issue. I tested to paint hundereds of them around my character along with massive amounts of Unity-grass (ugh!) and I have a 4096x4096 gaia-terrain with rtp 2k-maps. In my built game I got steady 60+ FPS on 2560x1440 with the "Fantastic" setting (I only have a 60hz screen so it´s probably much higher). Then I tried to play in 4K on fantastic and got around 50 FPS. Unity-grass is absolutely awful and expensive so I guess those numbers are not too bad. But it´s hard as a developer when you can´t test your game on weaker systems :/ My scene as it is has over 1000 setpass-calls and over 2000 batches and I understand thats not very good but I don´t really understand those things.

 

As Adam told it above, you must play on each Grasses Details in the Terrain Inspector. If you add more Grasses from Resources, i guess its better tweaking them at this stage, Spawners will make the job faster after!
You can although re-tweaking them after if you find its not at your tastes and making adjustments by still using the Edit... and changing too of Grass if there is one or more that you guess is not good and using other one.

Considering basically the 3rd Person Character is on a h.: 1.8/2.0, almost quite of my Grasses have to be from an h. between: 0.1 to 1.5. Some can be more taller as they are in true life at the same human size until people going at 2 meters high!

Moreover you can also settle some others Grasses more higher to give a better harmony mostly isolated and/or more larger/smaller something as w.: 1.5 to 3.5 / h.: 0.1 to 0.6 (i'm thinking particulary on the Grounds Covers in the HQ1 on 2048x1024).

I'm working on a ReadMe for each of my assets to help people having my Grasses and get the best results.

And i forgot to mention the most important when using Grass on Gaia, for the less i have experimented and seen, with the newest version's coming, you will be able to settle directly from Spawners, advanced scattering, positioning or not positioning, visualising and decide where you want to add each Grasses Textures, quantity, density ect ect...! AWE

 

Very possible this could be the issue. Also I did say more than it didn't work... I stated the errors I got and the fresh install, with a fresh Unity install, not sure what other information you are looking for.... You should know from development, that just because it works for others never means it won't for someone else.

Prime example... Years ago when I went to college and used Unity and Unreal, I seen a few times, where everything worked great for everyone and one person one computer something was broke...aka Unity or Unreal build. Same version same computer specs so this can happen and does... I seen this with Strumpy I believe was the asset the whole class of 38 was fine but two people had issues at the install...

Not saying its Gaia, but I have experience stuff like this....I been a programmer for 20 years, for gaming and seen some strange things.. Unity 5.3 has been buggy for more than myself...

I been developing for Xbox One, and seen many users have no issues and a handful with some as well..

 

Totally agree. As commented - lets hook up via Skype and work out where the issue is. I tried to get a Samsung TV build going yesty. It showed up more fileio issues that I had introduced (and now fixed) and was also supposed to work - it didnt

 

Not sure what my issue is here. My terrain size is 4096x4096, when I spawn the textures only Gaia textures only a small portion properly. It is texturing the entire map but not correctly. It is just like square patches that are being filled in as expected.
In the images you can see how the grass is only being placed in small square patches and the rest is being filled with the sand and rock textures.
Do you know what might cause this?

Texture Spawner settings

Terrain Settings/Resolutions

 

Modify your instance settings on the spawner rules for each texture - make the max instances to 2147483646. The instance settings are picked up off defaults rather than your terrain, and if your terrain is larger than defaults then they will be too small. Make sure you hit reset before respawning.

 

These pictures are fantastic!! Are you using the built in Unity Tilt Shift script?

 

Didn't know there was one to be honest. I am using Cinema Pro Cams and a 28mm lens w/ 2.8f aperture. I have been tweaking the effect for the past couple hours and love it. All of the items in the level are .5 scale but look like they are tiny.

 

Thanks for the reply! So I Increased all the textures to that instance amount but then in the Statistics panel it says Max Instance : -8 and when I click spawn nothing happens. But I found it I unselect the active toggle for any 1 of the 4 textures the Max Instance: reads 2147483646 and then when clicking spawn it textures it properly but of course without 1 of the 4 textures.

Here is a video cap of what I am talking about.

 

Arrgh.. yeah.

In first release I used a signed int, instead of an unsigned long.. and what you are seeing there is an int overflow.

The quick n dirty workaround... reset - deactivate the last texture - spawn - reset - deactivate texture 1-3 - reactivate last texture - spawn.

Alternatively PM me and pass on your invoice number - and I will give you access to latest if you are prepared to put up with the odd idiosyncrasy of something that's not quite ready to be published to store.

That particular issue was one of the first things I changed after initial launch. Interesting learning for me as a first time publisher is to separate new development from issue fixes. Will make sure I am able to do this better for the next release.

 

I just wanted to say a quick thank you for all the hard work you put into this tool, Adam. I've played with Gaia for a little bit now and I already love it. I'll be saying goodbye to terrain Composer for good thanks to this excellent product. I've successfully gone through the quick start guide and had not issues. The results were very nice for default settings. Now I'll be setting up my own defaults and adding custom assets for spawners.

One quick question. Is this able to spawn stuff from the Advanced Foliage Shader? I assume it can, but just thought I'd see if anyone else has done it.

 

I see that worked TY much!

 

Glad you like it Gaia is shader agnostic - so you can pretty much use anything with it.

 

Excellent. As soon as I have a decent custom test scene, I'll share screenshots and maybe a video. Hopefully soon, but I'm also using RTP, AFS, Landscaper, Liquidum, and more. I want to put together something that uses all these tools to see what I can achieve.

 

Those screen-grabs look awesome Adam! I'll have to get this soon and try it out with my Asset pack.

 

For anyone wondering about third person and the vegetation sizes this is how the default size comes out on the new updated version on gaia

 

Yup.. The default heights in the update are much more 3rd person camera/character friendly. The screenshot and video Adam posted above should help those who are working on doing changes to their grasses prior to the update being live. I generally aim for between .5 to 1 on heights of all of my grasses unless they are supposed to be a really tall field type grass. For those I generally don't go above 1.5, although I think I may have one set with max height of 2.

 

Playing again

 

Sure Adam, sounds good.. I doubt its a Gaia issue, I believe its a Unity issue. But there is a chance I been doing something wrong and got lucky the last few times, who knows.. lol.

 

Just got this, Can't wait to have a play around with it! I have RTP also which should be fun
Will post screenies when its ready.

 

Rainbows, I haven't seen any Gaia scenes with rainbows, maybe a skybox is necessary to get one?

 

I was thinking the same thing when I made the last image

 

Well - am very tired but made a major milestone today for the Gaia 1.5 release - a feature I call 'Composable Resources' is finally in and looking good.

It allows you to mix and match resources from multiple asset packs concurrently in the same scene., and if the resource you are spawning happens not to be in the terrain then it will be added, and all of its settings will be used.

This is key feature needed in order to support Gaia eXtensions (GX).. which in turn allows things like this to happen:



In the sample above (which took all of 5 mins to create) I am adding individual trees from SpeedTree Desktop Pack 1 to the scene.. and rather the all of the usual messing around - all you have to do is click to add the spawner, then press spawn on the spawner.

This feature will enable you to easily integrate and leverage any asset / art package that chooses to expose an extension. Whether it supports this or not, I have also almost completed an extension creator, and this will enable the community to share them as well (the extension - not the asset!!). You can think of an extension as the blueprint or rules that enables Gaia to leverage that asset - and in turn makes it easy for you to use it!

Why is the extension creator cool?

Because it enables anyone, whether they are an asset producer, an environmental artist, someone wanting to back up their settings to use between projects, or perhaps just someone just wanting to create and share cool stuff, to easily create and share their setup with anyone!

If you happen to own the resources / asset behind the thing being shared - then it will just work - and if not then just swap them out for ones that you own

 

Fantastic work Adam !,
Definitely a useful feature .

 

An interesting aspect of GX is that it's not just for art assets - watch this space for integration with uConstruct - a very cool building system that leverages your modular building assets to allow your players to create their own structures - just released by @ElroyUnity!!

A bunch of other very useful integration's will some awesome assets will also be released - gorgeous scene and game generation was never so easy as it will be once 1.5 is out !!!

 

Hi Adam, Hi all

Sorry to bother, but once again a stupid question...lol

Is there a possibility for you to make a Gaia "Basic" with only the stamping system, no texturing nothing else but shaping a terrain for Unity 4.3.4???

My main goal is to get a huge raw map with sharp zones i could shape precisely....

Thanks in advance for your answer

 

I might make a plain stamping system. Hadn't really considered it.

 

Dear Adam,
Thanks for your prompt reply.

Actually you would save a lot of people using U4xxx !! Technically i do suppose the stamping system should work without issue on U4xxx.
i'm sure it wouldn't take so long for you to do it and you could sell it a good price! To me upgrading to U5 means too many changes....
You know the stamping system makes the success of Gaia, Populating the terrain, texturing it...there are many Tools, but shaping accurate zones, Gaia is the only one!!
I guess it's time for me to say "Please consider it, please, please....."lol
SO your "plane stamping system" could change my life and i 'll buy it as soon as it's released!

thanks in advance for considering U4xxx Users!!!!

Peace out!

 

Gaia has transformed me from a perfectionist into an extremely anal and never-satisfied perfectionist.

I spend so much time tweaking details, trees and objects to the point where I'm never truly content with what Gaia has helped me create. It's a good problem to have especially because prior to Gaia, my chief complaint was, "Wow, do I really have time to paint all of THAT?"

Just throwing this out there but does anybody have a good handle on finding that balance between too many trees / too few trees and too many details / too few details? (I know it's tough to translate aesthetics into tangible numbers)

 

Not to discourage the use of Gaia, because I have it as well and am using it for terrain generation, but maybe you should consider an alternative to the Gaia foliage spawning system. I'm actually using Landscaper for that as it has a very realistic tree/foliage placement system. I'm still experimenting, but I believe it gives better results.

 

First world problems

Imho this is a completely subjective thing - and then on top of that you need to factor in the performance impact of whats in your mind vs what your target audience hardware can handle.

Nice thing is that you can change the cluster size in your spawner, seed throw and area bounds on your dna, and then experiment with it - if you don't like then clear it, tweak it and try again.

I make my spawners small, with a range of say 256 meters, and then experiment until I am happy. The i hit fit to terrain and run it on the entire scene.

In next version of Gaia you will be able so share settings via Gaia extensions - so it will be even easier - just take one you like and hit a few buttons and you are done.

 

Randomly generated terrain, some Alaskan Cedars from Desktop Tree Pack 1, and exploring new textures for the 1.5 update.

 

Can someone please tell me how to fix this:



This is after making a whole new project, its not letting me run GAIA anymore as it says I need to re-compile something once again. Any help or a fix? thanks