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

Kia ora

I'm beginning to get the feel I'm killing my project test, I made ALL my landscape textures (old habbits from Skyrim I guess) 32Bit TGA files,.. bit of over kill and maybe not very optimised

 

I'm thinking for yourself it'd be less pressure putting things to bed before a release too. While we can't get continuous delivery inside the asset store, at least it means you can put a smaller featureset to bed and focus on new stuff (or make some progress on the bigger features depending on how your source control/branching strategy are organised)

 

Smaller increments for releases, yes, but same huge enthusiasm. It's best when a dev enjoys his work.

 

What are best practices for the hard edges of the end of the environment? I bought Horizon[ON] but have not yet been able to make it work with Gaia.

 

About the only alternative I can think of to Horizon[ON] is to place a terrain or a plane of some sort slightly underneath your main terrain, and have it extend out as far as your camera's far clipping plane.

 

Thank you for replying. Amazing we get all this with a few clicks of buttons in Gaia. Can't wait for the next release!

 

Smaller more rapid releases will be my strategy going forward - am working crazy hours at moment to bed the next release down - and I am also paranoid about releasing bugs. Will push this release and maybe push another in a week or so to resolve anything I might have missed in the final push

That said - I am incredibly excited about what you are about to get - its got more depth on the procedural generation side - plus handy things like lighting and camera fx setups, and a screen shotting system that takes you back to where you took the screen shot - and then the real power will be how nice it is to use the new sessioning and extension systems.

 

I have seen some scenes with horizon set up with Gaia - it was awesome. I will get my head around this after release and maybe i can generate an extension that makes this whole process easier.

 

I've been playing around with Gaia a bit tonight and thought I'd do something a little different. Here's a basic terrain I setup with Gaia and Tenkoku... No trees or grass, just some basic textures, and a custom terrain shader for the snow accumulation.



I love how easy Gaia makes getting an interesting terrain setup with so little effort. A little detailing with some proper lighting and you almost don't need any other filler objects in a barren winter wasteland like this. The real test for me will come when I try to use Gaia to build a real world terrain, though from what I see so far it should make a lot of that process much easier for me.

 

Just did some playing around testing some of the features due out for 1.5 in Adam's RC7 release he gave the team to test. The two screenshots below were taken using the new screenshotter he put into Gaia.

One of the things that Adam has been working on for 1.5 is the ability for asset publishers to easily create resource files to go along with their packs in the hopes that we might get more quality publishers tagging their packs as Gaia ready. To test this, I loaded Manufacture K4's Asia pack into my project and did the following.

1. I loaded his demo scene and then went to my Gaia folder. Opening up the Data folder, I highlighted the GaiaResources.asset file and used CTRL-D to duplicate the file. Then I appended MK4 Asia Pack to the end of the file name.
2. Then with the new resources file displayed in my inspector, I clicked the Get Resources from Terrain button. When it asked if I wanted to replace what was already in the file, I confirmed to replace them. All I wanted in the file was the new terrain textures, new grasses, and new trees from the Asia pack.
3. Since Game Objects are not stored in Unity's terrain data file, I then dragged the prefabs from all of the rocks in the pack as well as building_01 and building_08.
4. At this point, I have a loaded resources file. I have not touched any of the fitness settings at all. I'm letting it use all of Gaia's default settings.
   
5. Now I move back to the scene with the terrain I had stamped. The initial stamp of my island is the stamp I created from the Isle_01 demo scene in Big Environment Pack 1.5 by Philipp Schmidt. I then used another new Gaia 1.5 feature, the Session Manager. In the session manager there is an option to use the stamp randomizer. I clicked this option on and adjusted it to randomize up to 10 additional stamps selecting from the hills and mountain stamps weighing heavier towards hills. I ran the randomizer and then played the session to apply the stamps.
6. I then adjusted my Gaia Manager to use the new Asia Pack resources file instead of the default resources file. Once that was done, I selected to create my spawners from the list of Standard options.
   
7. I didn't touch anything else or make any adjustments. I just went to the group spawner and here are the results. (Asset list follows the screenshots)

Assets used in this test are Gaia (of course), ground textures/grasses/trees/buildings/rocks are from Manufacture K4's Asia pack, Time of Day for sky, Suimono for water, Scion and SSAO Pro camera effects, Ootii Motion Controller and Adventure Camera Rig, and Mixamo's Alpha.

Screenshots are just quickies and everything was spawned using the new 1.5 default spawner settings. I didn't adjust any of the fitness settings on the plants/textures/grasses/game objects. And from the way Adam talked, he is still planning to tweak them a bit more between now and release.

At any rate, I just wanted to share how easy and painless this process was. I didn't have to manually add all the trees, grasses, etc since I could quickly retrieve them from the demo terrain's terrain data file. Not adjustments to spawn settings. All in all, I pulled in a complete pack into my project, stamped my island with the foundation I wanted and then used randomizer to make it unique, and ran the spawners, all in under an hour! And that included importing the Asia pack into my project!

Gaia is a LIFESAVER!

 

Very cool and well done Shawn!!

 

Awesome stuff Justin!!

 

Excellent, thanks, and sorry for moaning - didn't mean to be negative, got overwhelmed by teaser anticipation and the way time slips away.

 

It is pretty close. We've been testing a few things tonight.. Including the creation of extensions which allow us to share resource files and spawners. As long as the person we share with has the assets from the same pack, sharing spawner "blueprints" is simple!

 

I just saw something happen that I have had a vision about for a long time - it happened without prompting - and is a major major step forward!

We were talking in beta chat about Shawns great work with Manufactura K4 - Asia Far East Environment pack, and Dan says - hey I have that asset and would like to use your setup - can you send me your session.

So i say to Shawn - just use the Extension Creator and make an extension out of it... 5 mins later he drops a .cs file into the chat. I drag and drop it into my project... Unity compiles it, and now not only do i have all the resources set up and configured to that environment pack - but i also have all of his Spawner configurations as well. All the great work that Shawn did to set that resource up is now available for me to leverage in my project. All i have to do is drop that asset in my project as well and its ready to go!

Its all nicely configured and exposed as a new extension.. and being code based its a moment in time - you will never lose that setup!!



I love it when a plan comes together!!

 

You watched too much A Team as a kid That is a really interesting feature, very cool indeed.

I hope someone can help with this question please? If I want my trees to be axe chop-able for the user, would I need to load my trees as trees, or objects to be able to attach a script to the prefab?

 

Hello,

what are the differences between TerrainComposer and GAIA ? (the interface part is not concerned by this question).

I ask community and creator because TerrainComposer has special offer today.

+++

 

Currently the main one for me is ease of use. Gaia is easy to get results with. I have yet to get any results I'm satisfied with using TC. TC also has multi-tile support. It is coming in Gaia, but no definite date. Just that it is next on the list after this upcoming release.

I think I saw Nathaniel mention the RTP support for multiple tiles but I really think that is leveraged out with all the partnerships Adam has been working on as well as the extensions support that is coming in 1.5. RTP still works with Gaia but it doesn't have built in integration like TC does. That doesn't mean similar support for it or ATS or similar shader packs might not appear built in down the road.

 

World Machine is actually the real asset to compare against.

TC allows for higher visual quality, but it has poor terrain generation so you really have to use it with World Machine, which is expensive ($249 really) Gaia is easier to use and has everything built in, but lacks the AAA quality of World Machine.

I personally like Gaia very much (more than any other asset I have) and I think it is worth what I spent. I love being able to generate complete and populated terrains immediately. Truly awesome.

TBH, I think there might be a case for focusing on mobile games which could be a real sweet spot for Gaia. That's just a hunch, though. If not, perhaps the sweet spot isn't so much games as people who want to play in Unity and generate beautiful terrains as a hobby.

I honestly think that may be the future, TBH. Unity/Unreal these engines will probably never serve the Skyrim/Witcher 3/Genre defining titles. For that you have Creation Engine or Red Engine or whatever. You'll always need to really push the limits and Unity/Unreal can't do that as they are held back by investing in ease of use.

So what are Unity/Unreal? Indie game makers, hobbyists, etc. Prioritizing ease of use over visual quality will probably win out every time. Just look at the popular assets on the store. Playmaker for example. Programming by visual scripting

 

I thought about grabbing TC, but Adam's support, speed of development and attention to detail has me pretty convinced Gaia will be the answer to my terrain needs Gaia is still very much under development and believe it will be the absolute go to asset for all things terrain in the future.

In regards to Unity, while it's still pretty new in the market and definitely has a lot of room for improvements, it does have a few what I'd call genre defining games...Rust for survival and Hearthstone for card games, and more and more larger studios are starting to use it. While there will always be specialized, proprietary engines that do certain things better, I think Unity is definitely coming into it's own as a very powerful and capable engine.

 

hello,

concerning map import from google map or others, is it working ?

Adam, for you: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=55779#more-55779

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I don't think its wise to compare the two. I think having both are good. $22 was really great deal for TC.

Yeah, that's a fair point. I guess when I say "genre defining" I mean in terms of visual quality. When it comes to innovating in clever game play, unity will be great because you don't have to invest as much in visuals for such things.

I think Indies who use unity should think about that in their games. Worry less about having the best visuals (ie, beating out Witcher or whatever) and rather have the most innovative game play.

Gaia works very well for that, because you can get a very good visual quickly so you have time to focus on new ideas with regards to game play.

 

Very cool... makes my day to see stuff like this!! Blimey those guys have raised some money!!



Just read a little more - Shroud of the Avatar is the new game from Richard Garriott, the guy behind the Ultima series!! I remember my grades dipping one time - such awesome games!!

 

Thanks for that heads up - that was a bit of a blast for the morning

You can grab terrains from http://terrain.party/. You need to convert the pngs to stamps by scanning them - and for Unity to recognise the PNG's I have encapsulated them inside of photoshop files. A small levels adjustment will remove a lot of the jaggies in the image - which will give you a better result when you use the scanner to scan them and import them into Gaia.

 

I just refined the process - here are some quick environments I put together. Will do a video on how shortly!

Did a quick tour - Yosemite, Devils Tower, Monument Valley

 

OH. MY. GOD.
Do you realize how easy that makes my life? Where did that website come from? That's the greatest thing I've seen since forever. When I think about the hoops you used to have to jump through to get DEM data just a year or two ago (registering on agency websites, sorting through satellite datasets, matching up coordinates, looking through archaic preview files, downloading and converting... ) What used to take a couple hours now took me all of 2 minutes!

 

Added in a few tweaks



Tenkoku for lighting of course @chingwa

 

Tried this. When I download a file it is in png format, so I change it to raw format and when I import it to a Unity Terrain, I get this..

 

Try wrapping the png file in a .psd and then adding that into your project

 

You need to make sure your byte order is set properly, both on export and import, they need to match. So if you save it as a PC byte order, then import it with the mac byte order, you will get results similar to above. Make sure to import it with the PC byte order setting.

Or if you want to use it with gaia, just save it as a psd like @smada luap suggested, and use it as a stamp.

 

This is so cool. Sadly I had asked elsewhere what Terrain program to use and was suggested to use Terrain Composer and used up the last bit of funds.. Don't get me wrong it looks like a powerful tool but I only want to do simple stuff as simple as possible. I will be spending weeks trying figure it all out sadly.

I will keep an eye on this overtime. I'm trying make the most simple designs like so:

 

I will do you a video later today to show how I created these scenes. You need to actually convert it to an IBM order raw file.

 

Adam I no longer need your help...Its fixed the issue I had with 5.3, I reinstalled Unity, and then GAIA and the issue is resolved.... So as I thought it was a bug with Unity.

 

I have used Horizon On, with GAIA as well. that's a odd issue he is having... I would contact the Dev, he normally is helpful.

 

Make sure you contact the Dev for Horizon On, I use GAIA with it for PC, Console and Android, with no real issues, and yes issues can happen regardless, so I would contact Peter and ask him about it. See what he has to say for a fix.

 

This worked for me for png to raw: http://fiji.sc/Downloads#Fiji Just load and save as raw.

 

Hi
This is really an amazing asset. So glad that I purchased it. Nice that updates are free. I have only tried using it a little bit but the stamping feature to create terrains was incredible. Not sure how the developer does it. This really takes Unity to a new level. Give him a year and I am sure he could create a new Unity

Anyway my question is about creating pathways in your very convincing procedural terrain. Most of the examples I have seen do not have paths or roads in them. I am mainly interested in creating paths with variation in the edges like natural pathways. Would be interested in what other people have done in this regard.

 

As promised - here is the tutorial on how to ingest real world terrain from terrain.party and use it with Gaia.

I also show off some of the new features in Gaia 1.5. Enjoy

 

For those interested - here are some screenies from the environment i generated in the tutorial.











Great SpeedTrees, great Grasses, pretty Houses, great Rocks, great Textures and lovely lighting. Not too shabby for 15 mins work

 

Thanks for the tutorial Adam, 15 mins for you would be much longer for me until I get the hang of all those settings but the results of your exploring are simply outstanding. When 1.5 comes out there are going to be some more fantastic screenshots appearing, nice work.

 

Yeah - I was more trying to show off how you can leverage terrain party to get nice real world terrains. Btw... even though I show off some of the cool new things in version 1.5, the terrain party techniques work for version 1.

 

Yeah, that's really amazing stuff. For anyone doing open world games this is probably the best asset. Can't wait for terrain stitching!

Here's an interesting paper on erosion, btw: http://hpcg.purdue.edu/bbenes/papers/Benes02WSCG.pdf There's a bunch of others too.

Erosion is probably one of the most critical features in World Machine.

 

Thanks. I will check it out.

 

GAIA can texture fast, glad this was posted.... 15 mins wow!. Looks pretty darn good for that time for sure. I love that GAIA is the easiest tool for newbies , and you don't have to spend hours reading a manual to follow along, took me 10 mins to learn GAIA ..

I didn't have to train any one either in my team where all other tools like TC, WC, and World Machine I had to spend hours doing so, GAIA, I gave them the link to some video's and they where good to go...

Keep up the good work... I used to love TC for terrains, but now I hardly use it these days...since GAIA.. Can't wait for terrain slicing, hopefully Perlin maps. which I seen in the new Video.. Do you have plans to have Gaia make there own normal's maps?
I would like to use just one tool to be honest..

 

What would Gaia look like with base prime colors. Like just Green, Brown, Grey, Sand Color lol, etc. Anyone feel like trying that as an example?



I guess Blue as well for water hehe.

But just wondering if anyone felt like doing fast sample of what a cartoon looking world would be like.

 

After lurking a few weeks in this forum and reading every page I guess it's now my turn to post my experiences with Gaia and give something back to this awesome community.

In the past 1+ year I've been programming a magic themed PVP style game (not nearly close to being finished) just for the fun of it. I was originally inspired by a youtube channel run by quill18creates and set out to do some happy coding.
All worked out well but at a certain stage you simply need terrain to make your magic spells working. I've tried another terrain building asset which was good but beyond my capabilities to handle properly. When my first person controller asset also failed (probably same reason) I paused for a few months... until Gaia and this forum came along. I was so motivated by the enthusiasm and sharing of tips in this forum that I had to restart my effort. The assets you have been mentioning saved my hobby project. So a few weeks later here we are.

What did I create? Here's a short video I captured yesterday. Hope you like it:

And two accompanying screenshots:




The assets used are: GAIA terrain creation, Adventure Camera and Motion Controller (ootii), Particle Playground (Polyfied), Suimono Water System + Tenkoku Dynamic Sky (Tanuki Digital), Fantasy Village Pack 1 (Mindscape 3D), BIG Environment Pack (Philipp Schmidt), HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol 1 + 2 (turboscalpeur), Realrock Vol I (MotuProprio), Standard Assets (Unity), The Blacksmith Characters (Unity), Super Sampling SSAA (Flow Fire Games), Scion Filmic Post Processing (Jove Software).

Sounds used from Freesound.org: Evening in the forest – reinsamba, Air portal – humanoide7000, Campfire_01.wav - matucha.

It's definitely far from finished (you'll see and hear quite a few defects) but I felt the time was right to give something back to this community.

I've compiled a short document with some of the "issues" I've encountered while building this demo in the past three weeks. Hopefully it will prevent others from falling into the same pitfalls.

Note: I've been using Unity 5.2.3 which seems to be a pretty stable release.

p.s. Next stop: guess how many star review of Gaia?

 

1/5? haha clearly 5/5

Thanks for sharing those images and the video looks really nice.

 

That's awesome!

Just a general question though, any know what causes that shadow flickering at ~10s in the video?

From goodgulfs doc:

Issue: flickering terrain
Cause: ??
Resolved:

• (See Nov 11 post in Gaia forum): select rendering path = deferred (see project settings | player settings) and set color space=linear if you’re at it. Select HDR on main camera.
  
  
• It’s better but not all is resolved:

@Goodgulf , is the flicker in the video before or after you made the changes?

 

Hi Blazespinnaker, I thought is was gone after making the changes, actually pretty sure about it. I suspect adding one of the other assets reintroduced the problem.

 

Wow - awesome work and thanks so much for sharing! You have done some things differently to me - and I quite like how big the rocks are - I had already made them bigger in the next release - will make them bigger again based on how you have used them

The flickering issue can potentially be mitigated I think by setting the far clip plane on your camera. Some other people can probably comment on this better than i.

Thanks also for your comment on the tips - I would really like this forum to be a place where people drop in to share their creativity and knowledge. This forum is all about creating a space where we can all succeed!