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

Short answer: Yes, sort of.

Long answer: At this point they are all still the same terrain tile. Once it is stamped it is part of that tile. Then after I'm finished stamping, I'll let SECTR slice the terrains and they will become separate terrains. At that point, Gaia's stamper is pretty much out of the picture. It has already been stamped and is 100% Unity terrain.

Basically the plan is that I'll use the grid as an outline of how the tiles will go together as I plan my stamps and stamp the terrain. It will also give me an idea of how the pieces will fit together with their neighbors and I can strategically plan seams in the middle of valleys so mountain ranges will block distance view and provide additional occlusion which will hopefully help with performance since multiple scenes will be loaded at a time.

But until the terrain is sliced after stamping, I wont be using spawners at all. Spawners should only be run on the small terrains. This will give max coverage. Plus trying to spawn on a 32k terrain will probably lock your computer up and cause it to hate you.

 

WOW, this and the next post are ABSOLUTELY STUNNING man.
Love the lighting setup hugely

I hope you don't mind, I am going to post the pics over in the Village Exteriors Kit Forum
It is just such a good display of the usage of the kit.

I have a weekend -33% SALE on both the Village Interiors Kit & the Village Exteriors Kit

You doing great work

Cheers
Cobus

 

My screenshots with SSAA enabled are 100% black too. Anybody has a tip for us?

 

i don't mind ... thanks for the kind words cobus

 

I left a message to the author of that asset - haven't had a response.

 

Really gorgeous shots - and thanks for your feedback as well. I will incorporate what I can in the 1.5 release. I must admit - i spend more time just exploring now when I create new scenes... its just fun

Stunning

 

Watching this with interest @Shawn67. Thanks very much for sharing

 

lol I have this problem too.. Anymore I pretty much need to make sure I have everything else that I planned to get done finished before I start stamping and testing things. Seems like after I've run all my spawners, I totally lose track of time exploring... lol

No problem. Figured it was something I have played with and with all the large terrain questions, I figured it would be a good thing to put together. If for nothing else, maybe it will spark another branch of creativity for folks. I started out planning to just do ocean with a bunch of islands, but when I looked at the first spawn that I had accidently left at Fit to Terrain, I realized this would be an awesome way to create a continent and use SECTR to break it up into manageable pieces! I did accidentally flatten that terrain though. So I have three screenshots left to share from it, which I'll post mid-week, but the shots after that will be ocean and islands since that is more in lines with plans for my own game. Most of te islands will be multi-tile since the were scanned and based on 2k tile instead of 1k. Some I may extend to 3 or 4k squares. That is the beauty of building large terrain first and then slicing it. easier to make zones which line up with each other without needing some type of stitch algorithm to make the borders line up. Kind of excited to see how it evovles!

Btw.. I told Adam earlier when we were chatting that once the whole tutorial is done, I will convert it into a PDF which I will post here and give to him to post wherever he ends up putting tutorials.

 

HAHA, the kind words just falls out so easy when the results like these appears on the screen

 

Hi, is there any way to make an infinite terrain? I mean, once you get the limit of a terrain, there is another procedurally generated terrain. Thanks.

 

This is possible with other assets such as Terrain Slicing & Dynamic Loading Kit and World Streamer. SECTR may have this capability (haven't tested it) but the main issue is with floating point errors which, thankfully, is easily addressed within the aforementioned assets.

Personally, I use the Dynamic Loading Kit and works easily with Gaia. Keep in mind multiple terrains won't be supported until the next update of Gaia but there are a couple of workarounds which I'm hoping to share. I believe Adam has already talked about how to do this in previous posts.

 

Okk, thank you

 

Im gonna give World Streamer a look

 

Spent some time overnight testing the new POI (Point of Interest) system that is in the next Gaia update. I converted the 3DForge ComboInn blueprint into a Gaia POI and spawned it through Gaia's spawners on a couple of new stamps I created.

The first one is a night shot. You can see the lights in the windows of the lonely inn which some fool built on the reef surrounding Bora Bora in the Leeward Islands, which you can see a silhouette of in the background.



The next two screenshots are on a stamp created from heightmaps of the island Huahine in also part of the Leeward Islands archipelagos. The first shot shows the same inn POI at sunset, the setting sun poking rays through the trees and the second is of sunrise on the other side of the island, no buildings in that one. (sorry Cobus)



Basically with the POI system, all of the ground objects are added to the POI separately so when the POI is spawned, each individual part in the POI will adjust to the terrain directly underneath it. Likewise, if you have stacked objects that are separate prefabs, the spawner will add the Y value on the prefab as a Y offset. So when you create your own POIs, you will need to make sure you are working on a flat plane with the ground level being at 0. If you have posts or anything you want sunk into the ground, a negative Y value will sink it into the terrain that much. Adam really outdid himself with this system!

 

Why do you promote SpeedTree? In reading the Unity3d forums and reviews over the past year I have heard others say they have problems. Such as.

1. Good look but not good in games, even on high end PC.
2. Missing Features: No vertical billboards, (line from above), billboards pop with orbit camera, dotted matrix when switching from geometry to billboard. No response to turbulence, Pulse Magnitude, and Pulse frequency in Unity Windzone.
3. Trees require adjustment that can only be accomplished by subscribing to their service.
4. Good for screen shots, but not in a real game.
5. Just not practical, and overpriced.

I wish speed tree would respond to its rating comments, but they don't. Personally, I don't have the time to devote to figure out complex assets that don't just plain work. That's why I bought GAIA, though I already owned Terrain Composer and World Composer.

What's the straight scoop?

 

Thanks for saying that POI stands for point of interest. The acronyms were killing me.

 

I'm using them in my scenes and so far I'm not having any of these problems and I'm running with an older GeForce GT610 card with non-dedicated/shared memory. I think the only thing that might be saving me is I have 20gb of RAM, but it isn't even fast ram, it is the old DDR3 stuff.

One thing I do with SpeedTrees is drag the ones I use into a scene, strip all the colliders except for the trunk, and make a new prefab. I think one of the things that kills performance with them is they have colliders on EVERY leaf group. You start spawning a lot of trees and you are pretty much overloaded with colliders! lol And it doesn't take modeler sub to do it.

I haven't had any problems at all with my orbit cam. I'm using Adventure Camera Rig by Ootii and have never had the issue you describe when my camera collides with a tree.

The only adjustment I'm aware of is the palm trees not sinking into the ground enough to compensate for slight grades in terrain. To my understanding, that has been fixed. Not sure if they have updated in standard assets or not but I think the sample pack asset (which contains the same models that come with Unity) has been updated. @Dannyoakes, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I do wish they were more affordable. I'm not sure they are overpriced or if it is case where the Asset Store is generally underpriced. I really think the latter is the case. I can't imagine doing large model kits and selling them for the prices that artists are charging. I really am shocked that the 3DForge Interior and Exterior kits aren't at least 4 times the price they are with all of the work Cobus puts into them and the sheer volume that they contain. I really do think SpeedTree would make up for lowering the pricing with volume of sales though. I'd really be surprised if they didn't.

With that said, the modeler is an excellent value if you can afford the $19 a month and you actually make use of it. Any trees you make, you are free to use even after you cancel your sub. And any trees you own, you can make lots of different varieties of them. I would recommend waiting to sub when you know you are going to have time to use it. Don't do like I did, sub and then let yourself get distracted by other projects. lol Plus you get three free trees a month (not full sets of the tree but you get the modeler files and one tree model for each tree. And I'm told, even though one is mobile, one is desktop, and one is hero, you can pull them in and adjust details to make them all mobile, or all desktop, or if just doing screenies then you can make them all hero.. (lol) Or you can make copies so you have one of each detail level.

 

I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip. I think I'll give the trees another try and see if this helps performance at all.

Also, I know 3DForge makes some great assets and I think they are all worthy of use in any project, but I'd also like to give a shout out to another great asset that fits well with Gaia and has that good ole Skyrim influence. The asset is the Medieval World Creation Kit. You can check it out at the following link.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/36555

 

@Shawn67, thanks for the great response. I'm going to give them a go!

 

Because I love creating beautiful environments.

They have had their share of issues - like most things new to Unity 5 - and I know from speaking with @Dannyoakes that there is more goodness coming down the track. It's my understanding that SpeedTree is actually dependent on Unity for the in game implementation - which must be frustrating for SpeedTree. UE4 seems to have nailed it.

From what I have seen, and I am relatively new to Unity, creating beautiful environments that also perform well is a balancing act. Its easy to create something that performs poorly, and much harder, but not impossible, to create something that performs well.

I read that SpeedTree will benefit from GPU instancing in Unity 5.4 - and am looking forward an improvement in performance that should come from that. Theres some limited info here.

 

I've been experimenting to create some island and archipelago environments. Here's some of my results:









Then there's one shot at dawn.


And one shot at night.


The problem here is that AQUAS doesn't receive fog from Tenkoku for some reason, so I had to keep fog at a minimum, to avoid hard edges between the terrain and the water, that's something I'll have to dive into very soon.

I'll try using Gaia's new spawning modules to spawn some villages at shore and see how that works out.

 

Wow, fantastic, especially the first ones, exactly how an ocean should look. Are you using the new shader Distingo as well?

 

Nope, there's just a bit of RTP in it. I'm not all up to date with all the upcoming assets - up to now I didn't even know, what distingo is.

 

Distingo has not be released yet has it, still under Beta test or somit

 

I'm using Unity 5.3.1, and the Speedtrees in that version still aren't fixed. No worries though. If you're going to make custom prefabs anyway to eliminate unnecessary colliders, you can lower the LODs and billboards with respect to the root tree object at the same time. Here are what I use:





As you can see, the pivots for the Standard Conifer and Palm are right at the bottom, but by moving the Palm components down 0.25 units, and the Conifer's 0.5 units, slopes should no longer be a problem. I've also removed all of the extra colliders, leaving just the trunks on the Conifer and Palm, and a total of 3 colliders on the Broadleaf, due to the larger branches and roots. Losing up to 10 colliders per tree has got to help performance though.

Once done, save them all as new prefabs, make a new Gaia resource file using them (preferably some place that won't get overwritten when you upgrade), and you're good to go.

 

It has been submitted to asset store and is waiting to be approved...

 

I just did another SpeedTree test. This time, I took the Broadleaf mobile and did the following things:

1. Removed the 2 extra colliders for the leaves
2. Turned off shadow casting and shadow receiving on all except LOD 0.
3. Turned off light probes on all LODs since I'm using realtime lighting anyway
4. Changed shadow settings to medium resolution, close fit, no cascades, and range 30

Now, I am getting a solid 60 fps. So, I think I finally solved my SpeedTree issues and I look forward to using it in my projects.

 

For you other SpeedTree veterans out there, I have a question. One glaring thing I'm noticing is that the wind effects on the trees is drastically different from LOD1 to LOD0. When a tree is at LOD1, the wind is whipping the trees around like they are in a gale force hurricane, but then when the trees go to LOD0, the leaves are barely moving at all. What's up with that? Is there some way to fix that so the wind looks consistent?

 

I had that problem when I first started using speedtrees lst summer but it kinda went away... Not sure what they issue was that was causing it. I'll try to corner Danny if one of the other speedtree vets doesn't know the fix.

 

Sorry if this has been covered already but is it possible to use Gaia with a terrain that already has heights or a splatmap? I'm interested in using noise to generate base terrain and then applying stamps to enhance the base terrain.

Also is there any information yet on runtime generation (or is that on the roadmap)?

 

I saw that too. I tried to correct it by adjusting the wind zone, and I broke something. Framerate dropped to about 7. I had to redo the terrain to get it working right again.

 

I think it may just have been an issue with the free sample model that is packaged with Gaia. I went ahead and bought the full mobile tree pack from SpeedTree and the first tree I've tried doesn't have that issue at all. It transitions smoothly and looks great. And my performance is still smooth.

 

@dogmachris is that AQUAS water lite your using? or the buyable "Set" ?

I've really not found a good enough water system yet apart from CETO which looks beautiful BUT expensive.
So I'm looking for the next best one

 

@dogmachris is the author of Aquas so I would imagine it is probably the full pack that is for sale and not Lite. I've been working with him some the past couple of days and have been working on some island stamps, so I should have more screenshots showing it in the next few days. It is pretty lightweight and I don't seem to have the performance issues I had with Suimono or Water4, but I think there may be a few things they can do that Aquas can't, at least at this point... Not sure what they are yet since I'm still trying to figure it all out but it is decent so far. Perfect solution for my inland waters. Not 100% sure on ocean yet but we'll see. Awesome support though!

 

Could be.. I never install standard assets with any pack. I've had too many issues with versions of stand assets from old Unity versions totally screwing up my projects. I REALLY wish Unity would implement a dependency system in the asset store where you could flag standard asset or assets from other authors that your packages are dependent on. The changed something in 5.3 and it is not a total pain in the #$%@ to go uncheck things now... some things it lets you deselect an entire foldout and others you have to drill down and uncheck individual files.. I think someone must have screwed up there because it is totally asinine... lol

 

I don't know the current status of this one, but it's free.

 

lol didn't notice he was the author haha, thanks for that. What I am really wanting to find is a decent water system with shoreline. I find so many water systems that just can't get the shoreline to work right. Nice, Calm, and a little foam to make it look realistic will be just fine

Thanks, will check it out

 

Gaia works fine with existing terrains.. The only catch is.. Well only two catches are, one - the center of your terrain needs to be at x position 0 and z position 0. If 0,0 is in the bottom corner, Gaia will throw an error. So you basically want to look at the width and length of your terrain, divide it in half and make it negative. For example a 2048x2048 terrain should have -1024 in both the x and z positions. That will put 0,0 in the center of the terrain.

The other thing, if there is a water plane already in your scene, take note of the Y position. Then go into your Gaia Defaults and your Gaia Resources files. (Located in Gaia -> Data folder) Locate the field for Sea Level and plug that number in there. If you leave it at the defaults, it will spawn everything in the wrong place thinking your sea level is, I think it defaults to either 100 or 30. I can't remember.. If you have no water plane, set your sea level in those files to 0 to ensure the spawners are set up properly.

 

@Shawn67 or @AdamGoodrich , hey guys one thing I am having trouble with is converting my World Composer Unity Terrain to work with Gaia spawners?

Yes, I've gone back to using World Composer as it is dead easy to gets the height data and create a terrain . Actually, I would rate it as easy as using Gaia and will be finally be adding a 5 star review for it.

I was unhappy for some time as the quality of the raw height image created which was too blocky like minecraft. Ironically, if I'd read the manual I would have found that because I was over-riding the default satellite height data (by manually adjusting the resolution); I could have saved myself a lot of frustration, and it was user related error creating the problem.

I also discovered that by retaining the default 14 zoom of the USA resolution, I could actually improve the default 11 zoom quality of Scotland. That and also creating 10.73km/sq terrains at 2049 x 2049.

The problem I am having though, is if I use the Unity Terrain created by World Composer, Gaia is unable to recognise this a terrain, and will not allow spawning of any type? I haven't got the very short error now, but will post it when I get home. I was wondering if anyone else has come across this?

 

If it is vanilla unity terrain then Gaia can use it. However in v1, if the terrain settings were different than the Gaia default settings then you would have an issue. In v1.5 the settings are picked directly up from the terrain.

Your welcome to try 1.5 with it if you want - just PM me with your invoice number.

 

Hi, what's the best way to spawn detail in all areas EXCEPT a specific area please? I have an example terrain where I don't want to spawn detail within the arena area for example, but I want detail elsewhere.

I think I was hoping for an ability to clear details within a bounding box area but couldn't find anything like that

 

Hello Adam,

is your next update going to allow us to work on the terrain from any location in the world?

 

I figured out the mask option, painted the arena grass area with a different texture and only applied detail to the grass area, then repainted the arena area with grass afterwards

 

You can do that now. The terrain party video shows you how. It's been linked to in the past few pages.

 

Seems to me terrain.party still has no heightmaps on europe. What video am I missing?

 

If terrain.party has no Europe then you are out of luck.

 

I have just tried Germany and France, and both have height maps when you choose MapQuest Satellite or Map Quest Street Map or Open Street Map; however the 2 USGS maps don't work

I have now PM'd you

By the way, the error for reference is:

KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary.
System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.Int32,System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Gaia.HeightMap]].get_Item (Int32 key) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/Dictionary.cs:150)
Gaia.Spawner.CheckLocation (Vector3 locationWU, Gaia.SpawnInfo& spawnInfo) (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:1623)
Gaia.Spawner+<RunAreaSpawnerIteration>c__Iterator1.MoveNext () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:893)
Gaia.Spawner.EditorUpdate () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:347)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication.Internal_CallUpdateFunctions () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:270)

 

@AdamGoodrich - Is this the error caused by the terrain not being centered? (center point at 0,0 and instead 0,0 is the bottom corner) I can't remember but I don't believe Nathaniel centers the TC/WC terrains.

 

Was busy applying detail to the terrain and got a blue screen of death, now I can't get into my Unity project argh! Unity.exe caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005) just reimporting everything to try resolve Clearly not a Gaia thing of course!

 

Although it was my terrain which was messed up in the end, got back in now though and can rebuild the scene thankfully!