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

Ahh cool thanks for the heads up will check it out

 

I'm finally getting the hang of Gaia and tiling sizes, even without details starting to look nice:


Just need the Distingo asset to remove some final texture pattern problems

 

@DarkXess Wait...these are screenshots inside of Unity? *jaw-drop*

 

Let's hope that this could also be either implemented in a future GAIA version or fixed within GAIA

@Sabathius they are yes, get the lighting and angles just right and you will get the perfect shot

 

As gorgeous as this looks, I dread to think how this affects frame rate!

 

You took the words right off my keyboard

 

Hi,

I dont think that is an area that @AdamGoodrich is going to venture into, for that requires a shader solution and Gaia is not a shader package at all. I personally would rather stick to what is was set out from the start then becoming a computer screen stuck full of sticky note with all add-ons that it was never meant to be.

I used Distingo in the beta, you will see the results and you will just buy it, @ $10 it is going to be like FREE

 

lol I do understand mate, I didn't mean anything by it, was just thinking it does make sense having it all into one package etc. But as you explained its just as good

 

You know what I've got to thank Adam for bringing all of this talent together using his asset and seeing the awe inspiring work everyone is doing with Gaia and other assets combined.
You truly have one of the best assets on the store since it has caused this much artwork.
So far I've seen so many people willing to help each other out and make beautiful scenes.

Just wanted to say thanks again for GAIA and this awesome community.

 

Just wanted to share how important normal are when adding textures to the terrain. I'm still a novice by all accounts and didn't appreciate just how much of a difference they can make. Hopefully this can help someone add depth to flat terrains!

Before:



After:

 

Stunning and thanks for sharing techniques

 

@AdamGoodrich As usual thanks for your involved replies on this thread.

Just checking in. Is full/integrated multi tile support still on track for an end of February release?

 

Awesome Work and Results here, kind of i want to get/see about Grass in Gaia & Unity5 !! BIG THUMBS UP for you

 

Nope - only just getting the 1.5 release out. Wont be starting multi tile until 1.5 is bedded down and working nicely. Will probably release it in smaller chunks so that we don't have the same long time between releases.

 

They were told "don't build your house on the edge of a ravine" but did they listen? Oh noooo....



Not sure why it spawned here. I didn't change any of the spawn settings for small farms.

 

subsidence man

 

Landslide > Natural disaster

 

Don't judge rules by their exceptions, they're not laws - especially not spawning rules.

 

Maybe it's an exterior view of a cave that goes deep below the house above.

 

Lmao. Awesome

 

I'm guessing CryEngine 3 lighting.

 

So I finally had the time to really get my hands dirty with Gaia. Here are a few screenshots of my first attempt at building terrain for an RPG using the classic PC-style "top down" camera and click-to-move:









Anybody know why the transparencies aren't working on all of my broadleaf trees?

 

Nice! You need to hit regenerate on your speedtree models.

 

Hehe - not sure if that is the new version - you need to take the new resources files as well

 

And here is a pretty massive milestone:

The following screen shot was generated out of a scene that I created in Gaia - all default Gaia assets and lighting:



And this next screen shot was generated by @Shawn67 out of his copy of Gaia about 15 minutes later - using TOD as lighting:



Why is this significant - because in order to do this I just shared the session file I used to create my environment with Shawn... (with the embedded preview image this was 400kb) and a few minutes later he had an exact replica of the environment I just created!!

The ability to quickly and easily share scenes this way opens up many possibilities for collaboration, technique sharing, bug fixing etc etc.

As long as you both have the same assets installed in your project it will just work!

 

That is great news. Looking forward to the next update.

 

Is it possible to make it so Gaia spawns grass detail textures in the shape of a + or * ? Basically so that instead of it spawning a single texture, it spawns 2 or 3 so it doesn't look like such a harsh line when viewing it from the 'side' (straight down the texture)?

 

Not really - for that you need custom meshes and the way that Unity does mesh grasses is really bad - the entire thing sways like a mat that slides over the ground in the wind.

The next best thing is to set them your grass textures up the way that Gaia does with billboarding switched off.



If your prepared to take the performance hit you can spawn grass meshes as trees or game objects - but that's not ideal either. Some of the Nobiax grasses seem to work ok this way.

Be interesting to see if others have any better suggestions.

 

Is it do-able, logical to maybe us the default house's in Gaia as place holders and replace them with Blueprint prefabs to end up with complete house's with working interiors?

 

And here's the terrain integrated with my game:





Very, very happy with Gaia so far!

 

very very nice work @TeagansDad - for your nameplates, are you using a worldspace uGUI canvas for each one, or single screenspace canvas? I've found pros and cons to each method.

 

nice portrait ! is the portrait an asset pack in the unity assetstore? my indie game also need such nice portrait, i wonder where you buy it?

 

The old version. The whole thing took about 20 mins. 2 mins to import gaia and standard assets. 2 mins for the scene. 4 mins faffing trying to find ethan's materials/textures and the rest importing Cobus's village interiors to add the table and 2 chairs This is not a complaint. just a testament to how much Cobus's includes in the pack!!

Even though it's just knocked together for a laugh it shows how quick Gaia is when it takes longer to import the assets than to do a scene. The thing is I was trying and to get sparse but it could have added a foliage/prefab rich scene in the same time.

 

Any news on the new version? I cant wait for it

 

Thanks! It's a single canvas. I'm using ORK Framework for the game and I'm letting it take care of the GUI for the time being. It uses a single canvas when using uGUI (it supports both uGUI and Legacy GUI).

No, they're just placeholders -- I can't use these ones in the actual game. I just needed something to use for portraits to prototype the UI.

 

You can do that.

I've set up simple prefabs of houses using just the core building blocks from Cobus' exterior kit and then fed them into Gaia to spawn around the terrain. It's then just a simple case of placing one of the blueprint houses in the same location as one of the 'core' houses and matching the rotation.

 

Great, very nice to see the Village Exteriors Kit used in your game.
It really suits the Top Down style very well
Even though the camera is far away, the geometry displays the textures very well.

Again, very nice designs, nice believable Farm/homestead setups

This is such a major feature that you have successfully implemented.
I do not think everyone is realizing the power of what you have added with this
It is basically a BLUEPRINT type method to share creativity with someone on the other side of the planet should you which to.

This is going to be HUGE for the Unity community, I am very excited about it.

Just something I have seen myself, when I de-activate my firewall tools, I get a HUGE time saved.
@Shawn67 had the same experience and the same advice also gave him a cut down in time to import larger packs.

Thanks for the compliment on the size of the package

Cheers
Cobus

 

Thanks!

The Castle exteriors are next on your roadmap, right?

I take no credit for this. These are simply the results of what Adam set up in the default Gaia spawners.

@AdamGoodrich, what is the easiest way to set up the spawners to create all of the trees as Game Objects on their own layer, rather than being part of the terrain?

The trees play havoc with my camera setup. It's using an RTS-style camera where you can have it follow the player but also pan around the scene. When the camera pans, it follows the terrain using a raycast, which is great for not having the camera ending up inside buildings and mountains, but I don't want the camera shooting up several meters every time it goes over a tree. Also, I need to put the trees on a separate layer so that I can have the raycast used by the click-to-move controller ignore them.

 

Yip, that is part of the next batch that will be updated with

 

Thanks for the reply mate,..

 

Some awesome work from @TerrainBuilder aka Josh Savage - an awesome level designer if you ever happen to be looking for one

 

That's fantastic! nice terrain with mountain borders - this way players can't jump off the terrain and when moving closer to the edge there shouldn't be any cuts in the vision. @AdamGoodrich any chance, you will modify the randomize stamps methods in the future, to create such borders with a less defined terrain in the middle, so one doesn't have to do it manually?

 

you have to give us the details, this is just toooo good!

 

Go to your resources file and add the tree prefabs there. You will need to tweak the settings, fitness etc to match the settings for terrain trees. Then just spawn them as game objects.

FYI, there is no such thing as a texture, detail, tree, gameobject spawner - its all the same bit of code running in the same way - with slight changes only in the code that instantiates the resource into the scene.

So when you crack how one works - you have essentially cracked them all.

 

@AdamGoodrich, thanks! I was wondering if I would be able to just do it that way. Glad to know it's that easy!

Is there any way to apply new Spawn Criteria to multiple prototypes at once? For example, I painted a cobblestone road texture on my terrain to create a road, and now I don't want any trees or grass to spawn on that texture. It's not TOO laborious to go through each of the default prototypes one at a time and set it to check the texture, but if I start adding more trees and/or grasses, it could get very tedious.

Or in the case of roads, would I be better off using some sort of spline tool to create some geometry on top of the terrain, which would also prevent foliage from spawning there.

 

Yep the plan is to refine this before 1.5 release.

I have thought about it but am not sure how to do it - this issue is actually how to work out which resource to apply the changes to - post v1.5 I will review this.

 

I'm really liking Gaia. There's just one minor interface criticism I have. I find the bubble help boxes get in the way.

Hover the mouse over a button for a second, help pops up below pointer, then gets in the way of the button underneath, and doesn't go away until you either move the pointer away from the button then back. Or click on the help box itself. Unfortunately it catches the click and doesn't let you click on what's under it.

Could there be an option added to let us turn the help off? There's something ironic when the thing that is supposed to help, is in fact hindering the workflow.

In the attached picture I moved the mouse at a certain speed over the "Ground" button on my way to the "Reset" button and got it's help... Which covered the "Reset" button!

 

I think the only real way to stop this is to literally go through your copy of the code and remove all the tooltip sections and recompile

 

Wait, I'm confused, did you create the textures from photographs or high-poly sculpts? Or did you maybe post pictures of somebody else's work in a different engine?

And that's great news Adam! A project could have hundreds of pre-defined maps/terrains with a minimal memory footprint. Now if there was a way to automate the creation process with other parameters, strategy games could have a huge variety of battle maps realistically embedded in campaign maps à la Total War.