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

Gaia just grabs unity standard effects, adds them to the camera, and configures them to some pleasing defaults. There is no requirement to use them - the intention was to provide new comers with a nice starting point.

So question is whether or not the other assets being used have an issue with standard unity camera effects. I thought they were a nice value add.

 

I am going to modify the session file so that you can adjust the sea level there - i find this annoying as well

EDIT - DONE - Will be in patch release either today or tomorrow. Its actually rather cool to see the entire scene adjust properly to changes in sea level.

MORE EDIT - Lowered default sea level to 50m. I was never hugely keen on the deeper sea anyway. Was doing this as a test as much as anything else.

Quite a nice little randomly generated island

 

The issue is in fact with UFPS. UFPS has a 2nd camera that is used to render the weapons and helps prevent weapons from clipping through objects directly in front of the player. Once I disable this camera, all of the pretty effects Gaia adds work just fine

 

This may not work correctly when used with existing terrains then. As I said, I set sea level in both the Defaults and Resources files I was using before adding Gaia spawners to an existing terrain. Since Gaia didn't actually create this terrain, maybe it's not reading the Defaults data first?

Just to be clear, the GameObject involved is a large tarmac that wasn't spawned by Gaia. It was in the scene already. As such it has no DNA file, just a mesh collider. Is that a problem? (Not that it's a BIG problem. I can just delete any stray grass manually. I was just wondering why it wasn't being stopped by the presence of the mesh.)

Thanks. I'm going to go over my settings again tomorrow when I'm fresh in case I missed something also. I've already tried deleting and re-importing the new SpeedTree assets I've been trying to add. I'll see if there's anything else that can be done differently.

 

Some screenies, still playing around with this and working out things, especially on getting rid of the foggy whiteness at night though this is surely down to Tenkoku Dynamic Sky. Loving the update so far, also used in the images are Distingo, HQ Photographic Textures One & Two, FERNS World, and of course GAIA

Edit: fixed the foggy whiteness by disabling the global fog and using the fog by tenkouku.

 

For those that asked for it - there will also be a grass splatmap exporter in the patch release

 

About my Grasses, thanks to have purchased them @DarkXess and @docsavage !

Thanks Adam & Shawn for the support and sharing your experiences

I'm currently on holidays, and i can't being active here until the begining of March. Month where will come new updates on my 3 Grasses Assets, a lot of new improvments, new Textures, a Turboscalpeur's Grass Forum etc etc.

As its out of thread, i'll give all the informations/requests/support/answers etc.. as well on my Forum !
What i can suggest fastly now, is to you to buy ssaa currently at 13$ on Madness Sales, so far better with the Grasses, i guess (i'm not coder) you should be able to screen within' on Gaia by deleting or desactivating the Screenshot Script from ssaa to make functioning the one from Gaia (preventing the black screens), btw its functioning perfectly away from Screenshots, build your Projects/Games etc.

Good SSAO and shaders as Scion and ColorfulFX will help you too still from my experience.

A shot taken fastly some dayz ago on Gaia old build with only some Textures from HQ1 and didn't tweaked my Spawners so much, by tweaking more carefully those last one you will be able to have a lot of great results and variants:


I will provide too, the most sooner as possible Grasses Extensions for Gaia.
That shot is only a very little example of what you can do with my Grasses and by only using them as billboards, so we will see with custom Meshes until where we could go.
I may work too on Meshes on Springtime.
I forgot you can use on Gaia InfiniGrass by @nasos_333 even if i'm still not advanced within', but i guess it should be useful.

Congrats Adam, for the Update, Stars and all the great news coming, i'm happy
Keep it up for everybody, getting evolving Gaia and sharing our experiences within'!

See you soon

turboscalpeur

 

Hi there:
Sorry for my English, I use google translator.

First congratulations for the asset, is incredibly practical.

A "little problem" I am having is with "spawners":

I explain:

When spawn trees or objects, in the hierarchy, a gameobject is created as a child of "spawner". At the moment there are many objects on the terrain, performance can drop a lot, because they have selected all gameobjects. This makes it very uncomfortable to push spawn again.

Another suggestion:

Add an option to spawn in at one time a certain number of objects. This avoids having to spawn too many times.

Thanks for all

Best regards

 

Yep I have some ideas on how to do this so that you don't get the slow down. I am planning a patch release shortly, and will see if i can get this in.

 

Thanks for considering =)

 

Hello, Is there a way to do something like biomes like have a snowy area, a swamp area, a desert area, etc or would that need to be each in separate terrains and need to be merged together?

 

That would have to be done via separate terrains and then stitched together, the bigger the terrain though don't forget that the more cpu/ram/etc usage it's going to use, I recently got this World Streamer and then stitching it using another of their assets called Multiple Terrain Brush or the Terrain Stitcher which can all help to overcome the usage and also stitching things together.

I myself was actually thinking similar, but in ways as would GAIA be able to make multiple terrains in one scene or so and then stitch together using another asset as such?

 

I've never tried that before due to Unity's limitations with dealing with the texturing. Technically it should work. You would just need to make sure your spawners are only covering the biomes you want to deal with. I played around with doing this early in beta, but it was for everything except the ground textures. Spawners do not have to cover the whole tile. they can be resized to be smaller. Gaia will defintely do it but your performance may be pretty crappy.

With this approach, you are still going to be facing the same issues with regards to performance. Instead of making multiple tiles and stitching them together, you'd be better off stamping one huge terrain and then slicing them to use with something like Sectr (start of a tutorial in my signature) or one like you mentioned, World Streamer where you stream from scene to scene. Sliced and in separate scenes, you don't have to worry about a huge terrain. You then only need to worry about the terrains that will actually be loaded in memory.

I'm late getting next tutorial part out because I've been working non-stop on my project that I hope to reveal by (or during) this coming weekend. But I will take a day and get back to it over the weekend.

 

Yea its kind of what I meant, just giving a basic answer to the question that it won't be able to do what he wants with biomes - so it seems that slicing it into pieces is the answer then, but to do that within Gaia, I mean making 1 terrain and then another, how would we go around to doing that?

Only an example this but - if for say I released a game with 1 large island, and then wanted to add a whole new part later like in world of warcraft with the burning crusade and such, how would that be done? scenes? or as you said, parts sliced into pieces? has anyone actually pushed Gaia to its limits yet? what is the possible size of a land mass it can create? I wonder

Anyways yea, looking forward to your tutorial, was only just reading the 1st part today then wondering where the other part was. How come you have not made your own thread for it though as it is by all means a tutorial and will get buried in a normal and busy thread like this one

 

As I said in my answer, biomes are currently possible.. The limitation is going to be on Unity and the textures. If I wanted to have 4 completely different biomes in my 2048x2048 scene, I can do that now. I just have to figure out which biomes I want where, place spawners for the biomes in the areas they are relative to, and strategically plan spawning. I can definitely do that with trees/grasses/game objects.. And I should be able to do textures but may hit memory issues with Unity because the more textures you spawn to the terrain, the more passes that are required.

You mention WoW. If you look at WoW, when they expand, they usually expand into a new continent which you have to go through a loading screen to get to. The only exception (before I stopped playing) was when they did the area for the blood elves and other race they released at the time in the extreme north of that continent.. But that area was already there and just greyed out, if memory serves correctly. As for islands, you could always separate with oceans. Players wont notice terrain changes at much at deep ocean depths unless your game is underwater based. For continents, I would use the method that I'm building on in the tutorial.

Why I posted here instead of a new thread? It is directly related to questions on how to deal with a large terrain. In the case of the tutorial we are looking at a 32k terrain. Could probably go a lot higher even if your dev machine has the power to do it. Unfortunately mine is going to struggle with the 32k until after it is stamped and sliced. Stamping didn't seem to be any longer than stamping on a 2k terrain. The slicing is what is probably going to chug on for a while. And yeah, it could get lost here. I will reference former parts in new posts and when finished will post a pdf that has it all. I will probably also post it on my website when things are finished there as well.

 

Its seems your tutorial is one which I need to follow then, it seems much more convenient for continent/island methods though just another question, how would loading screens work then? it would need to be done in scenes right or what? just wondering, and thanks for your info on this

 

The tutorial is all about using Gaia with Sectr to create large terrain masses. All of the loading is done with Sectr Stream. There are a few different ways Stream can do it. Nathan has threads for Sectr Complete as well as the individual Sectr parts that make up Sectr Complete. I think he may even link the documentation or you can take a look at it from the asset store page. Not sure if you have any kind of options like that or not with the others. I also put Nathan and Adam in contact with each other. Would be awesome to get some kind of integration going. Even with Gaia supporting multi-tile natively, which is the goal with the next big release, it would also be nice to have an integration where we could easily tie Sectr Stream and the other Sectr products into our projects.

 

Hi @Shawn67, Nothing directed at anyone or yourself my friend. Just thought I'd say thanks to @Adam for allowing such an open discussion on his thread. I imagine a lot of other publishers have benefited by this thread from recommendations. It's great to learn here and I totally agree that support for other products should be kept on their own pages unless Adam says he's happy otherwise.

 

I am reading about Sectr Stream and its basically just World Streamer right? they both do the same thing

Maybe this answers your question

Why I posted here instead of a new thread? It is directly related to questions on how to deal with a large terrain. In the case of the tutorial we are looking at a 32k terrain. Could probably go a lot higher even if your dev machine has the power to do it. Unfortunately mine is going to struggle with the 32k until after it is stamped and sliced. Stamping didn't seem to be any longer than stamping on a 2k terrain. The slicing is what is probably going to chug on for a while. And yeah, it could get lost here. I will reference former parts in new posts and when finished will post a pdf that has it all. I will probably also post it on my website when things are finished there as well.

 

No clue.. I've never looked at it since I have Sectr. I know Stream gives a lot of options regarding how you load neighbors. Not sure what World Streamer does.

 

Hi, it's me again. I'm a newbie with Unity and Gaia. I just wanted to know if it's possible to add roads, or pavements using Gaia manager? I did the tutorial/quick guide where we set up our environments using the stamper and spawner. But if for example I want to create a pathwalk, how could I go about that? I noticed there's a folder of 3rd Party Samplers but I don't really know how to use it. I also wanted some kind of village to appear on my terrain but the terrain that I'm creating using the guide is just with trees and and grass. I'd appreciate it if someone helps me with this because I am really clueless with this. Thanks!

 

I was able to finally resolve the errors. Some script from my project was similarly named with one of the scripts from Gaia. Because there were so much stuff on my project, I tried to delete each folder from the asset store (of course I backed it up), and see from what folder the error will disappear. Then traced it to that particular script. I'm such a noob. But thanks for the help! Appreciate it!

 

Sorry, but that makes no sense. lol You should post on the threads for those particular assets. Most folks here are not streaming and if they are, they respect Adam and Gaia enough not to change the subject and ranting off about other assets, especially when there are forums for both World Streamer AND Sectr.

We are happy to give you a brief account of our use of the asset but for questions that go beyond that you need to go to the forums. There are also lots of topics on the store about huge terrains and the pitfalls of using them in Unity. Stamps become part of the terrain so won't affect Sectr or WS. However, they do increase the size of your terrain, not the dimensions but stamps increase the complexity so they will take a wee bit longer to load. However, this shouldn't be a problem. Make a build and check it out.

Go do a search. Continuing to post out of topic threads can get one banned from the thread if they are reported. Especially in one this huge where people already have a tough time finding answers.

Try clearing the errors on the console and see if they come back when you hit play. Sometimes errors show up after importing. If they don't clear, then take a picture of your console and post it here if it is in regard to Gaia. Otherwise, try the support forums.

Welcome to Unity. Make sure you use the LEARN button at the top of this website page before you tackle complex stuff.

Edit: I have been informed that the italicized quote that I pulled from DarkXess post was actually by Shawn. Wish people would keep quotes in the quote boxes. Less confusing. Anyway, I was responding to DarkXess, not Shawn. Shawn never listens to me anyway.

 

I am new to unity/programming in general and bought this last night. I followed to PDF tutorial and had great success! Today I would like to start making a large map (16000 * 24000). I've tried using the procedural generation and the stamper but the progress bar sits at 0. The largest area I was able to stamp was 4000 * 4000. What am I doing wrong? Is it just a limitation to my system?

 

Limitation to Unity. You need to tile maps to make them large and Gaia is not yet ready for tiling. It will be soon though. I would search for threads on how to make a large terrain and see how others do it.

If you are just starting, I don't recommend a huge terrain. You will regret it halfway through. lol Learn first.

 

The added lighting etc is perfect for those who don't have other assets "Yet"

All of my screenshots were just Gaia, Distingo, and using your new fx and they are amazing.

 

Wow fast response thanks!!

Haha I know I'm probably getting ahead of myself in making something so large. Just figured I'd be able to generate a large terrain and edit/explore for now while slowly adding features to it. I read about tiling about a week ago and yeah that's way ahead of where I'm at now that's why I tried to just make a large area to start. As a beginner this was just so easy to use and great results immediately! Think you guys did a hell of a job on this (maybe made my head a little bigger than it should be)!

What are the size limitations as of now? Also what would be some of the problems I would run into halfway through?

 

I think this is an interesting point - Unity (and I am sure most game engines) does have performance issues with bigger environments - there is a very real resource impact on your target machine - you need more memory, rendering etc etc, which in turn affects and limits your target audience. To make it perform well is a whole task in itself.

The other and also very real consideration is just 'why' - and this actually drove my decision not to focus on multi tiles straight away. Huge worlds full of boring game play are just huge boring worlds and discarded shortly after a long download.

It takes time to make the game play interesting - and to do that in my opinion you need to design the environment to support the game play you want. My last game project prior to Gaia was a 2km x 2km world, and it took weeks of work with a bunch of expensive tools just to make it look nice (what Gaia now does in minutes) - let alone fill it with interesting game play. That took a whole team a lot more time.

Curious as to what other people think about this.

 

I agree. I think the whole "open world" concept with bigger and bigger worlds is over rated. I like a little open world in my games as well, but not just if it's bigger boring, empty spaces. The first and primary concern is creating the proper environment for the story you are creating in your game. If it requires a larger world then you make a larger world. But don't just make a larger world because it's the big trend or because you want to outdo the latest open world game size.

As I am designing my game world and testing for performance and taking into consideration game console memory limits, I'm learning more and more about just how difficult it is to balance everything and still make it work at a decent frame rate. It is a technical challenge that is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. And I discovered that if I don't start from the ground up with this in mind that it would be impossible to achieve my goal.

 

Here is a quick n dirty performance tip with Unity water - it will give you about 1/3 more fps.

Change the reflection mask in the planar reflection script to only show the Water layer.

The real cost of water is that it needs to reflect things. Reflecting skies and terrain is cheap - reflecting vegetation which is moving in the wind is expensive.

The tip above just reflects the sky and the impact is dramatic.

I shared a more advanced technique for reflecting terrain (but not vegetation) many pages back. That technique gives imho the best performance vs visual tradeoff possible with standard unity water.

 

I am finally going to play with Gaia for the first time since I bought it. Here's what I see in the Asset Store...

Version: 1.5.0 (Feb 22, 2016)Size: 932.3 MB
Originally released: 28 October 2015
Package has been submitted using Unity 5.1.0.

If I am just going to be playing around, and it doesn't matter which version of Unity I use, should I use v 5.1.0 since that is what you use to test your submissions? Or should I go to the extreme and use v 5.3.3.p1?

 

I would, I imported it into a clean project with v5.1.0 and had no errors

 

You can use anything above 5.1.0. So whatever you want!

 

So is the bets way currently to work on multiple terrains is have them in different scenes and load them up together?
Also if I move on terrain over say 1024 so it's sitting right next to my current terrain what do I need to change in Gaia on the scene where the terrain has been moved if anything so it will still work?

Thanks sorry if any of this has been asked before but with this thread being 87 pages now it's becoming difficult to search for things

 

Thanks! Hopefully when you have time to improve the site that's been in discussion, these types of things will end up in a wiki (or some type of other format) for easy searching/discovering. Loving this community, but obviously a huge thread makes it difficult to find things like this if you missed it or to refer back to.

I put stuff like this into OneNote, but I'm sure I've missed many gems =)

 

I tested with 5.3.3p1 yesty - ran like a dream. Btw a patch will be live in the next few hours (hopefully), so you may want to hang off a little longer

Here are the patch notes:

V 1.5.1 New Features
• Grass splatmap exporter

Enhancements:
• Sea level now editable in the session manager
• Sea level defaults set to 50m instead of 100m
• GX - Procedural Worlds - Camera and Light - Changed approach - now shows all the time
• GX - Procedural Worlds - Camera and Light - Detected alternative spelling of Directional Light in some unity version
• Got rid of obsolete message in 5.3.x
• Improved documentaion on sessions
• Added documentation on extensions

Bug Fixes:
• Fixed a configuration error in GaiaResources that was causing a house not to be spawned properly
• Fixed incorrect documentation in QuickStart Guide

 

I have a cunning plan!!!

I will make an update to the first post in this thread and link to all the posts in the thread - that way there is an single place to go.. Got a lot on today so might take a little time.. 87 pages of goodness to read through

 

Will take even longer if you get distracted by shiny things again (which can easily happen to you lol)

 

Been looking at different media output formats..

 

@daniel, that looks like the new iClone 6 character, Chuck.

 

You're not wrong. I'm finding IClone is pretty versatile. Chuck could be morphed into a totally different character simply using sliders. I've left him 'as is' for this quick example.

 

I took a bit of a break from working on stuff for my game and tried out something in Gaia that I've been thinking about for a while. I took the assets from the Stylized Nature Pack and fed them in to Gaia to see what sort of results I would get. Now, I have a long ways to go before getting something that looks as aesthetically pleasing as the screenshots and (small) demo scene that are provided with the package, but I'm still quite happy with what I was able to create in a fairly short period of time. I'd been wanting to get into really changing the spawning rules, so I figured that this would be a good way to do so.











I need to tweak the spawn criteria some more, and I think that I can achieve some nicer-looking results if I group together different configurations of trees, bushes, and rocks as POIs. In these screens, I've just gone with the basics to see how it might look.

 

Likely in the minority here (especially with strong opinions contrary ) but I'm not certain there's an immutable correlation between large worlds and boredom, especially when you factor in audience and genres. If it's a competitive multiplayer game but you can travel for ages without seeing another player, a tightly focused narrative experience or anything that depends on non-renewable content (puzzles for instance) then I certainly agree. But the promise of procedural generation is the possibility of a riot of emergent gameplay, particularly if the bulk of the gameplay 'travels' with the player regardless of physical environment (think Minecraft or wilderness survival/horror games).

I personally find hard walls and invisible barriers very frustrating in games. Nothing shouts 4th wall like a big popup that says "You must turn back." Impassible mountains require removal of mountaineering, auto-killing oceans the removal of sailing. Yes, there must be some limits somewhere, but when I recall that decades ago we were creating games that had astounding boundaries I shake my head at the current state of affairs. Daggerfall offered thousands of towns, Starflight hundreds of explorable worlds, Elite numerous galaxies.

I guess it really depends on the type of game you aspire to make, and I don't think anyone's choice is wrong. I just find massive worlds breathtaking. Give me a rogue-like survival game (preferably with Borderland's guns and Spore's creatures) and my life will be complete.

 

My goal is to create a first person tycoon type game so I need a fairly large space. Just something I've always wanted to play, so decided to give it a go in my spare time.

When I said I was getting ahead of myself I wasn't kidding. Since I'm new to this, Gaia out of the box was fast to use, and after spending literally all day with it I realize I'm only at the surface. I think I spent somewhere around 5 hours just experimenting with the stamps and I still don't have close to a full grasp on them. I appreciate the advice from earlier because I would like to add some caves and other features that I don't know how to do yet. So for now I'm just working with a small area and experimenting.

I'm a fan of open worlds, but they have to be interesting. The Witcher 3 was huge but to me it was very empty and repetitive. I prefer the density of fallout much more.

Here's my results from day 1. I'm a sound designer and the last time I programed was in basic so for day one I'm more than happy with what I've been able to do.

 

Wow! Absolutely loving the creativity here - and the different points of view - keep it going!!!

 

Thanks!!!

Gonna focus on water and adding more variety of trees for the rest of the night. Didn't take any shots of the beaches because the water doesn't look very good right now and there's some weird lighthouse light effect going on with it that I don't understand.

Shot my buddy these screens (the same guy that introduced me to unity) and he's on board for this project now!

 

lol that's nice to just blame it all on me as we were both off topic, though I did have the decency to point it out asking why post it here and as I quoted earlier from Shawn it's a valid reason as its to do with dealing with large terrains and unity, he just pointed out using such things as Sectr and WS were the way to go

@Adam - in your 1.5.1 is this still going to be fixed mate:

Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaManagerEditor.cs(96,47): warning CS0618: `UnityEditor.EditorApplication.currentScene' is obsolete: `Use EditorSceneManager to see which scenes are currently loaded'

 

Yup.. He posted changes in his post above.

 

Yeah, we are friends..and I told him that even though I goofed, it applied to him as well. lol

 

No wonder I didn't see it as it was under "Enhancements", I thought it would be under Bug Fixes*