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

Amazed - as usual. Nice I mean stunning work - thank you all so much for sharing This inspires me to give you better tools

 

Hello again, Mr. Adam, and thank you so much for Gaia!
I just finished up reading the rest of the 93 pages I hadn't gotten to, and I was wanting to ask something concerning this.

Being very interested in mutli-terrain, open-world games, I just picked up World Streamer on sale. I read that it still requires multiple terrain tiles (or one to be split) for it to be able to do its magic. And it had recommended this free asset that I had found just earlier when looking for a lower-cost alternative to SECTR in order to divide a single terrain tile...

http://kostiantyn-dvornik.blogspot.com/2013/12/unity-split-terrain-script.html

Since this forum is full of terrain pros, I was going to ask if anyone has tried it or would be willing to do so, and either recommend it or against it. I do apologize if this is the wrong place to do so.

I've only played around with it for a few minutes, so far, but it did seem to work decently at first glance. It took a terrain that was stamped and populated with Gaia, and split it in 4 (that seems to be the only number it supports from what I can tell). It did not delete the original terrain, so when I disabled it, it appeared to have slightly altered some textures for some reason. It also seemed to have adjusted some of the settings (wind effects and tint color for grass, etc.).

All in all, it still appeared very similar to the original terrain. But I was hoping that a more experienced person (non-noob like me) would share their take on it... especially before I create a large, flawed world because of it

Anyway, thank you again! I wish you the very best of success in everything you do! :-D

Ps. I also want to thank the entire Gaia community for being so helpful... especially the beta team!

 

Mind listing what you have used to achieve these results? Stunning!!!

 

Currently Gaia is looking for terrain. With some mods it could probably do this.

 

As a suggestion for the multi-tile system, it would be great to be able to 'lock' certain tiles so that you can use some edges along one side to stitch to while building larger terrains. That way you can build a set of say large terrain as a beginning and then only move X of the edge tiles into the next scene to build the terrain there, but locking the edge tiles so they can't be accidentally changed while building the next set. I am still ingesting the first cup of coffee, so hopefully that makes a little bit of sense!

 

will with the multi tile system a function how i can tile my terrain at now?i found the problem,unit support me 8 textures for terrain when i use more,unity crash...give it a other way to use more textures as 8?

 

default Gaia assets
Se Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens
AllSky
this fog

everything else is just Unity default effects and colors choices/corrections ... i could really use the Speedtree desktop Tree pack

 

You and me both.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I plead to @Dannyoakes he still won't budge and let me have a free copy rofl (for "evaluation" purposes of course lol)

 

@Adam Have ever done a terrain using both Ceto and Aquas in the same project?. I'm looking at using Ceto for my main water ways at sea level and Aquas for a couple of lakes and rivers that are to be quite a lot higher than sea level, sorry I'm asking here but Scrawk does not know Aquas

 

I just drove myself partially insane looking for this information! I knew I had read it somewhere recently but it took ages to find again. Could you put this stuff somewhere more prominent whilst we are waiting for Speedtree to include the scripts in their packages? Cheers.

 

I second this...

Also, I imagine these will be pretty easy to tweak for getting to work with the other SpeedTree packages as well, correct?

 

I have tried it in conjunction with Gaia and found it very good at slicing the terrain accurately. It does however not leave the height map, base detail map and texture map at the original settings..... It seems to divide these by 2 and 4.

That is where the colour difference you have seen occurs. a very decent free asset that World Streamer really should have built into it as a default. But alas we will have to wait for a master technical programming asset creator personage demigod like @AdamGoodrich or @NemoKrad or now @Shawn67 to walk amongst us ........hint hint

 

Used Gaia to spawn 200+ Emerald AI animals on our terrain, that was also generated with Gaia. Results are awesome and saves so much time from having to do it manually.

 

With SpeedTree Extension stresses over now, I finally got to give 1.5 a try - oh wow! Such fun, such great results.

Am I right in thinking I had to put the Desktop Ground Cover Package and Desktop Tree Package folders into a folder called 3rd Party in order for the integration to work properly? I bought these packs direct from the SpeedTree site rather than from the Asset Store and the 3rd Party folder bit only became clear to me after I had thousands of console errors when spawning so looked at the provided scripts and saw that path.

 

Hey all

I'm having WAY to much fun with this. I keep doing new terrains over and over.
Wondering if anyone can help me I'm having a bit of a weird issue with the grass. I've tried the grass included in the pack, and even the photographic grass pack and the results I have are consistent: overly bright, squary, they stick out like a sore thumb from everything else.

Included a few pics:
ToD, standard assets, Deferred, HDR, Linear color range


Using a mix of included assets, SpeedTree, HQ photographic and a ton of post effects:



If anyone has any ideas pls let me know

Cheers
J

 

What is the best way to create our own group of objects, like your farms.
I could go to another project, put together a villa of sorts, export as prefab, and then spawn the whole prefab, but I see your "Small Farm" instances are a lot more adaptative than that, they seem to have the rough spot for each prefab input, but then it tweeks it slightly according to the terrain.

is there an easy way or workflow to create these? instances?

 

I HAVE a terrain in the level, it just happens to be flat and occupy a dungeon floor

 

Please pm me. Probably a Skype session will help me to understand your setup, and some guidance will save you some time.

 

I wrote a bunch of code to have it search for the directory you put that asset into. So it should 'just work' and find it regardless of where you installed it. Let me know how you go with this. If there are any edge conditions, it should not take long to resolve.

 

Just wanted to chime in - bought it a while ago but only recently dove into Gaia head first. Just playing around with the settings and roaming the landscape after a few minutes is so much fun.

 

I saw those MS Drive extension scripts you posted last night, thank you for this! Hope SpeedTree let you put those in the next version of Gaia!
They worked just fine. Without the SpeedTree asset, it created the resource file without objects. with the asset it linked the objects automagically!!

I saw you liked my post about how to make "composite instances" (do you have a name for those groups of objects?). Is there a tutorial coming on how to best create these?

Also any idea on what I'm missing with the grass, why does it look so different than everyone else's?

 

I have noticed since Unity5.3 a lot of scene look too bright but it seems to be getting better with the latest version 5.3.3 on. Also go to player settings and try changing Rendering Path to Linear. I think this is more expensive though and doesn't work with all devices but looks more better to me. I am no designer but from doing my own game I have noticed that matching textures to levels is a necessity. From what I can see the grass pack textures are different enough to the terrain painted textures to be noticed. If you had the whole grass pack you could probably go through and select a best match as in real life the undergrowth is usually made up of similar/same grass types to the more mature visible ones.

Hopefully someone with a genuine understanding can advise on this as it's something I need to know as well.

 

I'm on 5.3.2, Deferred rendering, linear colour space, HDR enabled main camera.
while I agreed that texture mapping is an essential part of level editing, I'm seeing pictures of people using included assets only, even the ones in older versions of gaia (2013 etc.)

Like this one: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ga...nd-scene-creation.327342/page-83#post-2522358

Or this one by Adam: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ga...nd-scene-creation.327342/page-80#post-2518678

Not like mine, mine just seem to stick out like a plastic ornament on a sushi dish?

 

great analogy!

 

Questions, Questions, Questions
You'll probably find out really soon that I'm the sound guy, and I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to terrains, mesh, shaders

How can I generate a custom mesh so I can make a river that fits this ravine?



I'm using Suimono, and I see that it lets me import custom meshes, but I have no idea how to edit or create these, and if there's a way to export meshes of the terrain and then edit them.

 

@jplebre The easiest way to do this is use an asset like Probuilder, which will let you build a mesh directly in your scene in the location you need it. I have the full version and it works well, but I assume the free/basic version will work just as well for building simple meshes like this... https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11919

 

Hi,
Thanks for Gaia. Best fun I've had in ages.
Does anyone know how to make a tiny scene?
I'm specifically trying to use Gaia to make a GearVR project.
Thanks,
Dave.

 

Besides the excellent advice @chingwa suggested, your other option is to export the terrain as a mesh, using the mesh export utility included with Gaia (under Utilities), and then use any 3D modeling program to create custom meshes for water, roads, or whatever. I have a lake, 2 waterfalls, several caves and tunnels, and a race track that I've fitted to my terrain this way.

 

I have added them to the first post in this forum - just read down towards the bottom - will post other cool things there as well and use it as a bit of an index into this forum.

 

I've seen another screenshot of your game before, it looks like it's coming along really nicely.
I tried to look for that before I asked but couldn't find that script, I thought it was something coming in later versions or something (eg. the manual also mentions the speed tree extensions, although they are not in yet). Since I don't have a 3d modelling program yet (should really get Blender) I might go with the option suggested by @chingwa failing that I now know what to try next, thanks!

 

A village

 

Hey Adam,

This may have been asked before and sorry if it has (the thread here is gigantic).

I noticed with the border style when you select mountains... it's not really mountanious on the borders. Have you thought about some how ensuring that the edges will always be equal to or higher than the stamps that come in? Or allowing the user to set a minimum and maximum height for the borders?

 

As a little thank you I wanted to share this SpeedTree SpeedWeed GAIA extension. Basically I refactored a bit of what was in the other SpeedTree extensions to make this. It is the beginning of a series of extensions I will be writing, so it will continued to get refined and abstracted as I go.

Also, this will need a bit of tweaking still, but I wanted to get it out as I am moving to other things for now.

Thanks again, can't wait until I get multi-terrain!

Boysenberry

 

Hey

maybe i am missing something
I imported the newest gaia
and have 3d Forge ex/interior installed

but they dont appear in the gx tab

the same happened to TPC but there is an integration file available
after I imported it it works

are they integrations files for 3d forge stuff or should it work automatically

on Unity 5.3.3

 

At this point 3DForge doesn't have integration files for the packs. The 3DForge integration is with the sample stuff already provided with Gaia.

 

@AdamGoodrich had to first release v1.5.0 to lay the base and have the back end stuff done inside Gaia that would allow full integration with the current selection of packages that has been added.

I am an artist, can not do one line of code, so with @AdamGoodrich 's help with my upcoming update that I have lots completed already, the required "stuff" will be added to the Village Exteriors Kit that will complete that process.

As @Shawn67 has said, the 3DForge included items that ships with Gaia, @AdamGoodrich have done that already because he shipped it with the Gaia release.

Thanks for supporting 3DForge assets

Cheers
Cobus

 

ah ok fine
everything is amazing anyway

 

Just check the video on our site before saying things like above - www.world-creator.com

And you also quoted a post of magique saying that it is World Creator that arrived last wednesday, which is not! You meant Landscape Builder ... that is what magique was talking about.

 

It is hard to make judgement based on videos. Terrain Composer videos made it look easy, but when I tried to do the same thing, I wasn't able to get results that looked as good. What she was basing her opinion on was version 1. Your version 2 may be a totally different story. But until there are more videos, it is kind of hard to make a good judgement call.

As for quoting @magique, he simply stated that there was competition popping up. I thing @Teila was simply adding her experience with World Creator 1 wasn't competition. In all fairness, Magique didn't mention your product at all. Again, hard to say what 2 will bring until you show more. Personally I wasn't impressed with the one video you have for Unity. But that is one video. I, as I am sure others here, are following your thread and waiting for more information..

At any rate, I don't really think this is the right place to have this discussion since it is the Gaia thread. Also think it is kind of poor taste to come into another asset publishers thread and post links to your product, as it appears you are defending that it is a competitive product. That alone makes me have second thoughts of ever purchasing your assets.

 

I just was searching for World Creator to see what people are talking about it. And reading things that are stated wrong needs me to correct it because this might be missleading. And yes, of course I will defend my product against wrong states to make things clear - I see nothing wrong at all about this. I also never said that Magique mentioned my product but someone else did think that this is World Creator - that is all I just wanted to correct.

 

Bat-Hippo surveyed the urban night. He knew, somewhere, forum crimes were being committed.

 

@hippocoder ROFL

 

Feature request, low priority, but would probably make work flow easier. It would be nice to be able to rearrange the resource lists once they've already been created (especially when considering things like Distingo and or RTP and how texture pipelines work). It sucks to get textures in place then realize you need to start over because the order doesn't match what you need for a shader, etc. Also even for the other lists if I want to get rid of one item and leave the others afterwards intact, not so easy. With proper planning and discipline all of that is mitigated, but there is an overhead in figuring out how to work around those sticky spots.
Just a little feedback for the interface. I love your product though!

PS Its a complaint I have with a lot of assets. Once something is packaged up in those nice little unity asset packages we are totally dependent on the interface to manipulate the data, one of the drawbacks of housing data in that format. I myself would much prefer a CSV or XML type setup, there are plenty of tools for handling those data formats that don't lock a dev into a particular interface. <Okay stepping off of my soapbox for the next person>...

 

Easy folks. Take it offline.

 

In one of my posts I did say that World Creator looked amazing.

 

Yeah...well, don't want to take it offline..but don't want it here either. I deleted it all to keep Adam's thread clean. I was so shocked and hurt though...reacted instinctively. Sorry guys. Have fun!

 

Understandable. I can knee jerk react too.

 

I'm enjoying the new features in Gaia, in particular the 'clumping' or 'cluster' thing.

 

I recently had the privilege of doing an interview with @JohnRossitter the author of Zone Controller Pro, and it was shared on the Cinema Suite blog today. It talks a little bit about me, about what Gaia is trying to achieve, and about some of my experiences on what it takes to succeed - whether in asset development, game development, or business in general.

Hope some of you find it useful

 

It was good reading. Thanks for posting.