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

Oh snap! Pretty soon the maps just going to make its self for me. When do we get the intelligent scripting? When AI evolves into terminators? hehehe

 

Thank you Adam, I am inspired by your tool and hope I can improve with this one, btw I am a beginner to Unity and It was a great pleasure to read and hear some tips with the veterans in this community.

 

Here a couple of test images that I did with two of the stamps from that pack. They are both using one of the free waterfall assets in the asset store and the AQUAS Lite water pack (prior to my getting the full AQUAS pack).

The big rocks are just the free rocks from @MotuProprio that are in his samples he provided to distribute with Gaia.

Once I can get decent waterfalls so I can create marketing images, I have two packs of waterfall stamps pretty much ready to go...

 

@Wolfen, Shawn and Adam
Thanks for a quick response, hope that you give us more good news. I am looking forward to see that water fall stamps that you have said awhile ago.

 

There will be a Make MMO button in the next version of Gaia, right underneath the Print Money button Standard joke in the beta group - gives me a chuckle every time

 

Yup.. The biggest problem with these is finding good waterfall to go with them. I really like being able to suggest companion assets that work well to help folks find decent assets to work with them. At this point I'm still looking for a waterfall asset that works well in all cases. So until I find something I can recommend to go along with them, they are kind of on hold.

But follow my thread too and I'll be sure to keep up to date on when they will be coming available.

 

There are a couple of water fall stamps in Gaia, and @Shawn67 is making stamp packs to extend Gaia. You now purchase them from here and they are currently waiting for approval for the asset store



I made this with his village and volcanoes packs (and Distingo, Aquas, Prism and SpeedTrees)

 

If I find a good asset then I'll share it too. Hopefully we get more support from other developers too.

 

@Adma

I have seen the screenshots and it seems that these assets are not included to the Gaia itself because it is a separate package. Am i right?

 

Correct.

 

Some of the screenshots are taken with just the sample assets that come with Gaia as well. There are a handful of assets to get you started from a few of the great asset producers that work closely with Adam's team. So it really depends on which images you are looking at.

 

But still no "Create what I am thinking" button eh?

 

I'd say @Teila is correct in her guess, if you export an 8bit file you will get that stepping, use 16 Bit the r16 setting is great just change the extension after export, Unity doesnt see the .r16 so just edit it to read .raw

 

You can do this but there is no reason to. Simply drag and drop it from wherever it is in your file system onto the scanner.

 

How do we avoid this scenario? I went through a normal process and I have seen this happen a couple of times now. This just happens to be the worst I have seen yet.

 

Sorry I maybe should have said that was to import it direct with the terrain Unity tool

 

This is an awesome tool. I'm really loving it. Setting up resource rules and keeping them in tune with my spawners is a bit tricky. Is it alright if I ask a question about the spawn criteria on "matching textures"? Can I only match (or not match) one texture at a time? What if I want it to go on any texture except 2 and 6? I tried "!2,!6" but that doesn't seem to be right? I'm guessing that field doesn't like commas. When I add a second criteria GAIA seems to want to say 'criteria A OR criteria B'. Can I AND them somehow?

 

Gaia gets this right 95% of the time. When your spawn criteria is a bounded area check, and you have selected virgin terrain it will do a collision and slope test at the centre and then the 4 corners of your area bounds (as defined in your dna). It wont check every single point on the terrain as this would be too expensive from a time perspective - and when you get upwellings within the constraints of an area - it can get missed.

Short answer is just delete those objects manually - should only take a minute or so. Longer answer is I will try to find a better and more robust algorithm for this that is also performant.

 

You have it exactly right !2!6 means spawn on all but textures 2 and 6. Use the visualiser to test this. Just remember that they are zero based so !2 really is referring to the 3rd texture not the second.

 

Here are a few screenshots from my first one that I really spent a little bit of time with today. Nothing too special. Gaia, Distingo, Scion Post Processing.

Eventually I may try and get my copy of Sky Master Ultimate (scary it has so much in it) up and running in the scene.

 

Looks pretty except for the lights that was used in it. 4/5 rate for this one

 

Looks pretty except for the lights that was used in it. 4/5 rate for this one

 

Just Gaia setup. He never proclaimed to have a grand setup for skies and sun lol. Anyways, that's why I want to get my Skymaster Ultimate in. Though it's so complext I am afraid it will break stuff. I might just go get another sky solution.

 

Anybody tried out the KinoObscurance effect yet? Apparently its being integrated into the cinematic image effects from unity but since it's only in a branch rather than the main trunk so far I'll link to the original effect instead:

https://github.com/keijiro/KinoObscurance

 

Here are a few more from a new scene. Also added Tenkoku. No other effects. Just wanted to try a new one. =)






@AdamGoodrich One thing I have noticed about your screenshotter. I have an Ultra Wide Screen monitor. I use maximize on play to prevent a strange bug with Unity that makes the game crawl. Some of these shots would be way better with the UWS. Any way to update that screenshotter so it shoots the whole play window and not just a standard size you are using?

 

Quick glance of first screenshot from new desert stamps pack I'm working on spawned with Manufactura K4's Middle-East pack.. Links for assets are on post in my stamps pack thread (linked in signature).

Scene stamped and spawned with Gaia 1.5 after making a quick resources file from one of Michael O's demo scene terrain objects and then adding building game objects from the pack.

 

Nice stamper pack

 

Your OCD is showing. ;-) The enemy of producing lots of GOOD documentation is producing a LITTLE bit of EXCELLENT documentation. Really, a cat or dog making noise doesn't diminish the effectiveness of the video. In some places you can lower your bar.

Just saying.

 

Well, it wasn't a guess. It was years of working with terrain and game engines, well before I used Unity. I think I have used just about ever terrain generation tool out there.

Really important to use the right types of files and make sure the resolutions/sizes are set properly. Once you do that, the stair stepping effect should be gone. The other reason you get it, and the most likely, is that folks download height maps off google that are not of high enough resolution. When images are compressed they sometimes look very bad when imported into your terrain engine.

 

Awww, I wanna see the kitty cat!! I have 5 of my own. They would really enjoy the meow in the background.

 

Last question, is it possible to import directly my texture heightmap of WM on my GAIA terrain ?

 

Yep, I explained how to do that in detail above. Just scroll back a page or so and look for my face. lol It is very easy.

 

Hey,

You seem to have skipped steps in your quick start. What's the process of adding textures to the texture spawner, trees to tree spawner, etc? I tried to add spawner rules I guess? That didn't do anything. Bit confused here.

 

Add them to your terrain just like you would for any other terrain. Just open the terrain inspector, go to the place with the brushes, and click on the symbol of the tree, texture, grass, whatever.

 

Oh okay, but this doesn't appear to affect the spawner at all? Or should I be putting textures on before creating spawner?

 

Got Gaia a week or two ago and it's really good, except that grass and such (details) really neuter frame rate, both in-game and in-editor. I'm still figuring out how to use Gaia, but perhaps consider not having everything turned on by default?

 

Thanks again Teila ! You are my savior !

 

There should be a button on the Resource thing to pull from the terrain. Are you using the resource data?

 

Ok so I think my problem is there's no Texture Prototype script attachted to anything? How do I create that with the Gaia Manager?

 

To be honest, I'd take a look at the other videos as well. I think the quick start may just be showing the general workflow using the default assets. To actually go in and do changes and such, that may be better shown in the other tutorial videos. I've fallen behind and haven't had a chance to go through the new videos and materials Adam is putting out for 1.5. But with the 1.0 ones, I always recommended people go through all of them to get a good feel for what is going on.

The default settings and their effect on your performance will vary depending on what kind of equipment you are running and what platform you are targeting. For me, even on an old GeForce GTS-610 video card, the default spawners run fine on a 2048x2048 terrain tile. So it is really hard to determine a default settings that works great for everyone. And I can guarantee, as soon as the default spawns are lowered, people would start complaining that they don't spawn enough. It is kind of up to each of us to figure out how the spawners and resources work and configure them to best fit our own needs.

 

So, there doesn't appear to be any way to create the resource system? I guess I need to watch some videos because this documentation isn't helpful for what I'm trying to do :/

 

It is already there. Just look in the folders. Videos are a very good idea. I highly suggest those before asking on the forums. LOL

 

In this video, his textures are already in the spawner rules. Mine aren't there and I can't add anything. I select the plus sign... and can't do anything other than remove or visualise.

 

I think the limitation might be somewhere else, as neither my CPU, GPU, RAM or VRAM show high usage when I have everything set to the current default. GPU does show very low FPS, though.

Now that I think about it, I think it might possibly be related to other issues I'm having with the standard assets, such as transparency not effective on all foliage sprites.

 

You need to watch all the videos... All of this is covered in them. What you are trying to do is beyond the quick start guide.

If you want totally new resources files, just duplicate GaiaResources by pressing CTRL-D when you have it selected in your project view. Then if you have all the resources you want to use already defined in your terrain object, I'm pretty sure there is a button to replace from terrain. To be safe, you could always go through and set each of the type lengths to 0 so it empties them in your GaiaResources duplicate and then get from terrain to pull what has been defined in your terrain object.

 

I know these are for 1.0, but the core concept still applies. You need to have your resources file synced up with your terrain. If you don't have that done, you aren't going to see any textures..

 

Ok another video, and it was no help. But I think I deciphered your over comment. I dragged the Gaia Resources into the manager and now I have a thing where I can actually "get resources from terrain"...

Why didn't it just start like that rather than creating some random thing that didn't have these options available? :/

 

Actually if you pay a little more attention. I comment in the description that I will swap resources, then I demonstrate doing it.

 

There are also a whole bunch of other videos from version one including videos specifically on resource management. Please take some time to view them. If its still murky then pm me and I will be happy to take you through it.

The reasons everything is set up is to provide a good out of the box experience, as well as an actual system that works that you can learn from if you want to.

 

To add to this....as well as really good Multi-Tiling with Gaia. If you use L3DT (http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/) or World Machine (http://www.world-machine.com/) you will want the Tiled/Mosaic export from these tools. Then the Raw16, PSD, TIF, or PNG (all loss-less formats) is imported into Unity then brought through the Gaia Scanner.

Once the new Stamps are available....simply stamp each stamp in the grid that the tile was exported. After stamping/texturing and whatever....simply offset this "Grid Square" to the location it is supposed to be. A simple spreadsheet can make typing the offsets into the Terrain Transform much easier. You are guaranteed that each stamp is perfectly aligned with the next and the 'stitching' will be perfectly seamless.

This technique will allow for massive terrain systems (with multiple biomes) of 100km2 or even more with world origin moving techniques and a healthy computer.

Lastly, I have moved the entire game to UE4. Indeed the landscapes that you make in Unity, Gaia can Export these and then imported into UE4 to set up the base terrain (for those interested in this). As always in Unity or UE4, Gaia can be a very solid terrain system (Massive Time Saver) for the base but hand touch up is a must no matter what you do.....even if you are not making a high end game.

Cheers
O