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

Very unusual morph of an image. The dragon's lower jaw is turned into another creature, and so is it's right leg. Can't say I've ever seen anything like that before.

 

This is not quite what you are talking about, but pretty close i think...

If we just had a procedural editor tool that would run a pass over the terrain and create a mesh or path to be used at run time

Or this...

 

They both look pretty good, but could be pushing performance limits of the machines they're running on all by themselves. Proper physics based simulations could be a bit heavy resource-wise in an actual game. Still, the videos are from 2009 and 2011 respectively. Wonder what these people have been doing since then... ?

 

I like the idea but it is pushing too much performance especially with lower specs CPU.

 

These could just be renders from modeling software to demonstrate the concept and not an actual system working. Though I didn't look at the videos.

 

Thought I'd show off a screenshot of a terrain I've been working on, using Gaia + Distingo + PRISM + DX11 Grass.


Edit so I don't derail the thread:

I've only just picked it up today, and it can definitely support the grass displacement, I'm pretty sure you can have at least 3 (maybe 4) different textures of grass per terrain, but they've all gotta be pretty much the same shape (you can edit the shape). The workflow with DX11 grass is very slow though, you have to manually export splatmaps etc. to get the grass placed where you want it.

 

Yep, I was just throwing it out there.. but I was thinking if this kind of algorithm was used at design time, perhaps it could be used to plot a path and maybe have a mesh/meshes created to use at run time, perhaps with a directional value (although down is enough i guess!)

There is an asset that has been on the asset store for sometime and was recently updated, I've never used it but it's free and is about erosion.. maybe that could be modified or something... sorry haven;t looked into it (got it, but never actually tried)

Actually it is $5, I'm pretty sure it used to be free... https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/33792 but it simply applies a blanket erosion over the entire terrain, still the core code may have something in it that could be used to save a path or something... or not.

 

Hey i love it... can you share with us what you've found DX11 grass to be like?, it appears all to be the same blades of grass, but i do see other grasses as well (very natural looking) but they are standard vanilla grass applications yeah?, so is that a limitation with it? one grass per instance (one instance per terrain)? does it push over by the player as you walk through it (like the video shows a vehicle flattening the grass as it plows through a field?) and how do you decide where to plant it? can you use a noise filter or map like GAIA does? or is it always solid? Do you specify a WindZone as well so it's in sync?

Ah.. Saw your reply edited into your original post... yeah i don;t know sometimes, I want to discuss all kinds of things related to creating a world, but this is GAIA... hope i don;t step on any toes

 

But if i set a chance to 0%, why those stamps got included instead of being not taken into account?

I tried the settings from you demo video, but could not get those surrounding mountains....

 

Hi,

I was just wondering if you can use infiniGRASS as the grass layer? has anyone managed to do this? This package I am talking about is here:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/45188

I presume you would just place it like any other prefab (I haven't purchased infiniGRASS yet)

David

 

I was even thinking something like a cloth simulation might work - placing a water plane at some height above sea level, and "draping" it to conform to the terrain, creating streams and rivers wherever the terrain dictates they should be.

I have. It actually works pretty well. After stamping new features into my terrain with Gaia, I realized some of the original terrain sculpting needed a makeover as well, so I used the Terrain Water Erosion tool to give it a bit more pizzazz. I needed to do some work in places after, where the erosion covered or undercut my roads, but the final results were worth it.

 

Cool, That's an interesting thought using Cloth, I guess you could edit the cloth as it is draped over rocks for example and decide if it should be wrapped over a rock or go through it, OR do some kind of transparency where if the angle is too steep like draped over a protruding rock it would become invisible for the hump part (and the top of the rock perhaps is now separated from the rest of the cloth so it is also ignored) - There's room on the asset store for such a tool i think 'WaterFalls Pro'

The Smooth tool in GAIA unfortunately is one of those things, you can apply it, but as far as i know it affects the entire terrain, so if you make some manual changes and want to smooth that you can only apply again to all and then you lose detail, or can it be applied to a masked area? I find the Unity smooth tool not so good, seems all the brushes became square for me, not sure what caused that.

 

I am busy exploring Gaia and here is the outcome of my simple scene, nothing special except by using this:
- Gaia
- Playway Water
- UBER
- Time of Day


I hope I can test this asset's potential with the help of Distingo (need to buy this one).

 

I haven't used UBER in a while. It has terrain shaders?

 

nope
for that you have to use RTP

or distingo

 

Yeah, I have both of those. So what are you using UBER on in those shots exactly?

 

i just mentioned your queston in the infinigrass thread
would like a deepter integration with gaia too

i have both
and yes you can place it like any other prefab

it has inbuilt mass placement options
but (at least right now) it has no totally automatic placement like gaia
but i think thats on the list for it

 

I used on my time of day light

 

You are right

But in my scene I only prefer to use it on the lights of my Time of day (the latest verison) just to tweak some good results and I am satisfied with the outcome, I have no Distingo yet but I have RTP (the latest version). For now I am trying to use the Advanced Foliage (the latest version) to see if there will be lifelike version of grasses and shrubs when I bumped on it.

Does anyone knows exactly how this boat can float in a right angle and bouyancy ???

 

Did you try the bouyancy script that comes with playway?

 

Huh... I should install UBER again. I don't know what you mean by using it on time of day light lol. Shaders usually are applied to a material. So I guess maybe the sun's material? hehe

 

I think Suimono - a water asset, does a little boat like that, and the water is not inside he boat either:

 

I have tried it but I am not satisfied with the result also I am failing with the Underwater script and Camera Water Drops when applying it. Do you know the reason why Unity crashes when I play the scene when I applied both scripts ?

 

I did that awhile ago but yet I have problem with the _FoamOverlay. I don't know why it causes me a lot of trouble when I upgrade my Unity3D to version 5.3.3

 

Best head over to Justin's Website for support as he doesn't have a Unity support forum I think... http://www.tanukidigital.com/ register with your key or just email him, he's pretty good with replying to all issues on his forums pages. I'm assuming you have Suimono as well.

 

In my oppinion you only need this script if you user rtp terrain shader or uber shader on objects to fix some lighting issues.

 

Works for me. Maybe you will get some help in the playway thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/playway-water-high-quality-water-system.360079/

 

Environment is coming together nicely.

Using:
Gaia
Distington
Truesky
Ceto
Attack Helicopter by Vic20

Just a quick island scene using a single island stamp from Gaia and standard settings.

 

Lots of assets broke with unity 5.3.x. They messed up particle FX, and Suimono was dependent on them I think.

 

I see Emitter.. blah blah error a bit.. not sure what from actually (one guess is Tenkoku fog effect out of range or something maybe). But anyway, contact Tanuki and he's likely to have already sorted it, I've found that often I am the first to tell him about issues, so best to bring them up and he often fixes it within a day or so and makes the update available before Unity's 2 week wait or whatever. Actually.. @chingwa << Got a issue for you, see original post http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ga...nd-scene-creation.327342/page-98#post-2549194

HashTag C#

 

@ZenMicro, That tool did used to be free. I downloaded it and posted some pics a good few pages back now. Noticed when it was last updated that it was now $5. Still a good tool. Very simple to use.

 

PlayWay water is nice because it supports separate instances of water that only render within a defined volume. So unlike some other solutions that do infinite ocean stuff, you could use that one to also do lakes at different heights, etc. Not that I've had time to investigate how practical it is to go overboard with this in a scene!

 

I might just ask the Author of that Asset if he can see a way to make such an asset for the community.. sometimes i find those geniuses are so close to their work they can't take a step back and see the bigger picture (I mean that in the nicest possible way.. like eccentrics who changed the world... there were likely many more that just didn't take that step back).. OK OK it must be a very late night for me - Still might ask...

 

@SerdeeneilNakpilMerin Yes the _FoamOverlay errors are an issue in unity 5.3+. there is a fix available though, as @ZenMicro has recommended, to get access to the latest update you'll need to register your purchase here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/index.php?register=1

There is a Suimono support thread...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/suimono-2-0-interactive-water-system.289311/

And a dedicated forum where you can get support....
http://tanukidigital.com/forum/

(Now back to your regularly scheduled Gaia programming...)

 

As far as waterfalls I saw Adam talking about Splines and such. I'm surprised no one has used spheres and physics. Seems you could maybe have an erosion check mark, size of sphere, quantity of sphere, etc and then drop them at a position where you want water to begin and let them roll. If erosion is checked maybe deform the terrain a bit. If not checked could build a path based upon how the water actually moves. I'm not sure if this would actually work or not.

I've built meshes at runtime, and such but haven't spent a lot of time with shaders myself. Anyway, if people are thinking about how to handle water I thought I'd share this weird idea since I don't know if it'd have any merit or not. I was thinking of Substance Painter and some of it's particle brushes and how they work when I thought of this water issue. It seems that tackling rivers, and waterfalls is still an issue that there is no great asset for.

 

Gaia modifies the default Unity terrain directly so its compatible with most plugins.
You should be able to use Gaia for your terrain stamping, texturing and tree placement. Then apply Infinigrass plugin over the top. Instead of using Gaia's grass placement system. That should work as Infingrass has its own systems.

 

That sounds a little complex to me, however if an erosion tool as mentioned from the asset store already does this kind of thing, it may already have the variables in it's calculations... I think mostly devs make a waterfall from an artists point of view with manual placement of rocks etc and hopefully can also deform the terrain manually as needed... then it would be nice to have a tool that could just wash over it and report a path or a mesh or meshes as they split at a fork etc, I can now imagine the cloth concept, kinda like laying a Vinyl underlay for a pond waterfall (as i did a few years back for real ) so in strips, which could be merged as one mesh (if desired)

Yeah a cloth like layer you can tweak or help etc to get the effect you want sounds pretty cool, maybe could even do manually.. i know Half-Life (1 back in 1999 or whenever ) had animated textures of running water and you'd just edit the scale and rotation etc (and add sound,.. or was that automatic?)

 

Hi,

For my project I need water (AQUAS chosen), roads (EasyRoads3D), terrain (Gaia) and weather. Since Gaia is centre of project what would be the best for weather system?
Requirements: daytime, dynamic clouds, wind, rain and lighting. I already looked into UniStorm, Sky Master and Time of Day.

 

So, there's a button to remove trees, there's a button to remove grass. Why isn't there a button to remove game objects (rocks, farms, etc)?

 

I'm a fan of using algorithms, including ones that may be aiming to run at useful frame rates in realtime on powerful systems, to bake stuff at design time. Especially as general purpose computing on the GPU continues its slow crawl towards greater real world application. I'm not capable of making such systems myself, but I enjoy studying the work and results of others, sometimes hacking around with their code when its available, and of pondering where it may lead one day.

Rivers, moving water & waterfalls are not something I've looked at much yet. I'm vaguely aware of some of the techniques, such as creating flow-maps that are then used by the water shader to give the impression of movement of the water in varying directions along the rivers path. My personal interest in improved graphics in game engines these days tends to centre around an integrated volumetric atmosphere/fog/lighting/GI systems. Certain forms of spray and mist around the waterfall could be well served by a volumetric fog-etc system that was able to receive 'fog density' information from particle systems. But thats going off to an exotic niche for now, with only more recent versions of CryEngine so far getting deep into this territory.

Anyway, simulation of erosion. I'm sure there are a number of techniques for this, including some classic ones that aren't trying to offer realtime GPU solutions. But as an example of what can be done in unity using techniques that were exploring potentially realtime speeds, the very excellent blog by scrawk (maker of the very nice Ceto Unity ocean asset) had a piece with working code some years ago. I tried it ages ago, but I've no idea if it still works with modern version of Unity. In any case the article is packed full of detail that would probably be of interest to anyone trying to create a system such as this.

https://scrawkblog.com/2013/07/24/interactive-erosion-in-unity/

 

Am i right in saying the GAIA uses Unity Grass placement and there for it flat out does not follow a WindZone that you wish to designate to it? I'm still a little unsure of this, seems i am always having to try find out this stuff but surely by now a GAMEOBJECT set WindZone can be used by any and all assets etc so you have the one true wind direction? I know I've got a few shaders and they do there own thing etc.

 

Yeah I wasn't thinking of my method for runtime. I was thinking something like it might be useful at build time to apply to a terrain after the fact to add erosion effect if desired but at the very least trace the flow of water. You wouldn't have to use spheres (I could see them getting stuck) that was just my quick brainstorm on trying to simulate flow. To really pull it off you'd want terrain wide water flow simulation. That'd be more complex. If I was a bit more skilled at mesh construction at runtime I might give it a shot just because it sounds like a fun problem. However, I'm like many people here. More ideas than I actually have time to complete.


EDIT: Thanks for linking that Interactive Erosion project though. It looks interesting and I am going to dig into it.

 

GPU is where it's at i hear... it's going to make a big difference to many a sluggish code-set soon, so glad someone will be able to wrote stuff my card can handle (Just a 970 but anyway)... Also I hate to say it, but I see snippets of videos from The Opposing Force engine (Unreal) and it appears to be ahead of Unity, but i'm dedicated to Unity

Speaking of Fog effects etc, Tenkoku got a rolling fog effect a while back, not even sure I was told about it but we were discussing it (from videos of the effect I liked)... anyway I have since turned it into a dust storm by changing the color to the earthy tones.. with more effects to come.. this is all Tenkoku.. I should make a video to do it justice. I can see (if comparing to BF4 for example... that you want some noise filter over the camera etc) and recently a dude posted a GAIA compatible leaf blowy thing.. merge all these together.. bingo!

As for these 'Science Experiments' (not to be degrading).. these guys are so able to make an asset for use within and by the game dev community if they wanted to.. they should be encouraged to do so i think.

 

For rivers you might need fancy flow maps, but for waterfalls I just use a planar mesh, bent into a parabolic shape, to which I apply a horizontal planar UV map. The Scrolling UVs script does the rest, making the water appear to speed up and stretch into long streams as it transitions from horizontal to nearly vertical. Add a bit of foam and mist using particles and you're set. But a "proper" solution that uses a bit more actual physics would still be a good thing.

 

The coming of this stuff has been very gradual so I tend to avoid getting too carried away about GPGPU stuff, mostly because I've been hearing it (and playing with it) for what must be over a decade now. Along the way its been slowed by fragmentation across platforms and between GPU vendors and graphics API's, by the sometimes different or daunting techniques required to do parallel rather than sequential programming. And by the fact that its not like gamers are known to be sitting on oodles of spare GPU capacity - its a balancing act and some things kept that balance away from GPGPU stuff to a great extent. One recent example would be discussions about some recent nvidia cards and whether they can compete with AMD when it comes to asynchronous compute, with a suggestion that they flubbed this side of things in the design because they favoured triangle, rendering etc performance over some forms of compute. But a lot of the articles written about this in relation to nvidia performing badly in a DX12 benchmark probably didn't really know what the asynchronous compute stuff really means in practice, as it pertains to the layman and future games.

As for Unreal, its recently ahead in some areas related to speedy realtime rendering of lush environments, but its not really ahead much in the areas I've been going on about tonight. If they had any sort of decent volumetric stuff going on in 4 then perhaps I might have jumped, but they've not emphasised this area at all so far in their release cycle and its been CryEngine thats come on leaps and bounds in this area. Its also no fun trying to get compute shaders going with Unreal, Unity is a much more practical environment for people to experiment with and deliver assets that use compute shaders. In particular their work, though not yet complete, to automatically translate compute shaders to work with graphics API's other than DX11 is a lovely thing even though only a small handful of assets available from the store have used compute shaders much to date.

Such a video would be interesting to see. I've got a couple of other genuinely volumetric fog systems for Unity now but since I only bought the second one this morning and haven't had time to use it yet, I'll not start going on about that right now.

Many techniques for graphics trickle down over a long period. Often people write papers that get presented and published. Others then create implementations based on these techniques, and thats when we get to play with these experiments. But there is quite a big jump between that stage and turning the technique into a commercial asset that has to be supported and made to work in a wider range of scenarios etc. I often encourage people to share their work, but I don't think I'd hassle them to turn it into a fully fledged unity asset unless they'd expressed some desire to go down that route if demand was there and expressions of interest numerous. And a lot of the time the stuff still isn't really practical for games - e.g. the simulation can run at decent frame rates on its own, but it takes too much GPU (and still potentially CPU) budget to live happily alongside a lot of other demanding stuff that makes up the game.

 

Currently i use enviro for this.

 

I've come up with quite a few nifty solutions for myself. I've had people tell me I should make an asset store item for some of them and it actually can be a lot of work trying to make it MORE editor friendly and so that it FEELS right to people. If they were satisfied with my scripts without me having to polish them all up then I could provide a lot of things. However, to do what is needed ends up with me spending my time making assets instead of making my game.

It's a hard call to make.

 

T

Thanks mate

 

Something like this would be really handy round 20:0 - 20:01 this some of the other tools could be nice too