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

Regarding the rivers, lakes and waterfalls, I'd like to recommend this one https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1019

 

Have you used it ? I tried it a year ago and never got a decent result. Maybe its been improved. Theoretically you turn the tap on and it should just flow water down the hill - i never found that to be the case.

 

Kind of a need to patch my Unity for some reasons. I'll post a screenshot after I use this one sir.

Anyway i used the Version: 3.0.0b11 of this asset. I'll email you a copy if you wanted to test this out.

 

Does this look like an alternative? - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/24340

It looks interesting and a much better price than the fluvio pro. Also looks like it could have a other uses.

Edit - it does mention waterfalls in the description. Also like how it mentions lava flow! sounds like a real terrain tool addition.

 

Very cool!

 

Jho: "Tryed Unity 5.2 and 5.3, Can´t load .bin files from Realflow.
Nothing seems to work, standard particles, hybrido particles, hybrido domains, which all create .bin files. "

 

Yeah i have look at this several times - but they never show off water - and that would be such a great use for it

 

Not too sure what this would mean to be fair. Maybe it's the kind of package that relies on other packages to get the most from?

Just found this - http://www.blendernation.com/2014/07/15/tutorial-creating-a-waterfall/

Love blender.

 

Agreed. I find a lot of assets are more capable than they sell themselves to be but the developers think everyone will just know it does what it does.

 

MegaFlow is only one piece of the jigsaw, and not a piece that includes timesaving helper functions that would automatically take account of terrain. It offers importing velocity info from external apps or creating your own (usually simpler ones) in unity. It's not going to take care of fancy custom rendering side of things, which is why there are no pretty water demos from the author. Out of the box, last time I checked, scripts are included that will make unity particle systems respond to the flows, and make game objects move with the flows. So if someone can get the results they want using particles, you are in business. You'd need something else that can read the flow data to, for example, use it to control shader-based water rendering, or make a particle system render to look like volumes of water.

 

@elbows, megaflow sounds a bit messy then. Just watching the blender waterfall vids now while it's late and quiet. If I see anything of interest I will point it out.

 

I wouldn't call it messy. I quite like it, and it certainly does a few of the things that have come up in relation to this topic. But if by messy you mean its not an asset which, without further development effort and brand new features, would be a natural fit for a 'Gaia compatible' asset that aims to offer 'one click or a few clicks' quick start Gaia integration and automation of terrain-related tasks, then yeah.

 

Just had a thought. I wonder if a tool like simple waypoint system or something like it could be used to add waypoints down the course of the fall/river and then the water effect, in whatever form it takes follow these waypoints. Ie use tweening tools.

 

I did think it looks like it's got a fair few uses.

 

Hi, just a few questions about the terrain defaults in Gaia which I've been wondering for some time:

1. Is there any benefit of having the terrain size at 2048 as opposed to 2000? The only benefit I could see was that the control resolution also uses 2048, and thought perhaps they are related.

2. Does the default height of 1000 have any impact on performance or quality? Does it allow for more detail on flat terrains, even if you only use a fraction of it? The only benefit I could see was that it allows for more control if you want to lower the height of the terrain.

3. Does the size of the terrain affect the quality of the textures? I always thought it did, but just did a test in scene view by placing the camera facing the terrain, then increased the size of the terrain and didn't notice any difference. I know it affects the resolution (i.e. textures cannot be painted with as much precision), but does it also affect the quality (i.e. more blurred)?

4. I didn't quite understand Adam's post about version 1.5.3. I'm still using version 1.5 because I didn't want to risk damaging my project by updating it, but I'm starting afresh and so would prefer to wait until 1.5.3 if it has been submitted to the Asset Store, but it wasn't clear if has or not.

5. What is the correct way of doing a backup? There are many posts about this, but they always discuss version control (which isn't really necessary for smaller projects) and not just a simple backup. Additionally, many of the posts are several years old. I had been using this tool, however after messing up my terrain I decided to reload an older backup and got this error message which prevented the game from running:

Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaExtensionExporterEditor.cs(240,13): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `Template' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?

After more research, I found the best way to back up a project is the following:
Edit > Project Settings > Editor > Visible Meta Files, then manually copy and paste the whole folder. Is this the correct way?


Thanks

 

Just an update on my waterfall possibility discoveries. Not seen all the blender vids linked to but they are well worth watching. Watching an experienced blender user at work shows how fantastic that software is. He even quickly covers how to make rocks and trees!!!

Also downloaded this today - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50735.

It's free at the moment and is top quality. This developer really does a decent job. If you go through the demo scene(buried in a load of folders) you'll see the particles in action. I tested particle system `Magma2` and changed to colours from reds/oranges to blues. It made a great waterfall effect and the frame rates look decent Just still orange particle texture so lava volcano effect is a winner. So not a full waterfall yet.


When I get some more funds I will be looking to buy some of his packs. Not affiliated etc etc etc...

Edit - it's magma 1 for more realism. He could easily charge for this pack

 

1. Is there any benefit of having the terrain size at 2048 as opposed to 2000? The only benefit I could see was that the control resolution also uses 2048, and thought perhaps they are related

Yes. Its a power of 2. Helps to avoid rounding errors.

2. Does the default height of 1000 have any impact on performance or quality? Does it allow for more detail on flat terrains, even if you only use a fraction of it? The only benefit I could see was that it allows for more control if you want to lower the height of the terrain.

No benefit other than more flexibility with heights.

3. Does the size of the terrain affect the quality of the textures? I always thought it did, but just did a test in scene view by placing the camera facing the terrain, then increased the size of the terrain and didn't notice any difference. I know it affects the resolution (i.e. textures cannot be painted with as much precision), but does it also affect the quality (i.e. more blurred)?

No, but it does control the precision at which things can be rendered into the terrain.

4. I didn't quite understand Adam's post about version 1.5.3. I'm still using version 1.5 because I didn't want to risk damaging my project by updating it, but I'm starting afresh and so would prefer to wait until 1.5.3 if it has been submitted to the Asset Store, but it wasn't clear if has or not.

Unity update systems seem to be broken a the moment as you should already have it. They are aware of it. The benefit is bug fixes and incremental improvements.

5. What is the correct way of doing a backup? There are many posts about this, but they always discuss version control (which isn't really necessary for smaller projects) and not just a simple backup. Additionally, many of the posts are several years old. I had been using this tool, however after messing up my terrain I decided to reload an older backup and got this error message which prevented the game from running:

Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaExtensionExporterEditor.cs(240,13): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `Template' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?

I use source control. Looks like your backup tool broke something.

 

I wanted to share a fly by (menu) scene I created in the past two days which shows off some of the assets often mentioned in this thread including Distingo, the Bird Flocks and of course Gaia!

The fly by opens a whole new can of worms: fps drops, tree shadows popping up which is much more visible from a birds eye perspective. It's time I start to learning how to properly use the Profiler and LODs.

p.s. The spline controller is great for doing these camera fly by effects: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Hermite_Spline_Controller

 

That stutter looks similar to one I have had with Tenkoku - if so - set the reflection probe update rate to zero - the stutter is caused by the reflection probes updating.

 

Has anyone tried one of these terrains on mobile?

 

Which one? They're standard unity terrains - nothing more.

 

Thanks, I've never used them. How do they usually preform on mobile?

 

It is just like any other unity terrain. You have to optimize your spawning and everything for it to work with mobile. Unity terrain works fine with mobile so a terrain created with Gaia is going to work fine with mobile too. But just like a non-Gaia created Unity terrain, you still have to optimize it. Gaia just creates the terrain. It is up to you to optimize it for whatever platform you are targeting.

 

i used it on ipad retina, it run at 60 fps but you have to optimize:

- design your terrain with pixel error at 1 then switch to ~15 to reduce poly after texturing
- reduce draw distance for tree, limit max instance to ~ 50, avoid speedtrees
- AFS shaders greatly help
- no shadow its just eat your ressources
- reduce camera culling distance to 350 ~ use fog that hide everything over 300 metters so you dont see objects popping
-switch the terrain shader to diffuse instead of standard

 

Tried on Samsung s6 (Lollipop) - works fine.
Tried VR on same phone with Gear VR - not so good.

 

Would be interesting to see how it performed with gear vr if you export it as a mesh.

 

Thanks, nice tip! I always wondered how you could make a rainforest with lots of flora, looks like this would be the answer.

 

Hi Adam, unfortunately the probes were already set to zero. However examining the Profiler recording and some Googling showed that this seems to be a known issue. For now I've set collectDetailPatches to false and almost all of the stuttering is gone. Some more investigation to be done but it's much better now.

 

Random question, don't know if this is the right place to ask. I just bought GAIA recently, and I've been trying to follow the tutorials from AdamGoodrich, but every time I try to Add Stamps then Play Session, it just gives me a complete black deformed terrain. I'm just following this tutorial:

.

What's going on with the rendering...?

 

Can you say how you did that? I tried to see if it this would make a difference in my scene, but can't seem to make the setting stick. There's a checkbox for it in the Terrain settings, but if you uncheck it, it resets to checked as soon as you hit "Play". I've also tried putting the script from the link onto my Terrain, and onto a blank GameObject in my scene, and it doesn't seem to do anything in either case. They don't really say much about how to use it in the scripting docs.

 

Try adding a directional light to your scene. Name it Directional Light. I think there is a version of unity there that might not include one by default.

 

Hi all!

I'd like to share with you a couple of screenshots from the recent Gaia integration with Volumetric Fog & Mist, which is currently on 24H SALE today.

It is really easy to use it along with Gaia as it's compatible with its Extension System:



Just select one of the presets. My favourite is Sea of Clouds:



The asset comes with lot of customizable parameters to tweak both appearance and performance, like distance falloff and baseline height, which allows you to move the fog far or above/below the camera.



The goal for Volumetric Fog & Mist was to create floating fog that could be crossed by the player as you can see in this video:

Currently we're working on V4 which adds custom point light support (latest update supports up to 6 point lights, which can be automatically tracked based on distance to the camera):

One of the benefits of making it compatible with Gaia is the ability to adjust some parameters automatically based on the terrain/scene, like water level or Sun properties.
For more details you can go into Gaia, just open the Extension System and go to Compatible tab, check out Volumetric Fog & Mist under Kronnect or visit the asset page.

 

@Thrawn75

Wow!!!! Your other videos sold me but these are fabulous!

 

Awesome integration! Your system has been living in my Wishlist for a few months now. Unfortunately until I can get some income going to take care of other things, it is going to have to live there a bit longer.. lol But super happy to see you working with Gaia and providing an extension to help easing into your asset a bit simpler for when I do get there! heheh

 

I just added the line to an Awake script I already had in the scene:

Code (CSharp):

1. void Awake() {
2.         if (!database) {
3.             database = Resources.Load("GameDatabase") as GameDatabase;
4.         }
5.         if (TeamSelector && database) {
6.             TeamSelector.currentlySelected = database.Team;
7.         }
8.  
9.         Terrain.activeTerrain.collectDetailPatches = false;
10. }

I checked the scene again and the check box remains unchecked in my scene until I stop the scene.

 

I did a few tests with gaia and cidy (city generator): trees, grass and gameobjects spawn on the roads. The road segments have mesh colliders on them and gaia spawn criteria is set to virgin terrain and bound checks (e.g. Desktop Trees Package ressource from adam).

What could cause this?

 

Make sure the spawner layers are checking the layers the roads are on. If not then you wont get collisions. I don't have Cidy so beyond that I can't really comment.

 

Thank you adam! After adding layer "Road" to collision layers and lifting gameobject "CiDyGraph" (all cidy objects) up by 0.1 it worked.

 

I figured out why mine wasn't working, and it turned out to be something pretty obvious. I have more than one terrain in my scene, and it was only doing this to one of them. Not sure how to specify all terrains, or a specific terrain with this script, as the scripting guide doesn't provide much additional detail. Too bad you can't just use the checkbox they provide in the terrain settings.

 

I wonder if you could just add a script with just that awake function to the terrain object. I haven't looked at the script to see what it does exactly, but wonder if that is a possibility.

 

Nope. The script does the same thing no matter where I put it. I saw there's another entry in the scripting guide for Terrain.activeTerrains, which looks like it's used to create an array of Terrains in the scene, but there's nothing on how to use it. I tried to iterate through it, setting Terrain.activeTerrain.collectDetailPatches = false for all members, but just got a bunch of errors. My scripting skills are pretty weak though, so I was probably just doing it wrong. Since the guide doesn't give an example of the right way to do it, I had to guess.

That's OK though. I was just curious what effect this setting would have on my scene performance. I don't know that I actually need it.

 

This scene was designed by @wolfen231.

He shared the session file with me and I replayed it. Then with a few clicks on the installed GX extensions I then added Volumetric Fog & Mist by @Thrawn75 and Tenkoku by @chingwa. Tweaked it so that the fog picked up the colour of the sky.

People collaborating to get great outcomes - lovely



If you would like the session file - grab it here - http://1drv.ms/1ppbVsH.

Drop it into your project with Gaia 1.5.3. From a new scene go to Utilities and add a session manager. The select this session and load it, and then play it.

 

woah great
thx for the session file

maybe you should make a Gaia contest
who gets the most out of a session file

have to try it with unistorm and others

 

Yes. Learn from my mistakes haha. This is pure raise height. I didn't even use masking or blends. So learn those if you want something like this to go easier for you. HAHA

 

I've imported the session file into my test project and works like a charm. Love it! It's a really simple way to share creations. Definitely Gaia is setting standards here!

One comment: when you add Volumetric Fog & Mist to Gaia, it picks up the color of the directional light or Sun, which is not pure white but yellowish. But as you say it's as simple as changing the light color property to match the mood of your scene.
I'd recommend playing with those parameters, as you can achieve lot of nice effects.

Also, if you have a very rich or heavy scene with lot of trees and vegetation, you may improve the performance setting the downsampling property to x2. You will notice it

 

There will be a competition coming up and there will be some awesome prizes

I want to bed all this new functionality down first. As a way of doing that i would love to see some other session files in here

We will need to limit the resources either to those available with Gaia, or ideally to assets that we can all get free access to Alternatively, if you have SpeedTree you can get the extension files from the first page in this forum. Any sessions created with these will be able to be replicated by people who also have these as assets.

The session files actually embed the resources and the defaults so that they can be encapsulated nicely in a single file. Same with the sample image.

Note. If you check in 1.5.3 there are 4 sessions there. I have attached images to make them easy to recognise.

Any takers ?

Also. When you take a screen shot with the screen shotter it encodes the x,y,z and rotation of the player at the time the screen shot was taken. This is very handy as it allows you to move your player to the same location in edit mode, then flick to game view to see what the player was seeing when they took the shot. Excellent for debugging, flagging issues etc.

 

Oh you beauty. Thanks for the x2 hint. The Volumetric settings getting reset threw me slightly until I remembered to set Volumetric Fog type to 'custom'

 

The interesting thing about session files... they replicate the scene exactly... down to the blade of grass... They are a very powerful way of both backing up and sharing your scenes.

You can also apply each operation to see how it was set up in the relevant stamper or spawner, and you can play each operation step by step. A great way to see how it was done...

Or alternatively, skip steps you didn't like. Don't forget to lock your session when you are done.

 

That session file is one of the most useful features of Gaia. Thanks for including that option. I hope more unity assets follow this example.

 

Not just for the final result, but as a learning experience too - seeing what goes into a great landscape stamp by stamp.