GeNa - Sophisticated procedural content spawner

Man, it is spectacular to see.

While doing a Skype screen share session, he grabbed a huge bunch of the wooden tree trunks and some wooden crates from the Exteriors Kit latest update and let them spawn.
They spawned a good distance away from the terrain surface, and all came tumbling down and end up and stopped
They then had a VERY natural state they were in, with things piling up in valley and rolling down slopes as they would in real life.

Cheers
Cobus

 

You prolly could, use it for roads, to, not sure, but I know 3d roads, works great with GAIA, and GENA, since we use it.

 

Think of Mega scatter with more features, in some sense, its not like Mega scatter really but it does do level, design world building like Mega scatter.... I have mega scatter, and rarely used it, as I did like the whole spline aspect, but I could never get anything to look more natural, with Gena, I can and very easily.. So think of Mega scatter with 1000 more features.. I guess, that is prolly the closest thing, as I told Adam when it first started making so I know Adam wanted to make it Unique tool like Gaia and have all the features that we need for Level Design and World building that we need...So its like a swiss army knife for those aspects... Is the best way to explain the tool. $25 to save hours and hours and have your levels and world look better....... is a done deal for me.. to be honest and I feel it should be for any serious developer in my opinion..

 

Ya color maps are nice, for that kind of stuff...Love color maps for alot of different tools.. Smart move to add them.

 

How is it different from World Creator object placement? WC can place every kinds of objects based on sun/cavity/sea level or textures, procedural of course, with noise map. It also has road and river tools (which is said above to be in this asset beta).

 

Hi @Shuttle

I am busy with the Exteriors Kit Update, so quickly opened GeNa and clicked some of the options so that they can expand.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Cobus

 

I'm confused. Should I get Gaia now or GeNa? And what is the latter? There isn't even a tutorial video in the asset store link.

 

That is a nice technique. Do you have screen shots of this? I think @Steve-Tack would be interested in that also.

 

I am a terror arent I

Yep - I saw a message at one point when I put into a different version of Unity but didn't catch what it was, just run the update and all will be fine, I will add a unity version specific compile fix in next update.

Should work ok - assume you are using Curvy. Only potential issue i can see is that it might get confused on collisions because curvy messes with unity coordinates.

Check the Y offset in your Prototype settings. You need to set it to zero. Its it rather cool to be able to spawn things in the air as well as on the ground. This gives you lots of latitude to be creative.

Yeah - I will post this more screens shots, documentation and a bunch of videos when I get back home next week - am currently away travelling for Unite (gave a presentation there yesterday), and PAX and I don't have access to normal equipment and network so its difficult to get stuff done. I ran out of time before I left and didn't want to delay the release. Am very proud of GeNa.

I guess for those people who are skeptical, that's entirely fair, it's always a choice whether or not to purchase an asset. GeNa be developed to my own standards, and if you look at Gaia, generally people are very happy with the quality and support I deliver. This will continue to do this with Gena

So how is Gaia and GeNa different.

Gaia is a complete end to end terrain solution - Gena is a sophisticated spawning and procedural content generation system that does not do any form of terrain modification.

Gaia can create, texture and modify terrain, and like the other terrain tools in the store, can spawn things into your environment.

GeNa does not modify terrain, but instead does one thin and one thing very well - which is to quickly and intuitively place (spawn) things into your environment. It is capable of global, localised and micro control of object placement. It is capable of doing really natural placement, and also very structured placement.

It can spawn single things - it can spawn entire scenes full of things in a single click - it can spawn sophisticated human structures - and can interrogate the terrain to work out where to put things - or use noise and image masks - or a combination of all of the above. I will do a bunch of videos when I get home to show of the different ways you can use it.

Did a bunch of design on the way over here on the plane and already have some very cool upgrade ideas in the pipeline

GeNa is not a road system. I have a bunch of ideas on this and may do a separate asset just for roads. Also have ideas for a river generation system but will see how we go.

It's always interesting talking to @recon0303 - he doesn't pull any punches and has been in the industry for a long time. Very pleased that he views GeNa as a powerful and useful tool.

 

This is quite easy to achieve in GeNa. You just set the Y offset of the spawned objects to a range - and GeNa will spawn at random heights in this range. This is a great example of thinking outside the box and the results are pretty cool.

 

Just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone for supporting with GeNa. Going to number one asset on the store in less than 24 hours is beyond awesome!!

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do!!

 

Bought GeNa yesterday and haven't got the chance to test it yet. But I'm already interested in this
I've been holding off to buy EasyRoads and Map-ity, might be worth to wait a little longer to see what you come out with.

 

Thanks!

Hmm... I wouldn't wait... they are at idea stage at moment - and EasyRoads is a pretty sophisticated product.

 

Are there any videos showing what this can do? Couldn't find any.

 

I need a video to see if the workflow fits my use-case. Please and thank you.

 

I am away from home and wont be back until after the weekend. My laptop is not really powerful enough to make videos. Videos will come after I get home and have access to my development machine.

 

Sounds like I'll have to buy it and see what happens.

 

And yet half a dozen posts down, somebody is going to ask if there are any videos and when they are coming...

 

I did this. Map-Ity doesn't have an updated support for EasyRoad3D and when I tried making my own solution it didn't work as intended. Adam is very supportive to the high volume of users his asset's have. So take that as you will. Map-ity works but may not give you the desired results (such as positional mesh generation).

 

Indeed a screenshot of that would be interesting to see.

 

ya sorry didn't mean to say its a road tool if it came off as such, its not. But though maybe since it can do fences, it may be able to connect roads, like the fences does, prolly more of a basic one, I never tried so , wasn't sure.

Yup, I like to be honest as I can, it don't help anyone being fake.. and telling people a product is good and thats it.

when I have my testers test my game, if someone just says its good....... they don't last long as a tester, I want people to be 100% honest, I know some people hate that i'm so blunt.... But I don't like being fake , or blowing smoke up someones butt either.. It don't help them at all.

When I was in college, I would see people all the time show there work and teachers, people would says yup looks good...I would rip into there work, in a nice way, and critique and I expected the same...that way you can make it better , if it needs to..Now if I cant find any flaws, I say so.. Same with my work, I love when people rip into it, and give me an honest opinion.. I do it , to hopefully help make already great product better, if I can...I don't pretend to know it all, I learn new stuff from listening to many of you talented people as well, in many of the Unity, Unreal , Skype channels I belong to
anyways , keep up the great work with Gena.!

 

Hi Adam. Sorry for spamming here, but I mailed to the support account about an issue I had while purchasing Gena. Can you confirm me that you checked it?
Thanks a lot.

 

Hi @longroadhwy, @Steve-Tack , Sorry. I did post a pic couple of pics on the skype beta group but have since got rid of the images in a desktop clean. I'm not able to create another for a few days now as snowed under. If I manage to get some time in the next couple of days i'll reproduce it.

Like Adam said above (post 61) you can now do this by using a spawn range in y (i'm not sure if that existed in the earlier version I tested.) so effectively you can use random y spawn on a flat terrain. I used another terain tool to generate a terrain with perlin noise applied and scaled it in y so it was very spiky. Then used gena to add the rocks/meteors based on angle. It's even easier in this last gena versoin. Basically use whatever asset you want to gererate a noisy terrain or you could use gimp/photoshop etc to create a noise .raw file that you can import into you terrain height map. Use gena to alter the possible y spawn range and angle range etc to suit then spawn it. When you are happy just make sure the spawned gameobjects are separate from the terrain object and delete the terrain.

You could also paint/use masks and stamps to create empty zones or whatever as well. Thinking about it with the new colormaps you can use those as well.

 

when does the promotion price ends

 

It says 7 days from release so it should end this sunday.

 

It says 7 Days SALE on the package description
It was launched on the 30th October, O one can presume end of 6th November

 

Thank you, a few more days then!

 

I'm subscribing to this thread

 

Can someone please do a 1 minute youtube video about what you can do with this? Thank you very much!

 

Just deleted my trees and let GeNa spawn them. This works really great and looks much more random and organic. But I still need to get behind the slope and height settings.

 

is there any video show as the feature, i don't understanding how this spawning works

or its a streamer?

 

@AdamGoodrich will surely post videos and tutorials soon

 

Here an example how nice it works with randomly spawned rocks with gravity option on a steep surface.

With visualised spawn area, just spawned the rocks:


After hitting playmode (let the gravity do its work):

 

I used about 5% of the GeNa (was on Beta earlier Version) Settings/Tools to spawn all my Prefabs in that video:

I spawned in it Grass, Rocks, Trees...as Prefabs was very easy and faster for me.

Not the best video to show off the Power of GeNa but it have been one of the essential Asset needed for doing it.

What I can say even if I still don't have tried every aspects of GeNa, it's at my knowledge the Tool for creating very very detailed areas naturals or others too. Precisely, easily and fastly.
From only one placement to multiples or global, it's so easy to custom it and just say: "I want that thing here, these things here and blabla"; you know that kind of things you have in mind and just want to concretize it in your Games !

So you have now GeNa for this!

 

Awesome stuff !!

For those of you that don't know @turboscalpeur, he does some amazing work with grasses - you can see them here.

 

Man, I'm really loving GeNa!

Quick thoughts so far:

It really fills in some gaps in my foliage painting workflow. The ability to essentially set up and tweak multiple spawners basically lets me use it as a procedural foliage brush. I'm using it in a very localized manner, not trying to cover a large amount of ground at once but just paint in certain areas. The ability to paint onto meshes is killer. Adams done a great job on this one!

This is running in Unity 5.5b08 taking advantage of the new SpeedTree instancing for the trees, I'm getting decent results by disabling light probes and reducing wind quality, but YMMV, It's certainly a step in the right direction.

Here's a test from last week using grass details (SpeedTree Rough Grass and Thick Grass with a little help from some HBAO) and a few models from the Desktop Tree Pack. Terrains of course made with Gaia, and sky using Tenkoku:



Here's my testing from this evening, but I added even more Adam with the Unity Adam assets released today and the Post processing stack as well. This is just the Unity Atmospheric Scattering in lieu of tenkoku for the sky(Same vegetation assets but with some SpeedTree Marigolds thrown in for good measure):

 

I'm not quite sure what this is. Is it similar to a prefab painter with randomization? Or does it just spawn prefabs? No offense to the author or anything but the asset store page and this forum don't really explain it. If it is just a prefab spawner, it really wouldn't be doing anything new. So it must be something else, that I am not understanding.

 

Hey, is there a video of this yet?

 

I like Gaia so I'm taking a leap of faith here not entirely understanding what GeNa does. Adam please do post video's soon!

 

Bought, sorry been gone for some time and catching things up(personal life went to hell, lol, oh well I'm back.).

I'm releasing a new AI asset soon, so expect videos to come, showing all the top assets I use and love in concert as always.

 

Long time no see
Welcome back

 

Hmmm. I've finally gotten around to trying GeNa out, and I'm having a bit of a problem. I added a spawner to my test scene, added a Speedtree prototype (Rough Grass Desktop), and Shift-Clicked on a grassy area of my terrain to check placement. Instead of the visualizer conforming to the terrain and showing placement based on the criteria I've selected (height, slope, texture}, it just floats in the air above it. GeNa seems to detect the terrain, since it correctly identifies the texture I've clicked on, but doesn't connect to it otherwise. I've tried this a dozen times already, going through the procedures in both the Readme file and the main manual with no luck. Other than setting Min Height and Height Range, I'm just using the default settings for everything at this point. Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Edit: Doh! I just realized I had a large box shaped trigger collider above my terrain. I couldn't see it in the editor, but apparently GeNa could. Funny, it read the texture from the terrain, but the geometry from the trigger collider.

 

Could you show a more top down screen?
From this angle it is a bit hard to see if it interacts with any mesh collider from trees. I had something like that too when I clicked near a tree and it tried to spawn grass on the branches.

 

Is it possible to generate and use stamp at runtime?

 

I like to see a video, are a cut from a tutorial first, let us see how it works, please.

 

Gena is a spawning system. It doesn't have stamps. And yes you can use it to spawn things at run time.

Not really sure why people have such an issue reading the forum. I am away from home travelling and I don't have the equipment with me to be able to make video's. Videos will come as promised early next week when I am home again.

Not sure how you are getting Gena to attempt to spawn grass on branches. Grass is a terrain only thing.

Are you spawning meshes on meshes ? If this is the cases then that is the intended behaviour. Gena will use whichever mesh you get a collision with when you click as the "ground". Sounds like you got a collision with a tree collider, and then Gena will assume that this is the thing you want it to spawn on.

So for example if you have a plane as your ground, which may also have trees, just make sure you ctrl click on the ground. Gena will avoid spawning on anything other than the thing you clicked on.

 

Yep Gena makes extensive use of collisions to find free spaces in which to spawn. The hidden box collider was absolutely what was causing the issue.

 

$25 isn't too much of a gamble, seeing how great and well-supported an asset Gaia is. This seems very useful and Adam's earned my trust. I'm in.

 

Cause reading is hard! I don't mind reading if I'm stuck but a video helps showcase what it does exactly. I don't have time to mess with it right now but I bought it cause you've earned my trust and from what I seen so far it could be extremely useful and a timesaver.

 

Thanks