GeNa - Sophisticated procedural content spawner

Super cool new feature - childed spawners!

In the next release you will be able to child spawners to a parent... this will enable you tor create sophisticated spawner chains... which can be activated with a single control click!

In this example - first the tree spawner runs, then each of the grass spawners run. The grass spawners were set up with opposing perlin masking to get the nice mutually exclusive grass and fern patches.

I then manually added the flowers with another click. Could have done them all in one as well

This nesting can go as many levels deep as you like.

This enables an incredible amount of flexibility!





Another quick spawn - this time added some rocks.

 

This is fixed in next release

 

Ok, I'm off to write a review.

 

Next release 1.1.0.0 is ready to go.

Just waiting for the asset store to come back up as it seems to have crashed.

New Features:
• Sub spawners / child spawners
• Runtime spawner sample
• Runtime growth sample
• Added POI colliders option and runtime collider disabler script

Enhancements:
• Updated default embedded setting for prefab prototypes
• Improved the invert perlin noise function
• Fixed the global spawn on mesh function
• Updated location of root component for poi spawns
• General tidy up of spawner class organisation
• Updated default prototype rotation settings to always rotate on Y axis
• Expose prototype rotation settings for trees
• Added version specific physics settings
• Added ability to cancel global spawns

 

New version is live.

 

So with those new child spawners, I should be able now to set up three to four grass textures with different perlin mask plus some random flowers on top right and it spawns them one after another? Neat!

 

Yep - videos will come on how to do this a little later today.

 

I still can't get Global Spawn to work on meshes.

I've updated GeNa, created a new project. I can Global Spawn onto terrain without issue, but once on a mesh it refuses to spawn. I can spawn singles and multiples on the mesh, but when I run a Global Sawn, no prefabs spawn, not even at 0,0,0.

I've checked on my existing project and on a new project and the same result. I made sure to completely delete GeNa prior to updating.

 

Hmm... as per my image above - I am comfortable that this works fine.

Other potential issues could be that the mesh you are placing things on does not have collider on it - it needs a collider so that Gena can detect it.

Another aspect of this is that Gena needs to know what "ground" is.. this is set by both shift and control clicking on the mesh. At that point Gena will only spawn on "ground" and will not place on other meshes that have colliders - this is how Gena knows to avoid things.

Finally, you can not place terrain trees or terrain grass on a mesh - this isn't supported by unity - you need to ensure you are placing some type of prefab.

If you are still stuck PM me and we can do a Skype session - i am sure the resolution will be quite simple.

 

Well I finally bought @turboscalpeur both grass packs today and I can't wait to try it out the next days. Maybe if I have enough time, I will try to even put my old terrain into Gaia I bought today to get the best out of those three assets.

 

I'm update gena 1.1 today.
but, error occur
Assets/gena/scripts/spawner.cs(643,25) error cs0117
UnityEngine.Physics does not contain a definition for defaultSolverIterations

I'm use unity 5.3.5f1.
Am i upgrade unity to 5.4 ?
thanks in advance.

 

Unfortunately Unity isn't great about when API changes happen and I didn't test on that specific version of Unity

There is a new version live now. It should fix this issue.

 

Hi Adam,

These new features look great ! Can't wait to test it.

I was just wondering what do you think if there would be a Gena Window with all the spawner.

I could switch from a spawner quickly and paint without organising or search my Gena spawner

I don't know if it's a good idea or not... Let me know if it's clear enough (sorry I'm not an english native speaker).

Thanx !

Antonio.

 

Here is a quick level design demo in Gena - gives you a sense of what can be done. Still only touches about half of what Gena is capable of

 

Nice idea !!

 

Awesome Adam !!

 

fantastic !!!
bravo

 

What are you using for your camera effects / post processing etc on this video.
Btw great job Gena will really make level design a ton of fun especially if you team it up with Gaia.

 

Thanks

I am using Tenkoku for lighting - currently on sale, and the new Unity Post Processing for the rest - it totally rocks !!

I just made another video - with another scene to show off more of Gena's capability, and also show off how to set up the lighting - you can pause the video to see the individual settings. Will post it here when it has finished uploading.

 

Really like that new video. It did raise one question: when you put down the logs after having spawned the grasses, and noted that the grass would clip through the logs, would it be possible to "erase" objects when spawning newer ones on top of them?

 

There is a bulk erase function in Gena ... and there are also the terrain erase functions... so there are multiple ways to get the desired effect.

 

And here it is... showing off how to do lighting and post FX!

 

Hi adam.
I try Gena 1.1.0.1 and fix now.
thanks for great support.

 

Here is a video on Grass Spawning in Gena, including showing image and perlin based masking, plus nested spawners.

 

Adam,

Unfortunately because of our timezone differences I missed sale on Gena, hopefully there will be a moment when You put it on 24h sale anytime soon.

If I could suggest You something, which I haven't found in videos. Maybe it would be nice feature to have some kind of flatten terrain function for buildings mostly, so like You are checking "C" to align with terrain or keep they Y value it would be nice to have option to check flatten terrain under specific objects. Sometimes map is not so flat and such functionality in my opinion would be a good idea.
Keep up with great work and great attitude.

 

Adam, that's wonderful, could you tell me what package you're using for those rock walls please?

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/45643
"Rocks & Boulders 3" I think. I had the same question, I believe he says so in one of the tutorial videos.

Most recent comments on the store say the shader doesn't work with new versions, but it seems to work for him.. I'm afraid to buy something that might not work, though. The price matches the quality as well, unfortunately.

Adam. Does this asset work out the box?

 

I haven't personally ran into any issues with the product; runs great great for me out of the box. I haven't updated to the newest release yet. But I can guarantee if there is any issues; Adam will resolve them. He takes his products and support seriously and doesn't abandon his customers.

Edit: if you mean the MK4 asset; then that's a different story and may need some tweaking since that author isn't so great on keeping his products up to date

 

Thanks! That's actually on my wishlist.

I also noted Rocks & Boulders 2 is free, which is very generous of the author

 

They work just fine out of the box as far as I can tell. The shader that comes with them is quite flexible, but if you want something other than the default you need to edit yourself.

I also added mesh colliders to the prefabs as they did not come with them by default. Its a bit tedious to set up - but only took me 10 or so minutes and it was a one off thing.

Btw... when you place the rock walls.. they don't look like that without Gena The magic is in the way Gena groups and places multiple prefabs together when it places them. I tend to play with settings until I get something I like - and will be happy to share the settings I used to this effect.

One of the improvements I have in mind for Gena is to try and automagic the settings to be good for the intended usage. I will also make some video to show the settings.

 

If you could share those settings that would be great.

To be honest, I was always a little unsure as to what Gena was there to do, but that video has completely sold me and I plan to make a purchase today.

Thanks!

 

Cool

The videos still don't show all the capability of Gena - and are plagued by sound issues - so I will make a bunch more over the next week.

Gena is now indispensable for me. Gaia does lots. Gena amplifies it - is super fun to play with - gets awesome results, and really speeds up the workflow!

 

I will explore this - its a feature that makes a lot of sense

 

Hey every one - one of the more common question I get is "my rocks are floating".

Being a tool that does what it is told - Gena obeys your command - and if your prefabs are not set up properly - or you added from in scene - then Gena will use the Y offset provided. The purpose of the Y offset is to allow you to embed things into the terrain - or conversely float things above.



To fix - make sure you set your Y offsets correctly.

 

Time to show off some results using GeNa for spawning everything^^

Love it far away, about the easiest to custom each spawns, then getting some beautiful places in no time and mostly varied

This is a small patch of green I created in a part of one of my Terrains within':

 

Looks amazing @turboscalpeur !!

 

Hi,
I'm having trouble getting spawning to work on a terrain that's translated on the y-axis. Seems to be related to the spawn range, so if the terrain is shifted more than the spawn range then nothing will spawn. All spawn criteria are turned off. Seen this before?

 

Um nope - I have tested this a bunch myself. One thing - check the minimum height and make sure that's not the issue. Failing that drop me a PM so we can do a Skype session - would be interested to see whats happening there.

 

Somehow I ran into a weird problem after I updated GeNa, as this was not happening with the initial release.

On the left side you can see the texture placed by hand, only one per patch. On the right side you can see the same texture spawned by GeNa. As you can see, it placed the same texture three or four times directly next to each other.
GeNa shows me it has spawned "3 Instances" which is true, but why do those three instanced have three or four spawned textures as a patch?

 

Check the strength of the grass - min and max - this determine how "bushy" it appears.

 

I broke down and bought this because Gaia was so awesomely well done and Gena looks like it'll really help with my level designs. Adam just seems to do everything right when it comes to developing and supporting his assets.

 

Thank you - very kind

I love Gaia - its very useful - and I now do the rest with Gena - its astounding what you can do and how quickly and intuitively you can do it.

I still have not shown off everything Gena can do yet - been getting through the end of year marking for my teaching

Also have more very cool stuff and another new product to announce soon hopefully!

 

I've been using GeNa to spawn trees on the terrain, only issue is it seems to be ignoring the min/max scale I've told it to use. Is it the same as rotation where the terrain just won't allow you to do it?

 

No - both scaling terrain trees and rotating them works fine.

 

Hm ok thanks. Are those speed trees? I tried using a single mesh low poly tree and also a TreeCreator tree and both types ignored GeNa's scale rules.

Edit: I think it's the instanced shaders I'm using. Keeps drawcalls way down but seems to make everything one size and orientation

 

Yep they are the free speedtrees that come with Unity.

Gena has an option to only spawn objects at the nearest whole scale i.e. 1, 2, 3 etc. You can find it in advanced settings. This was created specifically to support people for instancing and custom shaders.

 

Oh great that's awesome to know. For some reason I was under the impression instanced shaders rounded scale during batching, no idea why haha.

Thanks for the great assets by the way. I don't even know how many times I've purchased ones that are incomplete or just don't work in a way that would make sense for any person's workflow. Good stuff.

 

Hmmm... wonder what this could mean ...

 

I Know hehe

 

So... after a couple of days of dev, I got instancing support prototyped into Gena on Unity 5.5.

There are some great benefits to doing this:

* Draw call drop (sort of offset because of batching as far as i can tell)
* Control over culling - precise control and potential improvements e.g. mesh grass control
* No need for GameObjects and associated overhead

However there are also some considerable limitations:

* You lose global illumination.

* Every thing that gets instanced also needs to be set up with a custom shader that supports instancing, so all your favourite packages will need to be re-done with the instanced shader, and the instanced surface shader that comes with unity is quite primitive, so you will need to roll your own to get more sophistication.

* When you draw things using the instancing API's you lose all the goodness of GameObjects and composability, plus things like colliders, which for say larger rocks and buildings is a major downer.

I also experimented with SpeedTree's (which are instanced in 5.5), and when you set them up properly, you can put a lot more of them into your scene. I believe this is only going to get better.

In the end I concluded that while it has some significant benefits, which are absolutely brilliant for some use cases, it also has some significant drawbacks. Unity is also doing a huge amount of work in this space, and 5.6 will be introducing significant improvements again.

So for now I think it makes more sense to wait and see what 5.6 brings. Given that 5.5 is out, I am sure that the beta of 5.6 wont be that far away.