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

I think i need a detailed spawn criteria and spawn extensions tutorial..... i mean video tutorial.... if someone can help me with it....

 

There are a lot of them here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

 

@AdamGoodrich Hello there, i just bought Gaia and its amazing! i just have one problem that i stumbled onto.
Whenever i spawn in trees, some of the trees have squares in them any help? http://imgur.com/9BUmbmO

Cheers!

 

Seems to me the textures that the tree is using to render it's leaves have their shader kinda of in a funk, find the leaf texture of the tree and make sure its set to show alpha as transparency. That should remove the boxes around it's leaves.

 

Or actually go to the Broadleaf_desktop speedtree, or which ever one you're trying to use and try pressing the "Regenerate Materials" button under it's Inspector Settings.

 

Yep - this is an unfortunate issue with Unity / Speedtree. As castle suggests, just regenerate the materials. Instructions on how to do this are in the quickstart guide.

 

Hey Adam, did you happen to see this: http://www.gamedevo.net/speedtree-july-bonus-content/

 

(With @AdamGoodrich permission)

I am away for 5 days on leave with my wife and 2 sons.
Village Interiors Kit & Village Exteriors Kit both on a -25% sale for the 5 days.
Soon after I am back, the screenshots for the City Walls & Castle FREE update will appear and when all in the actual submission.

 

Here is something that's just amazing - its the full "Adam" video - not the cut down one.

Done with the new stuff that's coming to Unity in 5.4. Absolutely incredible!

 

Hello Adam and Gaia team,

I currently have the Gaia package in my checkout cart on the asset store, but I have one big question. Can I use something like World Streamer to create a large world with Gaia? Basically, I'm wondering if terrains can be stitched together and if so, does Gaia have any built in tools to handle the stitching?

Thanks!

 

What's with the off topic posts ??
Ban him.


Amazing and UNREAL ;-)
==============================
Anyway to make per stamp texture??
Meaning if I create a stamp I can set the texture spawner to just paint that stamp only and ignore the rest of the terrain.

 

Gaia is currently limited to 1 terrain tile, with a work around for multiples. The next major release will support multiple tiles seamlessly.

You can create large tiles and then split them up with tools like world streamer. I think the max size is 15k x 15k - but not sure as I never do this myself.

 

You would need to set some sort of mask up to do this.

 

Hello Qdqm,

is possible to add Layer named Building for all buildings stuffs generated?

+++

 

Yup.. You simply need to change the layer of the prefabs that are being spawned. All of the prefabs used by the default spawners that come with Gaia are within the 3DForge folders under Gaia/3rd Party Assets. If you are using your own buildings, you would just change the layer for the buildings you add to your Gaia Resources.

 

ok i will update prefab in 3DForge folder.

+++

 

The same holds true for any other prefabs too. I'm assuming you are looking for this in order to use Gaia's proximity spawning? You can do the same if you only want mushrooms growing around a certain tree you could change the Layer of the tree to a Layer you associate with the mushroom in proximity spawn criteria settings.

 

It's nice to have the old forums back

 

heheh.. I can visit them again without my eyes bleeding! Yay! heheh

 

Hello,
i recently purchased gaia and already making some small baby-steps in creating terrains. However now a problem occured and i am not sure how and if there is a solution to it:

I created a little island with only one beach-texture. This texture has wave-lines in it. Now when i add this texture to the resource-file and afterwards create my coverage texture spawner the texture only aligns in one direction. However like on real beaches the waves should align with the water.

I attached an image for details.

What would be the best approach for such a problem?

Thank you in advance and best regards,
Otto

 

Unity does not have a solution to this problem... in fact no game engine does to my knowledge

Your options are to create a custom terrain shader - which is generally a difficult task, or be artful, as the AAA games do. Beautiful environments are a mix of art and deception in order to create an illusion - and its a battle against the limitations of the engine and the hardware that the game will run on. When look critically even at the AAA games you will start to notice the limitations of the textures in certain places.

In reality I think your best bet is to choose another texture without the heavy waves in it. If anyone in the community has a solution to this then let me know as I want it too

 

You can try to use a flow map with a flow shader ... and set the flow to not move. There is surely a way to generate the correct direction base on slope and normal (ie the direction that is at 90° of the slope direction relative to normal)

 

Been playing with some new things.. more to announce soon



Btw - the assets used here are Gaia (of course), a new system I am developing (more soon) plus:

• PBR Terrain Textures for Unity 5 by Marcurios - lovely!
• AQUAS water - always reliable and pretty
• PBR Graveyard Pack - really awesome - i will have some cool news with this soon as well
• SpeedTree Desktop Trees Pack - best trees on the asset store imho
• HBAO - really lovely and fast ambient occlusion

Lots of cool announcements to make soon!

 

@AdamGoodrich
I would like to know, please:

1) what kind of file format are the ".bytes" files from the stamps directory
2) what software did you use to produce it.
3) It's possible to convert to a ".raw" file format?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

This is an internal Gaia file format. It is raw heightmap data + metadata. Go and check out LoadFromBinaryFile in HeightMap.cs to see its meta data and format.

Gaia - the scanner component. You can scan and turn terrains, windows raw files, world machine r16 files, 3d meshes and and any image that Unity can read into stamps with this utility. To learn more about it check it out in the documentation included with Gaia.

Yes - and many more - check previous comment.

 

First - love the software, it's really amazing how quickly it puts something together!

Question is: I've been trying to start a new project that has Gaia and Suimono - however Gaia is not showing it in the extensions are of Gaia Manager anymore, and it's been acting weird since importing. Is this something for Tenkoku to fix or has something happened where it's not compatible anymore? I really liked how easy it was to setup before and hope that this can still import like it used to.

 

Just called in and found the old forums back. Thanks to Unity for listening to the outcry.

 

Hi again. I am currently having trouble putting a dirt/leaf-texture random via Perlin Noise Mask over an existing texture. The problem is, that the dirt/leaf-texture is getting applied overall quadratic, which looks not natural. Can i tell the Noise Mask somehow to soften the edges?

Best regards,
Otto

 

Looks fantastic @AdamGoodrich!

 

Really looks nice. What was used for the sky?

 

There was an issue with a whole bunch of Unity releases in which assets did not get recompiled correctly by Unity. Suggest you move up to latest patch as I believe this has been fixed.

Just experiment with the settings and zoom - different variations can make for hard and soft edges.

A free HDR Skybox - check my free assets mega-list - the skybox I used is there as well as over 160 other very high quality and free assets.

Naturally Mr Oakes - it has lots of SpeedTrees

 

I found a weird issue in which the terrain does not display properly with the recent 5.4.0f1 release - which someone on the old new forums had as well - and I have filed a bug report with Unity.

If anyone else has this then please let me know. Thanks.

EDIT - Can someone test and verify this issue with Unity 5.4.0f1 please. Unity will consider it a 5.4 showstopper bug if they can get verification. Which means that its fix will be prioritized before 5.4 release. I can replicated it 100% of the time. Please go check out this forum here.

 

Found the problem: The Zoom-Factor for the Perlin Noise Mask was way to high. After reducing it (currently 10) it looks smooth again. Hope that helps others with the same problem.

 

So time to turn to the more exprienced crowd when it comes to the speedtrees and GAIA.

So in my hunt to find a good tree asset to match my expectations and other issues (rendering queue issues with other tree assets) I decided to give it a try with speedtrees. So after spawning 2800 trees with GAIA (which is far less then I had with other tree assets) and then starting the game I see my framerate go down from around 65 to 70 to something around 25-30 so a huge impact and still there are more trees I want to spawn

So with this in mind I am sure there are things that could be improved and optimized when it comes to the speedtrees. So here is my plead for your assistance on this forum. What caught my eye directly was that the LOD distances seems very generous.. I can basically be on the other side of my island and still not reaching the last LOD that is culling the trees.

So my question to you are:

How would you suggest me to do to optimize the LOD distances? Would love to see some concrete numbers that I can start off with and then do adjustments according to my needs (if needed).

Are there any other things beside the LOD's that you can advise me that will get my framerates back in track when it comes to the speedtrees vs the Unity Tree handler trees I had before?

Many thanks in advance!

/R

 

Thanks Mark - Much appreciated!

 

Your welcome, glad if I helped. Here is a better Screen Capture it shows the camera and I am on win 10

 

The best LOD settings really depend on your game, so there's no magic answer. You need to find something that gives smooth transitions, without a lot of popping. With a bit of fog, you can reduce the LOD distances quite a bit without making the transitions too noticeable, but you'll need to experiment a bit to see what works best for you.

The other big factor with SpeedTrees is how many colliders each prefab has. Some trees come with quite a few by default, which can cause a big performance hit when you have thousands in your scene. Try manually placing one of each tree prefab into your scene, delete any colliders you don't need, and re-saving them. Then use these stripped down prefabs in your Gaia resource file. You could end up reducing the total colliders in your scene by 80%.

Another option is to get an asset called Trees Manager System. It contains a number of optimizations, which should allow you to plant a lot more trees without a big performance hit. (Unity 5.4 is supposed to also improve SpeedTree performance, so you might want to wait and see what difference it makes before buying though.)

 

I'm just testing to see if I get an alert that anyone replied to my comment in this thread since the forums have been rolled back--I can only see alerts to the forum roll back thread. Forgive me. I love Gaia. And want to make sure I can get alerts of posts here.

 

THIS is awesome! Many many thanks! Precisely what I needed. Regarding the LOD's I totally understand that it depending on specific games etc. The issue in my case is that I am not really that used to do any changes to LOD's at all since it's normally been working out of the box for me. I know for sure that the other tree asset did cull trees at some point without it being annoying. However what was annoying with that asset was that I couldn't find the individual LOD's on the prefabs since they was made with tree handler, so I could not adjust the billboarding images to be less bright since as soon I am to billboarding distance then the trees became so much brighter that they stood out. Since I am so new regarding adjusting distances on the LOD's is it just to drag the camera limits to where I want them? Also I am a bit confused since it says that the tree is LOD0 even though the camera shows I am close to LOD2 (It actually goes to LOD1 when I enter LOD2).



So my initial task list will be:

1.) Reduce colliders on the prefabs I am using
2.) I will buy the Trees Manager System for sure... I love assets that provide these kinds of optimizations!
3.) Adjust LOD distances once I get a tad more info
4.) Wait for Unity 5.4 as well

/R

 

They should be working.. I'm getting alerts again since they did the rollback.

 

May want to grab it before he updates. Trees Manager System is going to be replaced by uNature. I think Elroy has made comments that we he releases uNature, it will be uploaded as an update for Trees Manager System (Trees Manager System will become uNature) and when he does that release the price will go up for new purchases.

He is currently working on grass management features of uNature and the tree management blows the current version's tree management away! Much better tree optimizations in the new system with the addition of grass management!

 

All my private conversations are messed up. I have a record of the old ones but can't see any new ones. I have had a couple of message notifications via email saying a conversation has been active but when I go to the conversation here it doesn't show up. If I respond via the email I don't think it is getting there

 

@Raptorixx,

Elroy did mention a TMS/unature sale before he updates but don't blame me if he doesn't go ahead with it. I'd ask on his forum.

 

Yeah. Not sure about the private ones. I know for a day or so after the rollback, it wouldn't even let you start a private convo. Evidently they didn't understand the concept of rolling back.. heheh

 

The old ones are ok. It's just new ones. Nevermind. There are worse things at sea

 

If anyone has not heard of AQUAS, you should check it out. Here is a video of the latest release. It's a very nice water asset. The terrain was created with a combination of Gaia and World Creator.

 

Thank you for the video. I just bought this along with some of Backwood's Gaming's stamps and Turboscalpeur's grasses.

 

Sorry for late reply I've been away, Ok i'm using your latest build and Unity 5.3.5f1 and my target platform is Windows Store Universal 10. I'm about 1 week away from needing to start to build some terrains and would really like to use your system if possible.

Thank you.

 

I will take a look. OK - so i took a look - the fix turns out to be quite significant. There is a lot of 'standard stuff' that they have ripped out of Windows Store Universal 10.

If you were considering using Gaia at run time - you wont be able to - the fix will allow you to use it at design time though. Please PM me with your contact details and invoice number.