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

And now for something completely different - a little sneak peak of something cool to come...

This scene is a WIP made with some test textures, a mesa stamp and with Tenkoku for lighting

 

Next version of Gaia has various noise functions in addition to your existing clumped spawning to help with this. If you scroll back a few pages you can see it in action.

 

I use Unity 5.3.0f04 , i have some error importing the package :
Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Utils/Utils.cs(304,47): error CS0117: `System.IO.File' does not contain a definition for `ReadAllBytes'

 

Stunning !!!, very natural

 

Your project is set to Web Player - change to pretty much anything else.

 

So much time coding - needed a little time playing

Only non (next version of Gaia) thing in this scene is Tenkoku.

The 3DForge Village Exteriors look stunning!! EDIT: And grasses and light and trees

 

Hi Adam. In this update you'll include several sessions recorded with this new option, to get those results? Thank you!

 

Yep - am making good progress with the sessioning system - the stuff I generate that I like I will keep and you can think of them as smart demo scenes. Naturally I can not include any 3rd party assets - but I mostly do scenes now with whats included in Gaia - the thing that's different if at all tends to be the lighting

Next version of Gaia also includes GX - one click integration into 3rd party assets (those asset authors that are interested in being involved). I will look at how I can integrate these into the sessioning system as well so that what you see here is truly what you will get if you have all the component pieces

 

I second that - been using ATS for a while. Its really good, and only costs $10 !

 

Yeah I'm going to buy it, hopefully today. I was waiting to see if there would be a sale but I'm guessing there won't be now. I'm happy with the textures I'm using for my terrain, but the problem is there are 8, each in high-res, so it's affecting the FPS, so a shader would be better. When you use it, do you remove all the textures from the Unity terrain? I guess it won't use Gaia's texture spawner in that case will it?

 

Your work is looking awesome ... that terrain (used to be) local to me.

From memory (and its flakey) ... It's (maybe) a little "rich"/dark in color. Normally its a bit drier (and deader) in the soil. If its darker it normally means more fertile. But I guess it depends where in Africa.

ATS will not work with 8 unique textures.
It will work with 6.
It accepts 8 textures, but the last 2 are repeats from the 6 ... used for painting heightmapped decals - which is quite cool.
Also, texture order and selection is very important ... 3 and 4 specifically ... check docs.

It does not remove the textures from Unity terrain - it reuses them - so they still work with Gaia etc. I have some issues with splatmaps - as > 4 terrain textures uses 2, but that's my own doing as I manually rework them, so I guess you should be ok.

 

Yeah I agree 100%. Here is a screenshot with the sun directly above, here it does look drier, but still not exactly what I wanted. In fact I've spent hours trying different tints to the textures, next time I'll try it with less saturation.

There were two images I was basing it on, both in Tsavo.
http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/africa/zebra-waterhole.jpg
http://www.maasaicamp.com/assets/tsavo.gif

The second one is much redder, but most images of the savanna are whitish like the first one. I'm going to see what the new grasses are like in the next version of Gaia, but I really like these ones here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/47175

Glad to hear it hear it uses the existing textures, I can easily omit two to get 6. Thanks, Ill check it out later

 

Hello Adam,

is possible to set quality level of render world in live ?

for example 3 types: low, medium and high details level.

or with which asset can i ?

++

 

Hey Adam, Could you confirm, can Gaia be used to recreate real-world locations? Specifically, I'm interested in re-creating terrain from real world locations,and adding buildings, roads, etc, using Open Street Map data. Is there a procedure for handling that within Gaia? Im guessing it will involve getting heightmap data & satellite imagery from Google Earth and then converting that somehow?
cheers

 

We have used it for some testing by taking real world height data from both WorldComposer and WorldMachine and turning them into stamps for the terrain tiles. It seems to work pretty good but we are still waiting on the multi-tile update so we can actually start using them for releasable quality terrain objects.

 

Just a heads up on the importing from terrain.party, I got a 1081x1081 which I changed to 1025x1025, when you
scan it, it will end up in /stamps/mountains (or whatever), and that's the one which works with the stamper, not
the original one.

 

pic

 

When scanning an image, the size is picked up from the image size. I have had problems with Unity recognising the PNG files exported by terrain party so I have embedded them inside Photoshop files and its worked fine.

When you have finished scanning just delete the scanner from your hierarchy. Its no longer needed.

Stamps can be any resolution as the stamping process will interpolate them to match the size of the stamp in the target terrain.

A note on PSD. If you modify the curves slightly it will smooth the terrain slightly and get rid of the bumpy image artefacts.

 

Looking good.. and as Daniel mentioned Bullrush it reminded me @turboscalpeur mentioned he was going to add these (he calls them Cat ears? Typha) anyway... they are from his HQ2 pack are they? Did a quick googly and "Typha is commonly known as Bulrush in Australia and Cattails in the United States." Good to know.

also have you had any issues with unity drawing a line across the top of the grass billboards? if so how have you resolved the issue - don't say photoshop lol.

Also thinking, what's it look like if you use the same rock texture as the terrain rock? wouldn't that work pretty well?

 

@turboscalpeur does have a process for removing the lines above the grass and its been applied to his packs I think. Its some weird unity issue with grass rendering.

 

My stamper's too high for the terrain, how do I get it to stamp the whole terrain?

 

Ran into some strange behavior when you have a bunch of trees that have the same spawn conditions it will only spawn the last tree in the array. So what i did was just make a spawn condition for where it was allowed to spawn big trees and then i just copied the element and placed all my big trees in it. But what it does when you hit spawn is only spawning the last element of the array. Is this intended?

 

I think you need to adjust the Base Level of the stamp or turn off the Ground Base checkbox and adjust it's Position Y value.

 

The Cattails/bulrushes are from speedtree as are the trees used, just updated last week to unity 5.2.3f1 seemed to make things better but i dont get any lines on my grasses but only 1 of my grasses are set to billboard

 

quote
I think you need to adjust the Base Level of the stamp or turn off the Ground Base checkbox and adjust it's Position Y value.
unquote

That works, thanks, the y doesn't show until you turn off ground base. Needed a lot of smoothing in 'terrain helpers'.

 

If you can code, you could build a UI window to let the user update their quality settings. You could take a look at Adam's code of the FrameRateManager.cs that lives in Gaia/Scripts/ValueAdds for some ideas. Adam has buttons for each Quality Setting or he has it where it tries cycling through the settings to get to a certain frame rate.

One asset that I've been looking at to get another look at doing this is one that was released in November called All Settings. It looks more along the lines of what I want to do in my game, having a settings/options panel that can be pulled up both prior to start or during the game to adjust video, sound, whatever other settings and then saves them in PlayerPrefs. For $5, it may be worth grabbing and taking a try. I haven't yet, but I did pick up the minimap asset from the same publisher. It cost a lot less than other minimap assets I'd bought in the past and it worked flawlessly right out of the box. If the settings asset is similar, then definitely worth $5 even if just to use for a code reference. Like Adam's valueadd script, it also uses the Unity quality settings accessible via the menu Edit -> Project Settings -> Quality

 

I know Adam already answered this but noticed that you stated it will end up in /stamps/mountains. Just wanted to point out that Gaia defaults to that setting when scanning. If you look at the inspector, you can click on Mountains and it gives you a dropdown where you can select which of the Gaia stamp folders you want to save your scan to.

 

With a lot of the stamps I have scanned, it seems that 5 clicks on smooth terrain after I finish stamping kinda smooths things out for me. One thing to be careful about though, before you smooth make sure you are done stamping as when you click smooth you are smoothing the entire terrain and not just the stamped area. (Unless Adam has changed that.. At least that is how it used to work... heheh) But on a halfway decent scan, around 5 smooth button clicks seems to work nice for me. I don't even look between each click anymore. I just automatically do 5 and then go look... lol

 

I saw that All Settings asset too, can it be used without coding? Also, does it act as a save and load game too? The asset description was a bit vague, and there is no forum link.

 

No clue.. It looks like it has some prefabs that you can just drag into the scene. So you may be able to just use those and replace their UI with your UI elements. Might want to throw an email to the support email and check with them before buying if that is an issue for you. Or post the question in their forum. It looks like their site is a bit on the new side, but they do have a support forum on it.

 

If you look back @sarum provided a link to a free lighting asset. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head - but it sure creates lovely effects.

 

No. You need to look at the settings on your spawner - fittest or weighted fittest will tend to find the best match for your trees - it they are all equal then maybe it will end up at last slot. The idea of fittest and weighted fittest is to have the best trees selected for a particular environment. If your spawn criteria have not been configured to support this then you may as well just use a Random selection on your spawner.

 

Oke i will take a look at this! Thanks for the amazing support.

 

My pleasure

 

What's the setting for keeping trees off of cliffs? I have the default spawn rules, some of the trees don't plant into the cliffs, don't want
them on cliffs anyway.

Gaia terrain with RPG Kit
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/102638093/rpg_kit_bogwood.zip
175mb

When you land in the main level, run to the teleport disc and 'teleport to bog'

Where do I put make sand texture from sea level to beach level?

 

i used a simple skybox from Allsky and some global fog .. nothing fancy

 

I would restrict the trees to a shallower slope angle than what the cliffs start at. You could also restrict the trees to only appear where there's a specific texture being used on the terrain

 

it was a modified version of the global fog found on the forum, you can see the thread here : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/extended-global-fog-unity5.313358/

i am using it right now on the christmas postcard world

 

I responded to your question on trees and cliffs several days ago. Please read back.

The questions you are asking seem to be related to resource configuration - there are several video's on this as well as extensive documentation.

In general Gaia puts things where you tell it to, and if you do not make sure your resources are in alignment with your terrain, then you will get bad results.

The visualiser is the best way to tweak where and how things are placed. You can learn about it and resource configuration in the following two videos.

Resources video 1:

Resources video 2:

If you still are having problems then the offer I made last week to work through your setup with you via Skype still stands.

 

Stunning as usual

 

When i said billboard i meant a flat quad, not necessarily camera facing. Unless Speedtree grasses are models? scratch that i just had a look - video provided and all - animated model grass, if i had a spare 1/2 a mil. , I'm tempted by SpeedTree but have invested in Xfrog (for trees but they are not game ready) Xfrog keep stalling on me but ensure they are starting with a tree pack for Unity.. I guess it wouldn't be cheating on them if i mixed and matched

So does Speedtree grass get affected by player interaction as in Advanced Foliage Shader?

That's one thing about screenshots... there is no indication of FPS, if there is proper day night with realistic weather patterns (or just static), and just in general how it all 'works' when interacted with by a player (shock - really?)

@AdamGoodrich That idea i mentioned before, maybe make a short gif creator or short video creator tool - just saying ;p might make for some forum acceptable sized animated postcards from some nice places!

 

WOW, very impressive !!!

 

Yep $20, cupla days... if only it were that simple

Not that I have noticed.

SpeedTree works - and looks great.

 

Yeah.. back to my original post/issue of some time ago... got over $300 worth of regionally and botanically correct trees, Speedtree doesn't have the trees i require as well. So yeah my problem Maybe Xfrog is not pulling my leg and they get back to me next year and some of the trees at least (per pack) are the ones i already have and can use... will see, I'll be trying everything before i turn to foreign trees

 

Please could we all stop asking for new features, too many goodies in the pipeline and I would like to see them released!

 

HAHA, it is one of the joys of the Forum, lots of valuable creative input

@AdamGoodrich has drawn the line in the sand so to speak a while back and is completing that which was at that time on the schedule to be included, I am 100% sure he is not adding more, with all new suggestions kept for future releases.

There are some AWESOME surprises on some of the features that only when seeing will be realized how great they are.

I am myself looking forward to this upcoming release.

Cheers
Cobus

 

I'm not getting new trees, even though I copied the resources file and specified the new resource file Gaia_bog3 in Gaia
Manager and Tree spawner, I cleared, reset, deleted/replace Tree spawner, these are the trees in GaiaResources
default

 

the shot

 

Yep am working through the list to complete. The next release is pretty massive. When you compare day one output on next release with day one on first you will be surprised (pleasantly).

Sessioning and extensions, plus lighting and camera setup, plus grasses, plus new noise modes, plus composable resources and more.