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

I think one of the grasses @turboscalpeur gave in his samples for Gaia is a fern.

I haven't played around with textures on meshes. I know @tomaszek had some videos for doing something like with for RTP. Also, I think Adam played around with some different tools for applying terrain textures to mesh objects, I just can't think of the names of them now.

 

Right, I knew about RTP, but figured it would be overkill just for that one feature. I'm not really interested in using the rest of the package, since I hear it's a bit tricky to master (nice as it looks when you do). Thanks though.

 

lol... No.. I'm one of those people who found it a bit tricky to master so I'm not currently using it. I just mentioned it because when I was going through watching Tom's videos, I remembered seeing on where it blended the terrain with mesh.. I think it is some sort of shader magic. All of that stuff is beyond me! heheh I know there was an asset that Adam had played with at one point but can't remember his results. I think it was on sale a month or two back and a couple of people from beta picked it up. Maybe one of them will chime in if someone else doesn't offer a suggestion.

 

I run the image through Bitmap2Material and spat out most of the maps it does if anybody wants it yell,. its a big archive tho 4096x4096 to give people leg room to do as the might and it should tile, run out 495mg with ALL the maps in there.

 

Small project with Gaia as a helper tool . Still without all textures but work in progress





What I miss in Gaia (or im blind) is spawn on choosen splat maps some kind of rules which kind of spawners can spawn on some splatmapa textures

 

Awesome!!

I think you are looking for this:

 

Hey Adam

I will check this later Tx for tip !!! Why i ask about this For example: When u create forest u need to consider variety of places, because forest is not a random trees on the ground. In my region there is a pine fores, but if u spend some time in this forest u can see logic in chaos example: dense tree on the border (more light), one type of tree pushing another out (birch-tree push out pines) etc

Our workflow looks like this 4 textures 0-3 we use to make standard generator think sand, grass forest rocks, next 4 is for variety. grass2 forest2 stone2 etc So matching textures is really important in our workflow .

I will test this feature and show results

Andrzej

 

I'm using this feature already, and it's pretty handy, but was wondering if you could specify more than one texture. If so, how would you do it? Would you use commas, spaces, or something else to separate individual entries? I'd like to be able to tell Gaia not to plant certain things on either the rock or sand textures for instance. When a terrain has 4 or 8 ground textures to choose from, there could be situations where you'd want to specify more than one value there.

 

Great idea !!

Andrzej

 

01 means use texture slots 0 and 1, !01 means use anything other than 0 and 1

Edit: fixed grammatical error lol

 

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

Thanks to you and @Shawn67 for clarifying, I was shaking my head a bit on that part.

 

Thanks! I'll see if I can create some masks to do the job. Probably need to review some of Adam's video tutorials again

 

Actually according to Adam, what he had me put in for multiple nots were !0!3 (I wanted to exclude spawning on my sand (0) and cliff (3))... I just with through that about a week ago and asked him if I should use !#!# or !## because I couldn't remember back when we added it in beta. If that is the case, then !01 would not spawn on 0 but would spawn on 1. But then I'm curious.. Why would you even specify the ! at all if you were only going to spawn on 1? lol

 

A forest Settlement I'm constructing..

 

Reminds me of Lost.

 

My second go at using Gaia and RTP.
Created the terrain from a heightmap in Gaia and then applied texturing, details and trees.
I also did some hand-painted work with the standard unity tools for the road and then applied the Relief Terrain Pack and set the textures up.

The heightmap produced from Gaia

 

!0!1 Means spawn on anything but texture 0 and 1.

01 means spawn on textures 0 or 1

Use the visualiser to play with these settings.

 

Have been working on the last major new feature before release, which is a sophisticated point of interest spawning capability, plus a spawner extension capability.

What's cool about this is that you can set up a template for say a farm, and then spawn the whole thing, plus variations. No two farms need look the same.

Build up a library of these... Farms, ruins, graveyards etc...

 

I can't express how eager I am to get my greasy little Canadian hands on the new version.

 

I'm sure I saw this answered somewhere, but I can't find it here or in the documentation. If I've already generated a terrain at 4096x4096 and I want to spawn the textures, how do I make sure it textures the entire terrain? Right now, it just textures half the terrain as if the terrain size is still 2048x2048. I went into Gaia Defaults and set the terrain size there to 4096, but that was after the spawners had already been created. Do I need to delete and re-create the spawners? I'm leery of doing that because I don't know what it will do.

EDIT: Nevermind. I gave it a shot by deleting and re-creating the spawners and that worked.

 

I know you said you got it working by deleting and re-creating the spawners. The default spawners are set for a 2048x2048 terrain and the Max Instances according to the terrain size. Another way you could have got around this would have been to increase Max Instances. The way you did it is probably the easier of the two though. A lot easier than playing a guessing game to get Max Instances right. Not sure if simply doubling it would have done the trick or not. But that is the number responsible for not enough spawns.

 

Yeah sorry for inconvenience - sorted in next release.

 

Wow - just came across this absolutely stunning forum post from "Shroud of the Avatar" - shows you what you can do with Unity, Gaia and Talent!!









Amazing!

 

Aweosome work, Ive got beta access to Shroud too I better check out the latest update!

 

Ok.. here are some samples of the new POI (Point Of Interest) spawning system. You might notice how they actually conform to the terrain. They also remap the textures under them using a mask. Grass was cleared manually but working on making that automatic as well

Total time to add 52 unique POI's into a 2km x 2km scene - a few seconds



All assets shown here except lighting are included in next release of Gaia.

Many thanks to Cobus of 3DForge for the generation and contribution of the POI's from his Village Exteriors Kit, and of course to Turboscalpeur for his grasses, Motoproprio for his rocks, GameTexures.com for the textures, and SpeedTree for the trees. These samples have all been contributed to show what good tools and good assets can do when put together.

 

This feature could be very useful to me, especially if clearing the terrain and conforming works. Not sure how it works.. but it looks great.

 

This release also comes with Spawner Extensions - which are also very cool. You can leverage this to change the way the spawning process works - so if you don't have something you need then you can add it with minimal code.

I will provide some useful ones, and can see more of them being developed and included over time.

 

Heheh... hopefully a tutorial can come for this one... This sounds AWESOME!

 

"Minimal Code" The gateway to complexity.

 

I was watching one of the tutorial of the upcoming version 1.5 in Youtube and it was posted in the comments that you can get a download link to that version before it's posted in the asset store and I'm very interested in getting it. Is it possible to get a link to that version?

 

Hi,

Saw this now only, but yes, they were part of one of the FREE updates that the Village Interiors Kit received

Cheers
Cobus

 

Greetings.

Is there resource/guide on how to properly setup added textures in the Gaia Resources script? I added a bunch of textures to the terrain and selected "Get From Terrain", however when I generate the textures the terrain is all messed up (sand in mountains, grass in the sea bed.)

I reckon this is due to the textures not being properly set up in the resources.

Can anyone offer any assistance regarding this?

 

Aquas needs Unity 5.2.3
At the suggestion of those on this board I just downgraded to 5.2.2.f1
Now Unity3d is officially at 5.3.2f1
Still not clear on how to keep all these assets working and the latest version of Unity3d?
I purchased a lot of assets, but they present errors in the latest versions of Unity3d.

 

Ask the Aquas developer.
He supplied me with an earlier version on request

 

Hey Adam, I just came across this on YouTube as I own a DJI Phantom 3 drone myself.

Now I am just wondering, would this be possible getting a hightmap and such then using it within GAIA? It's probably a stupid and crazy question but I'm just wondering, if this could be possible then wow

The software in the video is DroneDeploy.

 

Have you watched this video..?

 

For me it looks like bounded area check doesn't work for trees. No matter how big bounds radius I set for trees it always spawns them very closely. Yes, I added colliders for trees.

 

It looks pretty cool, but the biggest hurdle I can see is that trees are just extruded from the terrain. This looks great from overhead, but when viewing from an angle, they no longer look real. They'd certainly never work for anything taking place at ground level. It would be really cool if the software could filter the trees out somehow, to give just the underlying terrain elevation, and then use the tree elevation as a mask for tree placement. Maybe this is already possible using some of the different data filters available. If not, maybe a future version will allow this. Any terrain you capture that doesn't already have a lot of trees in it should look great though. The Cornwall cliffs model on their site looked awesome.

 

For those that want access to 1.5 pre-release then please PM me with your invoice number. Documentation not done yet, and some features still in flux as they are being finalised, so you would be using at own risk and without support.

 

Hi Adam, is this usable in any way on mobile?

 

This sounds like lots of fun! If I could find out what format the data is in then I am sure I could do something with it

 

I've seen a ton of breathtaking screenshots of others' Gaia creations and have been itching to share mine for a while now. I don't know why but it seems like my work just doesn't seem as beautiful. I'm hoping with 1.5 and along with Horizon[ON] and SkyMaster Ultimate things might be worth presenting.

One thing I cannot stress enough are the quality of turboscalpeur's grasses and ferns. These should be an automatic purchase for anyone wishing to use Gaia.

 

Yes - unity terrains are usable on mobile regardless of which tool creates them. That said you really need to simplify things down in order to get acceptable frame rates - and also choose appropriate low poly assets to spawn.

 

Just went and flew a drone with a friend - he is going to check that web site out and see what we get back

 

Here is my contribution on Gaia of the weekend



Winston have been there to go with me! A short video; Enjoy!:

14022016 EDIT!: Added a New Video 1080p/60FPS with ssaa & some Photoreal Stones Pack. Still a lot of Job!

I used:
Gaia
Some SpeedTree Models
Grass
Winston - iClone Character
3DForge
Rocks
Bird Flock Bundle
Time Of Day
Scion
Colorful FX
Some Textures included on Gaia's next release from GameTextures.com;
And some others Scripts from Standard Assets.

 

They have the ability to export scans as .obj files, which Unity can import, and Gaia has the ability to scan meshes (i.e. .obj files) and turn them into stamps.

A little bit of post processing to remove the trees and then you should have quite a good source for new terrains and interesting base structures etc.

If you can get me an obj file out of dronedeploy i will have a go at translating it into a stamp.

 

???

 

Seed throw - increasing this makes less densely packed clusters. Decreasing this makes more closely packed clusters. That plus area bounds should get you what you need.

If that doesn't help you then PM me if you want 1.5 pre release. I have improved the algorithms for this.

 

Would be a great tutorial for you to make mate

I have no idea on how important and then getting it to work with GAIA, or is really so simple?

 

To get an .obj file into unity just drag and drop it. To then scan that obj file drag n drop it in unity onto the scanner.

FYI. Gaia has the ability to export the current terrain as a mesh - encoded as an .obj file. Great for those that want to do games that don't use unity terrains.