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

I have nothing to say really other than that I am very much looking forward to see the release and be one of the first ones to jump in and try it out. Looks great, Adam!

 

This asset is looking amazing. I've been kicking around two game ideas and with this asset one of them could surely become reality.

 

Working hard on usability improvements at the moment so there's not much interesting to show in the way of screenshots. Aiming to have another beta out this weekend.

 

Hi Adam, I would not want you to release something before your ready to, but it's not that uncommon these days to release an asset store package as "beta" (perhaps at a discount ) and let more people have access that way to help drive out issues or workflow suggestions.

 

Hurry up Adam, the beta testers are starting to get restless

In the meantime, here's a screenshot I've taken using 3DForge's Exterior assets, Time of Day (for lighting) and the Gaia beta (for procedurally placed plants, terrain, etc.)

 

@smada luap looks nice. Need some fences and animals roaming around

 

I would buy this beta at full price without a second thought, but I would hate for him to get negative reviews from people who don't understand the concept of beta.

 

I'd also be willing to buy beta at full price I do agree with jdraper though that I think releasing to the asset store as a beta could hurt more than help those of us who would like to get our hands on it.

Really I'm telling myself once I can use GAIA that I'll make a ton of progress on my current project, but I know I'm lying to myself

 

Animals will come once I've got the money for herdsim or one if the other animal ai assets out there Fences will come once I actually start fleshing out the landscapes with all the minor detailing after Gaia has done its thing

 

Sadly, this is exactly what would happen. I honestly think too many assets are released as betas and then stay in beta for over a year sometimes. It makes me less willing to buy stuff and just wait until they are out of beta, even if it costs more. Plus the constant updating creates more work if we are plugging custom scripts into the asset. It also limits changes to the asset since the developer won't be as willing to make changes that will cause us to have to start over with our terrain.

Be patient, it will come out soon.

 

The beta is close to being ready now, but in the latest I have changed some data structures, and as @Teila points out, I would be more hesitant to do this after launch. Fortunately the beta group have been very supportive

I am finding wrestling with the unity editor time consuming and tedious, and there are still some issues to sort out.

 

Adam get it right and to a point your happy with. Cause the next thing are the instructions and videos
We can wait just a little bit more. Not too much more but a little

 

Looks great! =)

Question: Will this work with a multi terrain open world setup using some type of built in seam stitching to connect pieces? In order so we can make larger open world scenes by stitching together multiple, lets say 1k Terrain pieces? If so this would make the tool great.

What size terrains are you currently max generating now with your tests?

Keep up the great work. Are you coming close to public beta release?

 

You know you will wait until it is ready! LOL What choice do you have? There is nothing else like this.

 

I typically work on a 2k terrain. Have done a 10k terrain but bigger terrains mean larger numbers to crunch and 2k is a decent size and still very quick to process.

I have a seamless tiling system and thought i would try 50 x 50 x 2k terrains. Unity ran out of memory and crashed

Btw - the tiling system is not integrated into the rest of the system yet, and I am considering releasing multi tile support a couple of weeks after launch rather than delaying launch until its done.

Am open to feedback from the community on this. Delay and have multi tile - or launch sooner and the put an update out in a week or so ?

 

As long as it wont mess up what people have worked on, I would say do multi-terrain as an update. That way you can get it in the hands of the masses and I would guess the multi-tile group is probably smaller than the tile at a time group. Don't get me wrong, I'm anxious to see the multi-tile support but in what I've seen in testing, I think it will be very useful even without. Again, my only hesitation on waiting would be if the update down the road might wipe saved settings. So as long as it wont do that, I'd vote release in an update.

 

Oh god yes make sure that adding terrain will not destroy what you originally have.
Good point there @Shawn67

 

It wont

 

jdraper3, this isn't a dig at you or anyone else on here but a game/app developer that doesn't understand the concept of a "beta" (paid for or not) is very scary idea. I guess I assume too much.

My expectation with Asset store products is that there will be continuous improvement as part of the cycle and at a minimum it will at least be fixed to run on future versions of Unity.

Adam, trust me, I know what it's like to have a queue full of people waiting for you to get something out the door. Feedback from those lucky enough to be your beta testers, it sounds like were in for another great tool for the toolkit.

Cheers

 

Thanks for the info Adam! I'd be fine with seeing multi tile support in an update a few weeks later and allowing us to get our hands on the core product and get familiar with it. My only concern is the work flow design with going from one designed terrain to being able to spread that and or blend it into multiple terrain tiles that formed a larger concept.

Do you have a basic work flow for this type of work? How does your tile stitching work? Does it handle splatmap per terrain tile or are you able to batch the multiple terrain tiles into a final render to go across the board?

Thanks Adam!

 

A sneak peek at some of the user interface and the work flow.

One of the more interesting features is that once you define sea level everything else automatically conforms to it.

The scene below was generated literally with a few clicks

 

Will we be able to define other water systems like Suimono and Ceto?

 

Yep - that's what the 3rd party plugins section is for. I have Suimono and Tenkoku Dynamic Sky and will add defaults for them as well. I don't have Ceto so I can't comment on that yet. The idea is to create a generic plugin based system so that I can easily add support for more assets

 

Looking good ... keep up the good work ...

 

Still cannot wait for the release of this.

 

Thanks for the pic but its hard to tell much of the work flow or design from it. Ever think of producing a simple landscape demo tutorial video explaining how a basic user can generate a core terrain and the basic process? I'd love to see the usability of the terrain shaping and control of flat land to mountains, hills and various water bases ratio.

The biggest problem I run into which I'm not happy about other tools is its to difficult to generate a properly detailed landscape. Either you get crazy algorithms that are too random and hilly/ugly or you get satellite data which ends up being to flat, wide and boring. The key for me is finding a balance between big and wide with nice large flat or level areas with pleasant hills, and mountains/lakes to break up the flat nature of the explore-able area and to give perspective.

Would you ever consider making a short video letting us see your process with your tool to re-create something you've previously created like this?

I look forward to this going live. Keep it up.

 

I pretty sure that is something he plans to do after Gaia is released (or release videos like that as Gaia is released).. The problem with going into details or letting those of us who are testers discuss much about the process prior to release is there are some fairly unique concepts that he has used in the development of Gaia that he'd prefer to keep under wraps until release. I think release is pretty close though. So if folks with those kind of questions can be a little more patient, all will be revealed, to use a term frequently used in the MMO arena, soon(tm) heheh

 

One question came to my mind. How does the Gaia place the trees or other objects on a terrain that isn't flat. By it I mean hills and places that have large altitude drop? Does it adapt the placed objects nicely or do they float in air?

 

Yep As @Shawn67 point's out - Gaia brings some innovation that I will share when I have submitted to the asset store. I am working to see this done in the next few weeks, and the video's will be public shortly after that. You can use them to decide whether or not the work flow works for you.

Yep - it was this frustration that drove me to make Gaia. You might be surprised at how easy it is to get exactly the environment you want.

The Gaia work flow consists of terraforming and then spawning. Terraforming is about creating the broad structure and shape of your environment, and spawning is about texturing, planting and populating with game objects / prefabs.

The spawning system is rules based and adapts to the terrain. The cool thing about the spawning system is that the same set of rules can be applied to multiple terrains, so you can create your favorite settings and re-use them as many time as you want, on as many terrains as you want, and each time it will adapt to the new terrain.

 

So been working on some new stuff, fantastic rock quality and with the power of Gaia in just over 5 hours i was able to create this beautiful landscape called Hillside.

The rocks will be coming to the asset store soon

 

Wowsers!
I hope when you release your asset you go through your process of working with your asset with Gaia.

Again stunning...

BTW, what sky are you using?

 

Five hours is too long. Show us what you can do with Gaia in five minutes.

 

Having spend days on making a great looking terrain, 5 hours is nothing. A complete terrain, with trees, rocks, grasses, beautiful textures, etc, in 5 hours is an amazing feat.

This will definitely speed up your terrain making.

 

To be honest in that demo im not sure i saw much that was actually dependent on Gaia, as it seemed to be mostly rocks and grass and none of the excellent terraforming things Gaia promises

I too am used to spending huge amounts of time on terrain, with worldmachine then sorting out the shaders etc just to create the terrain before its even ready for populating so i understand that pain, and in fact its moved me away from Unity terrain building in favor of voxel based systems simply for something different and not having terrain be such a grind. So im with hopeful on wanting to see very fast turnaround examples of Gaia as that would be its strength to me

On the subject of shaders, what is being used?

 

It's just a unity default procedural sky i made.

 

Once Gaia is set up it can take between 3-5 mins to get fantastic results

 

@hopeful

This was done in 5mins




Edit - just in the interest of fairness - Gaia had already been configured with the various resource settings and all the rule-based spawners - and most of the 5 mins to make this was getting the basic terrain sorted out, but once you have everything set up, creating a new terrain and then getting Gaia to apply the texturing and spawn trees, grasses, etc. is a very quick process.

 

The 5 minutes is after everything is set up and that could take more time depending on your skill with this sort of thing and whether you already know what you want on the terrain...and how many grasses, rocks, etc, that you are using. Just don't want anyone upset that it takes them a bit longer than 5 minutes. It is still fast and easy to use compared to the alternatives and looks much better than doing it by hand.

 

THis is pretty COOOOOOOL

 

Is this yet in asset store so I can buy It?

 

Has anyone test out creating different geographic areas close to each other, OR connect areas together. For instance, a beach type area connected to some rolling plains connected to some canyons, and then maybe a mountainous region that might have some cliffs overlooking the ocean. Most of the time terrain assets focus on one geography at a time, then it might be difficult to connect together. Just a question. Would be neat to see an example.

 

Unity limits the number of texture you can use on one terrain that sort of makes it difficult to create widely different biomes and requires tiling or special tools/coding, beyond my expertise.

As long as you stay within the 4 textures or 8 if you use something that gives you a second pass, you probably could do this.

 

So, it probably would come down to terrain stitching then I suppose. As in make a beach area, make a desert area, make a forest area, make plains area, make mountainous area ... stitch or place them together. Thanks for the info.

 

Please could anybody tell me when this asset will be available in asset store?

 

Not yet, a week or two or three. But not now.

 

You could do that, but remember, if you use 4 different textures per tile, then then you will have to overlap some of the textures, so the individual tiles will blend together or use topography somehow to get them to work. I would probably do a mix of the two. Someday I might try it just for fun.

 

I haven't tried, but if you used a common base texture you could probably mix different textures across tiles to get the big biome differences. I suspect it would be quite fiddly to set up.

 

When will this be released?

 

If only there was some sort of automated tool that could take care of the fiddly bits of chopping up the terrain...

 

This asset is going to be a huge hit and I can't wait to buy it. The screenshots depicted look amazing.

I just hope it works well for smaller terrains. I'm trying to model some terrain for my small town and by hand it's going horribly.