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

Been a while since I've actually done anything with the Gaia betas (been working on a fence building system ), and I had time today to delve back into it for a while.

Here's the results from this afternoon's experimentation - everything in here is procedurally generated (terrain texturing, trees, rocks, houses, etc.) once I'd got the actual terrain shape to what I wanted.

 

@ smada luap
What kind of character are you using? I really like this kind of perspective, reminds me a little bit on pictures made by Caspar David Friedrich

Cheers
Michael

 

Just using one I created with Mixamo Fuse and using the standard 3rd person controller (for now)

 

Not bad for an afternoons work

 

A happy accident from a little experimenting - and a good idea to get Gaia to spawn certain objects in the correct order



Note to self: get the rocks in place first before you put the houses in, not the other way around

 

In response to @HeadClot88 's questions :

It will be comparable to other popular Terrain assets.

I am being naughty today and adding a rather cool feature that may take a few days to get right. I am mostly done now and am hoping to submit in the next week. Then its up to the Unity gods as to how long it takes to be approved. It will have been well tested before submission - we are up to beta 7 now, so hopefully not too long.

Umm - well yes and no - in the first release i will only support single tile terrains - however they can be quite large. The first update after launch will be to provide coherent multi-terrain support. There is some quite complex stuff going on, and multi terrain generation needs to be pixel perfect to work, so it may take me a week or two to crack.

Source will be included.

Not at the moment, although a lot of the smarts exist within Gaia to make this a possibility. Perhaps if there is enough interest I will make this in the future.

Thanks for your interest

 

I wish I could crank out perfection in a week or two

 

Just wanted to share somethin with the Gaia forum folks. I was looking up some speed tree assets on their website since I was having a hard time finding them in the asset store. For some reason 3 of the European tree model sets are selling for $29 but still $39 on the unity store so you can get three from them for a little more than two through the asset store. They don't even show up as on sale.

 

I have bought most of my SpeedTree assets direct via the SpeedTree sale section - if you keep an eye out there they have sales all the time.

And looky here - an interesting post on their blog, just below their academy award, and just above Witcher 3

 

Ah thanks for the reminder - Marine veggies are on sale now!

Btw what package types should one buy? Is there a web page which documents the differences between Desktop, Hero and Mobile?

If you bough the highest res veggies and paid for a subscription could you generated your own lower quality assets - like buy Desktop and generate Mobile?

 

i would really avoid speedtree on mobile, i bought them and regret, you cannot change the shader and obviously they look horrible and have terrible perf on ipad mini 2. much better to use the vegetation shader ($20) and use other trees

 

@AdamGoodrich - Would you mind doing a video video walk through of the work flow that you use for this asset?

I am really curious to see how this works.

Just curious

 

That's something Adam has said he will show everyone once it's ready to go to the asset store.

 

Thanks for the heads up

 

Yup - some little surprises to show off - very soon now

 

Are one of those surprises an asset store link?

 

That would be lovely wouldn't it. It's been such a push to get this to the point where i feel its good enough to go on the store. Most of the effort in that past six weeks as gone into usability work, which is sort of frustrating because I just want to get it out

 

think lot of people are awaiting that asset store link to throw money at it now. including me.

 

My money is begging to be thrown The hard part is going to be waiting for asset store approval - there's another asset I've been waiting for that was submitted over a month ago and still no word.

 

I think you guys will find it worth the wait. I think there is still a lot of stuff Adam wants to add, but I think even without those it will be hard to beat Gaia as the go-to terrain solution. And that is without the extra stuff he is talking about adding later. The changes in the last couple of betas have been amazing! The way the toolset has taken shape since we started beta is like looking at two different products. And the extra time taken to add the polish and shape the interface has been well worth it. I doubt I'll ever touch the other terrain generation/creation tools I've purchased again.

So if you guys can be patient just a little longer, I think he'll have something for you all to throw money at soon(tm) heheh..

 

Exciting news.... I think the launch version is finally ready to go!

I have some little issues i just noticed to tidy up, and will be creating RC1 for the beta group today. After that i need to finalise the documentation, video tutorials and get the web site up. Some of that will happen while its being submitted.

Blimey - its take such a lot of effort to get to this point - very excited to be so close to pressing the Go button!!!

Very excited!

 

Yeah this has been an asset that I have been looking forward to for some time, in fact I have stalled the development of my game waiting for this, so my hype meter could be measured by a Richter scale...

 

People may complain a bit about waiting for this plugin, but I keep thinking of Bolt ... a product where it really should have been held off the market and developed for a while longer before release. Gaia may not be quite as complicated as Bolt, but with that software in near alpha state and having to change the tutorials constantly and update docs and give support ... it became impossible to update Bolt, and I wouldn't want to see that happen here.

Keeping Gaia under wraps while you get it truly ready is very wise and will pay off for everyone.

 

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My aim is to submit to the asset store by late August – but in reality it will only be released when its ready – and that will be as ASAP as i can make it.It is designed to be artist friendly, precise, and fast to use and you wont need to be a fractal genius to get gorgeous results.Price wise it will be competitive with the other assets in the store, however it will also be launched with…

 

AWH YEA!

 

Hey @hopeful @SavithaAruntha @Licarell @FyreDogStudios
It is great that you and all the other users are excited. You have a ton of reasons to be.
I believe that you are going to have a tool-set in your hand very soon that you going to not know why no one has not done it yet and second of all, you not going to want to do terrain again without it.

It is very intuitive , @AdamGoodrich has been polishing it and refining features and really listened to the beta testers to present everyone with the best first release that can be delivered.

In fact minutes before I typed this, RC1 has been built for internal testing
So when @AdamGoodrich say that it is close it is becasue it is VERY close.

There is of course the submission that could take a few days, but the moment it has been submitted I am sure @AdamGoodrich will notify here on the forum and we all then wait for the vetting process and keep our ear to the ground for the big bang !!!

I am a publisher myself, sometimes they take a few short days, sometimes longer, that part publishers have no control over

10 , 9 , 8 , 7 ......

 

Any idea of what the price will be?

 

Yep There will be a launch special for the first 7 days. Keep an eye on the forum. Looking good to submit very soon.

 

Looking forward to the first release, and the up and coming multi-terrain functionality. Exciting stuff!

 

And that swishing sound you hear is a lot of us desperately trying to throw money at our computer screens.

But despite that take what time you need to do it right.

 

Just pushed RC2 out - almost ready to launch. Woo Hoo!!

 

Current project I'm working on does not require terrain I will have this asset anyway just to have fun, it's good to know that it's close

 

But... but... I've not even had chance to test out rc1

 

Nice, liked that! Simpson Island.
Might make a good demo level.

Couple of redwood trees would work well for some hair.

Then you need some wildlife to bring it alive ....
two (tethered) elephants instead of eye-pupils,
a vulture nest in ear (picking his brain),
some lions around his arm-pits (as they might kill you),
couple hyenas based in some rocks near his mouth (laughing),
and maybe some wild pigs (Pumba and co) nesting around his nostrils.
Belly-button looks perfect for a watering-hole
Maybe couple crocs around too, and whales!


Just to say for those thinking about this ... I've had the pleasure to help with some testing, and just want to say none of what you read from earlier testers was hyped up - it's really that good ... this is an amazing tool and its going to have everyone creating amazing terrains in fractions of time of anything previously, and easily enhance those over time too ... its a paradigm-shift as far as terrain building goes. And easy - if you can build lego, you'll master this.

 

Sooo ... I'd like to share a bit about my Gaia testing...

I'll be a bit different and show just a subset of Gaia's use, as this is another way I think everyone is also going to benefit from Gaia. What I mean by that is apart from the full monty ... ie creating awesome terrains from zip in a few minutes, its a brilliant tool for touch-up and enhancing.

In the pic below I have this terrain (height-map) from a previous game. But this could just have easily have been generated by Gaia, and in fact would have saved hours of work and I believe had better definition than my old one. But in this case, its just that some players want the same terrain, so I'm re-using it.

As other testers have mentioned, I won't show the Gaia UI etc, as that Adam will announce when ready. I will only say its really simple to use - which is a serious accomplishment considering the complex processing it achieves.

For this example, I will focus on one small area of the terrain ... a river and valley coming out into the sea...



I specially chose this as its a tricky area... most other areas are easily improved by texturing and spawning objects etc, but here the walls are steep meaning minimal terrain space on the height-map (which terrains use) to do much.

Now that looks a bit too plain for me, and if I texture it those steep walls will look a bit strange. Ideally maybe they should be stepped back a bit or layered / broken up to not be so steep, but in this case they can't be stepped back (something is planned behind).

But we can create that illusion.

So I decided to just use a rock face texture on them (one of my 4 terrain textures), but to use Gaia to help me enhance that. A good alternative here may be to use some stone wall mixed with rock face, but I like the KISS principle ... Keep It Simple, Stupid.

12 Minutes later, I have this ...
(yes 12 minutes!) ... I used to battle for hours with terrain brushes to create bumps to simulate rocks etc, and hours more to correct the mistakes. No longer.

Please note - Some people are really fast, I'm not one of those. I am no speedy, nor interested in speeding. In fact I prefer taking my time. But Gaia changes all that ... it really is a paradigm-shift in terrain building.



So with Gaia I have created a rocky mesh on the high wall. I have not pushed the top of that wall back at all.

I didn't save another pic, but 8 minutes later I had done similar (but a bit less) rocks on the left side to match. This included some corrections.

The next step took me all of 8 seconds to action (and 30 sec to process) ... getting Gaia to texture it ...



And I think its looking pretty good now.

Stupidly I didn't snap it with proper lighting etc, so its looks a bit dull above, but it really looked good ... pretty similar to pics below.

As can be seen ... because of the steepness of vertical walls, this could do with a tri-planar shader, and that would look great. But personally I decided to try get away without it, and hide some problems with a few models and foliage etc.

So from here, Gaia can spawn trees and grass etc (fast), but you've seen plenty of pics of those previously, and my plan diverts here a bit as I want to apply my own colormaps (which will have more effect elsewhere on flatter land - not so much here), and a custom splatmap etc on this terrain.

So here's another pic with my own first draft custom colormap etc (still 4 textures). This is a couple of hours later (told you I'm slow!) - but thats me manually making color and splatmap. Once I had them applied, I went back to Gaia again to spawn grass and weeds (because instead of me taking hours / days, Gaia does it in a few seconds!) ...



It still needs some work, but pretty good I think for just about no effort ! (apart from my hours manually making colormaps etc). Note: Gaia makes a Splatmap itself when you spawn textures, but I wanted to go my own way ... and Gaia allows you the freedom to be as creative as you like and use it (or not) where you need along the way.

In the pic above, I added a few rock models in water at base of cliff and the walls to break the streaking texture (instead of using tri-planar shader) , but it still needs some work to improve it. I also added a water and sky asset.

I can just imagine what really artistic users will come up with!

Heres another angle ...



Enjoy

 

I'm really excited to get my hands of GAIA when it's released. Are there any videos of it being used currently? It would be great to have a video explaining how to use it properly.

 

Seems some enjoyed my last post ... so thought I'd throw in one for the beach lovers (from just around the corner from river above) ... still needs some meshes and trees to spice it up ... so just used Gaia to improve the height-map and spawn details so far...

... actually all i need is a towel !

 

Adam posted earlier that he will make and post these types of videos once Gaia is ready for release. I think there were some videos earlier in the thread.

 

Will infinite generation ever be implemented?

 

I know Adam said earlier that the terrain creation process was too process heavy to be done at runtime (at least at the time I asked), so I don't think it will be any time soon. That said I believe he did say that the spawners (trees and such) can be done at runtime, so you could get creative and fake infinite generation. You pre-make a handful of base terrains and then stitch them together at runtime and run the spawner process stuff.

I haven't tested any of this nonsense I'm spouting, but from what I've read it should theoretically be possible.

 

I don't think it is possible with the workflow. Hard to clarify without talking about the tool set. The actual terrain creation part has some manual aspects to it. Might be something Adam can figure out and put in updates down the road, but from current beta/RC releases, I don't think it will be possible at launch. Like @Acissathar said, the spawners are totally procedural once configured so they would be more of the runtime stuff.

 

Actually i modified the terraforming and spawning code to make it run in co-routines - you can tweak how long it runs per yield - currently 1/30 of a second I think. So it would be possible to do the lot at run time - however that wasn't really the intention of the system - so you would need to write code to co-ordinate this yourself. The underpinnings all there and easy enough to use. You could look at the editor code to see how they manipulate the underlying objects.

WRT to the question on infinite terrains - i am limiting the bounds of a Gaia tileset to those that are inherently built into Unity's world unit / float size limitations. I am sure some smart cookie could layer a higher level grid mapping system on top of it.

 

Was under the impression it was an infinite procedural terrain generator somewhat like terravol, or voxeland. (yes i know are completely different)

The community really is looking for something affordable to create procedural world with. The only thing out there right now is terrain engine, which is 6,000 euros. It is un attainable for almost everyone.


ie, we're trying to make large open worlds! and there is absolutely almost zero out there that lets us do that in a real game situation.

 

Infinite world was not a thing for me so it's not really important in my case.
But by hearing the name "procedural worlds" I was also thinking about procedural created terrains and not only something like procedural placed textures / trees / objects on a "fix" defined terrain.
Like that GAIA creates a procedural terrain on every loading screen of a scene for me and also changing heighmaps and terrain itself.
But well since Adam just wrote that it could be possible I am really looking forward to some solution and codes from the community

Anyway HYPETRAIN is coming! So excited!

 

It's not. The vast majority of games don't need infinite worlds and they are difficult to do.

It takes a hybrid approach to scene generation - some of it is pure procedural, some of it isn't. The problem with pure procedural is that its almost impossible to get your environment just right. Gaia will offer the best of both worlds. Later on if it does well I will offer up a purely procedural solution. I already have the code built in another project and it won't take much work to adapt it to Gaia.

How big is big enough - 64k x 64k, 128k x 128k ? Gaia works with vanilla Unity and is inherently limited by what Unity is capable of supporting. The issue is with the precision of the floats that Unity uses to represent world space. Even with this limitation that is a lot of space to fill with interesting game play.

Note - the initial release of Gaia will be limited to a single unity terrain tile which is pretty large. I will add in multi tile support shortly after release. Not all of the internal workings have been converted to multi tile yet and I decided not to delay the release as even with single tile support it is a very useful tool.

Gaia is just one of the products I would like to release under Procedural Worlds. I have more planned and will talk about them when they are further developed.

The feedback in the beta with respect to how the system works has been generally very positive. When I submit to the asset store I will also share videos, and you can make your own judgement.

 

I have been so busy coding I haven't shared much for awhile.

One of the cool features of Gaia is its ability to take information from other sources and leverage it. In the instance below I took that valley in the Himalaya's and turned it into an island. It took me all of 5 minutes to do. I will include a bunch of 'Recipes' for how to do this and much more when Gaia is released.





Btw - this island may look small - but it's still 2k x 2k. Why 2k x 2k ? No reason

 

I don't need to make an own judgement Adam
It was not a critisim or something like this just wondering about the name after your explanation. And well you also explained thats it's not impossible.
The explanation of yours about more stuff coming under "procerual world" name explains the name to me.

So I am really looking forward to the final release.
Growth System is included in initial release right?

 

Yes it will be - I have a directory for what I call value add's. They are not really core to the systems functionality, but are useful anyway.

There will also be another one for Ceto that will make shoreline masks. Here are some sample exported masks.

 

Just want to add ... that this is a serious box of tools and everyone will get value from it in one way or another.

I can see the majority of users using all features, then specialists using some etc. Its been designed that way and is great for that. Its not an all-or-nothing. I don't use all the features, I enjoy my own tinkering. But it's enhanced what I like doing, made it easier and saved me days with the things that take me time.

 

Yup.. And to go along with what @mwituni says here, you could always use something else to create an infinite terrain (if you can find such a thing) and then run the spawners on top of it. Spawners aren't limited to Gaia-created terrains. I have run them on old terrains created with Terrain Composer and Limestone as well as ones I have created with Gaia. The only thing there is you will lose the awesome control over your terrain features, which you have when you actually create your terrain with Gaia. But it is possible. And like Adam said, if you (or someone on your team) is a coder then you can always extend Gaia to do more with the terrain creation to make it more procedural. There may even be things he does post-release that could help with that. So even if the initial videos don't grab you, keep your eye on this thread afterwards and maybe one of the updates will have something more to suit your needs.