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

Welcome to Asset Development my friend.

 

@smada luap

There is nothing like a cool late birthday present

 

Amazing work! Learned about this from your tests on youtube. Out of curiosity, how much of the world is generated at runtime? Is it just the tree spawners, or the heightmaps/splatmaps as well?

Been trying to make an outdoor rouge-like by setting the terrain height with voronoi and 3d simplex noise for each new level, but it still doesn't look nearly as natural as your results. Keep up the good work!

 

Any more screenshots for us to drool over?

 

Purely run time generated systems lack the fine grained control you get by doing it at design time, so in the interest of both simplicity and hitting the widest audience I decided to make this iteration of the system design time.

With this in mind all terrain features, texturing, terrain details (grass) and terrain trees are editor generated at design time, and the feedback I have had from the beta test group so far has been very positive.

Additionally, by the time I release you will also be able to spawn objects such as animals, buildings and trees and place them on and around the terrain at design time OR at run time (this is working now but i want to integrate it into the new spawning system so there is one simple way to spawn any type of entity).

Going forward, full run time world generation is completely feasible within the current architecture as the majority of the underpinnings are already there, but there is still a lot of work to do to make this work well without causing long wait screens for users.

If there is enough interest in a fully procedural run time world generation system then I will consider releasing a multi threaded run time version of the system as paid add-on.

Not at the moment - have been busy working in improving the UX - soon - i really want to show off biomes

 

YAY!!! This is what I'm really looking forward to.. In my mind, I envision my world covered in scatterings of islands with some of the larger ones having a few different types of environments (marsh, rain forest, coastal, volcanic are a couple off the top of my head)... I'm really curious how the biome will allow me to deal with those.. Oh.. Also, underwater biomes around the island might include coral or maybe thick sea vegetation, etc.. So I could see several biomes both above and below sea level in an island scene...

 

How goes it adam? Hopefully you are wrapping up the first release

 

Hi Archania, as you have sent this I am almost done writing a speech for my best mate, who passed away unexpectedly last Friday. I have been fortunate enough to never have lost anyone before, and I can honestly say that this knocked me for six.

Up till then it was advancing nicely, and I will try to get back into it again next week. My apologies for the delay.

 

Oh that really sucks. My sympathy to the family.
Makes you look at things a little differently when things like this happen.

 

Sorry man

 

Thoughts are with you as well as the rest of your friend's family and friends. While like most here, I am anxious for release of this asset but totally understand life throwing things at you that are beyond your control.. Been there, done that. Good luck with the speech..

 

Life always come first! Do what you have to do and we will still be here when you return. Take your time.

 

My condolences...
Like my uncle used to say: "S*** happens in life".

 

Condolences to his friends and family.

 

Sorry to hear it man.

 

Thank you all for your lovely thoughts

Am back now and back on the case and will have a new version to my beta group in the next few days. The spawning system is in pieces at the moment but the refactor is worth it from a usability perspective.

More screen shots in the next few days.

 

Really great that you can bounce back and get right back to work. As therapeutic as coding is, I hope you're doing okay.
Super excited for the release, keep it up!

 

Thanks

To be honest I feel shattered and don't want to be working at all - or if i did - it would just be on this - something that I genuinely enjoy.

Am working because I made a commitment a few weeks ago on a time sensitive project and I don't want to leave them in a mess.

 

Well, we greatly thank you for your commitment. This product looks amazing!
Thanks for all the hard work!

 

Hey, it's not us you should be worrying about. Do what you can to get through this and then get back to work. I think I speak for everyone when I say the best thing you can do right now is get better and I can guarantee everyone involved will be thankful for it. I don't know you or your personality, maybe blasting through a project despite everything helps, but I do know that what you need is whatever it takes to get back on track. And that's the truth.

Either way, thank you for your commitment.

 

Keep your chin up Adam.. As much as we sound like we want to rush you, I would hope everyone here is understanding and can be compassionate enough to realize things with your terrain tool is going to take a little longer. My thoughts are with ya....

 

An example of some mesa based features. Have just about completed a significant refactor to improve the usability of the user interface. We are on the move again. Please ignore the trees / grass / textures - not at all optimised. As per usual this took about 10 mins from start to end to create

 

Looks awesome. Glad it's coming all together. Can't wait to get it.

 

I noticed this in the changelog of Unity 5.1.2 (released today)...



I haven't had a chance to test it out on my end yet, but it sounds promising

 

Awesome stuff here! Keep up the amazing work.

 

Sounds cool

 

While the execution here isn't particularly exciting - it's useful none the less - you can now target specific terrain textures to choose where to place objects.

 

Woah, super useful. Something I never thought I would definitely need until now.

 

Looks amazing? Any ETA for when you can take my money?

 

I would love to say soon - but it really is soon - i am making one more feature at the moment - the ability to spawn any object in the terrain - and after testing will be documenting and submitting

 

Handy. You could use a texture as a possible placement marker for a building or any other object

 

It would be great to have an option that allows you to define specific areas you can generate. For an example, one create area class named "Tropical jungle" and then he assings various plant, rocks etc models to it. Finally, density of current object can be set. Those area classes could be later used for brush or texture-based objects spawn.

 

Yep, this is the purpose of the Spawner.

 

Just added the ability to spawn any object into the Spawner - the Spawner was responsible for every tree, every blade of grass, and every rock in this scene

 

now that is very nice. Beautiful work Adam!

 

You've been outside with your camera again haven't you? lol

 

LOL...
Goodbye Terrain Composer

 

DITTO! Surely it has to be getting close! *drools over the latest screen shots*

 

Wow, this just gets better and better! Keep up the amazing work!

 

Is your tool able to draw 2048x2048 terrain tiles x at least 10 times? So we can have a landscape at 10km square?
Regards! Tom

 

I think it's only limited by unity's terrain size

 

Yup, but i actually want to draw 10x10 of those terrains. So not an ubersized terrain area but rather a lot of smaller ones.

 

It will by the time it releases - i am focussing on main features at moment - then will extend them across terrains.

 

Hi Adam,

Any chance to release at THIS end of the month?

 

All of the major features minus multi terrain support are essentially ready now and went to the beta group today. I will be publishing as soon as i get multi terrain tile support working.

So if you were asking if it will release closer to end of this month than last month - the the answer yes.

That said - it will release when its ready - development rarely goes as quickly as I would like it to and I would rather release quality than have people upset over something that's buggy.

 

In addition to launching latest update to beta group today, I also have selected a bunch of textures and grasses from cgtextures.com to include in the package. These are a considerable improvement over what comes by default with unity, and will allow you to create nice environments from day one.





If anyone is interested - the lighting here is the latest Time of Day. The water is Suimono and then trees are Alaskan Cedars from the SpeedTree desktop package. The grasses and textures shown will be included with the asset.

 

Not to throw a wrench in this but you made sure you can use the textures by selling them with your asset?
Otherwise I can't wait!

 

Yeah. Last thing I want do do is step on their copyright. There is a special clause in their licence that says I can do this as my asset drives demand for theirs. I have included the appropriate licence snippet along with a reference back to their site. If I have it wrong then best to find out now

 

Awesome, and don't rush ahead leaving some features underdeveloped. Just release it once you feel it's ready for us to use, even if it's the end of next month. Great job!

 

Thankyou. Its an interesting balancing act. You want to release the best thing vs rush it out the door. In the mean time life has a habit of dropping its own challenges in there as well.