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

terrain wise yes, and yes I do have a clue how much time it saves.

 

if this asset eta for release is around a month or so, then I would have put in a couple of weeks worth of work on the terrains (object placement) on top. So in theory I would save time later, but waste time now Then having to place all of the assets on 11 x 11 grid of terrains, would double my workload in this respect. But in the long run save time on the terrains and terrain related objects (trees, rocks, grass) etc.

 

Obviously there's the time spent on learning how to use this system, so if you are close to ship, I would not recommend changing (common sense).

 

no, not close to ship yet. Just investor preview and maybe Steam Greenlight, but still have time to change. It will make updates a breeze. Sometimes you have to wait for the good stuff, even if it delays things by a few weeks, providing there are not many bugs to iron out after the first release of the asset then all should be good but will continue as normal. Like any game I've developed, just carry on, replace what needs improving later - get a build out first.

 

Awesome progress! Looking forward to using this myself.

 

Added nice new feature today - Spawner Groups - This allows you to group Spawners that have different purposes together and run them as a single entity - essentially one click world / biome creation

 

Sweet. Sounds like it is all coming together

 

it's amazing

 

Since Adam has given the ok for testers to post screen shots, I figured I would give a shot from a different perspective to showcase some of the diversity. One of the big things that I was interested in was the spawning system that is built into his system. Well, I was interested in all of the features but this was one that I have played with a little more than the others - using his system spawners to spawn game objects and creation of biome spawners. The screenshot below was just taken during a test of my underwater biome. Those of you who are using Suimono will probably recognize the underwater caustics. But within my object spawner, I am spawning the giant fish skeleton, a wrecked boat, and boat oar from Left Island Pack, several coral, sea shells, and starfish from and underwater plant pack, and dolphin schools and seahorse schools from Unluck's Fish School Bundle.. All of these are configured within the toolkit just like we configure trees, grasses, and textures to spawn. Takes a little legwork to get setup, but once they are setup, you can save to a prefab and use on other parts of your scene or even within other scenes within your project! AMAZING!!!

 

Atlantis here we come ...

 

Here is part of my above ground.. My terrain is a 4k square containing four islands, which will be split later into 500m squares using Sectr. My plan is to spawn all of my terrain details based on biomes. Each island may have different terrain configurations for texture spawning and maybe even different trees and grasses. One island is a volcano so instead of normal trees, I might use burned out leafless trees and brown grasses, for instance. You'll notice in the screenshots that there is a big sand mountain in the background. That is just another island that has had no spawners run on it yet.

The first shot is from my homestead area looking east. You'll see my small farm. This is the only thing that I haven't spawned with Adam's toolkit. I laid this one out by hand playing around with the 3DForge Exterior Kit and a few miscellaneous props from some other kits. But all terrain features were created/spawned using Adam's toolkit. I still need to setup my spawners for rocks and ground objects. I'll probably do this after I break the terrain into sectors using Sectr so I have all of my object spawners as children of the sector they are in. (I'll also wipe my underwater objects shown above and do them the same way when the time comes.)



The next photo is from the same spot looking west. You will see the giant fish skeleton bones sticking up from the water and off in the distance is the sand covered island that has not been worked on yet. All trees, textures, and grasses were spawned by Adam's toolkit and the land formations making up the islands were created with it.



I still need to do a lot of tweaking to get my textures, grasses, and trees spawning just the way I want. I blew them all out earlier to test the spawn groups that Adam just finished. So still tweaking all my settings under the new Spawner Groups. The only thing I didn't redo was my heightmap stuff. But the toolset is a LOT easier to work with than similar tools that I've used for terrains.

 

How does it work with RTP? Thanks

 

@siblingrivalry - It creates/modifies a unity terrain object so you can use RTP on it just as you would any other terrain.

The screenshot I posted earlier is just a basic terrain that has the UVFree triplanar shader applied to the terrain

 

Thanks.

 

Ok, some more goodness - the trees are speed tree's so i cant include - but the textures and grass will be included.

 

Stop showing off. lol

 

Why can I only click like once....

 

Hey lucky bastards with Beta access
One quick question... What FPS do you get with those terrains.
Thx

 

The same as you would do on any terrain. The more detail you add in, the more that needs processing and thus the lower the fps

 

Iguanapl, I have a terrain...will post a picture, that is 2k x 2k, pretty detailed topography wise, contains a river with Suimono, plus Time of Day, and a lot of vegetation, more than I would use in the end. I get about 300 fps.

Adding objects and meshes will decrease that of course.

Edit: I have a very good graphics card though...realize it is hard to compare systems.

 

That is on a fairly powerful development pc though, right @Teila?

To be honest, this too has nothing to do with FPS. It is about laying out the terrain. You still have the same constraints you do for FPS as you would with any terrain system. Your choices in how many details, how large a terrain, and all the other stuff are still factors in play.

In my huge 4k x 4k tile, I'm getting crappy fps with what I'm doing. When I've chopped it into sectors with Sectr, do my game object spawning with dedicated spawners within the sectors, fps improves. I just started testing with Sectr a couple days before Adam released the latest beta. So I dropped it and went back to test the new beta. So I still have a lot of things to do with Sectr. I want to try to figure out how to put my underwater and above ground objects in two different sectors to be able to cull with Sectr-Vis...

But really, Adam's tool doesn't really take away the same performance tweaking issues we already deal with using other workflows without his tool. It just makes creating terrains and populating them super quick...

 

The graphics card is a about 6 months old, the rest of the system is several years old so definitely not top of the line.

 

In contrast, this terrain is nearly complete. It has lots of Suimono water, birds, animals, buildings, trees and grasses placed with Gaia, and simpler terrain. It is 2k x 2k as well. So...all of that other stuff is what is causing the fps drop. I get between 50 and 90 which is about what i expect. It also has a number of image effects and some assets like HerdSims and Unluck's bird flocks. So lots going on here. Terrain was done with Adam's tool.

 

Gotta add to what Shawn said. He is absolutely right. When you make your terrain, whether with Gaia or World Machine or by hand, you still have to pay attention to the resolutions, the pixel error, the detail density, when your trees turn to billboards, how many tree or how much grass you place.

So..if you make a 10k x 10k terrain, with a very high resolution, low pixel error, and lots of polys (extremely detailed terrain features), you could have problems if your machine or your players' machines are not up to par.

This has nothing to do with the tool you are using. The good thing is that Adam's tool gives you a lot of control so it should be easier to figure out what to do fix things.

 

Some more screenshots to whet your whistle







Don't forget that this is a terrain generating tool that also quickly allows you to place grasses, plants, trees, etc. but as some are wondering what the performance issue is like, I'm getting between 35-65 fps on average on my ageing machine (I'm running a Radeon HD 7700 series card so I'm certainly not up-to-date with the latest tech ) and it's only dropping down to the lower end of that scale really when there is water to display - and it's throwing 5M tris through the graphics card

 

Just for a giggle, I decided to move the camera out a fair distance from the player.

 

@Teila - Maybe I'm misremembering, but aren't those pictures a big leap ahead in quality from what you had not long ago? Especially those grassy hills, they look awesome.

If that's all Gaia's work, then this is really great stuff.

 

Thanks, Hopeful! Much of it was Adam's tool, especially the hills. Of course, I probably won't be able to keep that density of grass. I did redo that terrain completely, using the same height map but with a modified valley and river, courtesy of Adam's tool. I also replaced with better textures. I will post more pictures later.

The swamp also improved with the addition of Suimono, fog and some image effects. My previous shots used the same terrain made with the help of Adam's tool as well. I just made some other changes as well.

 

@hopeful
Here is a picture just for you!

 

I expect Suimono is going to be the best answer for your water needs, since you have what looks like a bit of swamp or lagoon to wade in as a central feature of your home area. So a good pick for you there. And the fog adds a nice bit of, well ... atmosphere.

I haven't said much, but I've been following this thread since the first post. While I don't quite understand how it works or what it is doing, it seems likely Gaia is going to be a big hit in the Unity store, and probably with an arm-long list of positive reviews on day one.

 

Thanks for the response guys

 

I totally agree with this @hopeful. I really think Gaia is going to change the way we all look at creating and spawning terrain. The ease of use is ridiculous.. There are still one or two parts that take a bit to get a grasp of, but even if you struggle with those couple of things, you can still do awesome things with it. I'm still struggling with them and while my screenies could look a lot better, they are leaps and bounds better than what I struggled with using other terrain tools that I have purchased.

 

Is it easy to control the height? I really want to have most my biomes (forest, desert, grasslands) very flat. I rather have a seperate biome for a hilly area and another for mountains. I would also want to control the height of my hilly area and mountains.

 

Yes, you can control the height. Not hard at all.

 

All I shall add to this is that when Adam showcases just how it all works you're going to wonder why nobody thought of doing it this way before

 

Can Gaia take in low resolution heigthmaps, and work is wonders on them to improve there detail?

Also can I take a heigthmaps from Worldcomposser that always had its ocean at 0m (flat) and using Gaia mask of the land and generate terrain from 0m down to create the Under water terrain?

 

I can't help you with World Composer but maybe Adam can answer that. He may have a different response than me on the resolution as well.

A low resolution heightmap will still be low resolution and I doubt you can increase it's resolution through Gaia, although you could make it look better. I can't say much.....lol.

If I attempt to put a low resolution height map into Unity's terrain, then I end up with blocky or blurry terrain, before putting textures on. There are ways to make it a little better if the resolution is not too low but really, you need to start with a better resolution image. It would be nice if it could change low to high, but I doubt that is possible.

I have tried doing that in World Machine and it doesn't really work. Frustrating, I know.

 

@John G. Unity's terrain can't go below zero but there's noting to stop you developing part of the landscape that you'll know will be under water as you can set your water object any height yiu want

that's what I've done in the images above

 

Hmm... i have a bunch of ideas here, and I can do things like smooth them to remove terraces etc, but adding micro detail is not slated for first release.

Hmm.. if i understand you correctly then yes. That said, you still need to conform to the constraints of Unity terrain. So you would may your water / ground level greater than zero to allow for under ocean type features.

 

What i really love about the images that some of the beta testers have posted is that they all have their own style and their own approach. Its very rewarding to see the creativity being expressed

 

You know i have been wanting to do this for ages. I know exactly how i would do it, and it would have all the benefits of the spawning system. I reckon a day of effort to add it.

Which leads to the next challenge - i have this awesome framework now.. and every time i add a new feature it delays shipping as it needs UI, then testing then doco... which then annoys people here ... argh !!

 

Guess what I'm really asking is not so much to add detail to a low resolution heigthmap, but to generate a new terrain conforming to the heights of the low resolution version.
Creating more detailed mountains, valleys, erosion etc.

As for the worldcomposser issue, if it would be possible to raise the terrain by a set amount by the user. Then using a mask, take the original flat terrain that is the ocean, generate terrain that now goes from new heigth back down to 0 creating the ocean floors etc.

Hopefully is possible, but glad to wait for it as a future update. Don't want to delay the initial release an further. I'm dying to much to play with it as is.

 

You can do that! At least the creating more detailed mountains and valleys.

Definitely can make the oceans lower and focus on only that part of the terrain. That is what I did. I had a terrain map I made in World Machine but wanted a wider valley, so I used Adam's tool to make the valley. I then hand cut a river, and after exporting out the height map, I used WM to add more erosion.

Prior to having this tool, I had no good way to make my valley wider. The scale in WM was not creating what I wanted but with this tool, I was able to get in and fine tune it to my specifications.

 

if i understand Biome are like image based layer in terrain composer? how do you set their limits?
im really interested to see how interface look to define cliffs for example, how is it organised? per biome? can we make tiled Biome? (sectr user)

And do we have control over the terrain layout for example if i want to draw a base heightmap in photoshop to have some height borders?

 

As Adam mentioned in his OP - the texturing is based on height and slope values in the terrain data. You can tell it to only apply the cliff texture if the slope value is between certain values

 

Todays screenies.

This a Gaia environment set off with some manually placed rocks. I could spend some time here

 

@AdamGoodrich damn, they just getting better and better.
Almost look like good photographs man, well done

 

Looks awesome. Great job !!