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

I followed this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KIa216o8SM , after creating spawners and clicked the "Spawn" button, nothing showed up. But when i tried this

, it worked flawlessly.
Why? Please answer. (sorry for my bad English)

 

The only reason I can think of for this is that you did not use Gaia Manager to create the objects. Make sure you use Gaia manager. There are lots of video tutorials at : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

There are a couple of reasons why a spawner won't spawn.

The first is the position of your terrain. Make sure its Y value is zero.

The second possibility is your terrain itself. If it is too steep then very little will spawn. You can check how individual resources "see" the terrain by using the visualiser.

 

If skies and lighting are interesting for you, then go check out the link below

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/g...al-content-spawner.437566/page-5#post-2850237

 

It's been pretty quiet around here

Here is a preliminary exploration of Australian Landscapes for Brett Leavy and Virtual Songlines.

The scene in the images below was put together in about 20 minutes using Gaia for terrain and texturing and GeNa for everything else. Coincidentally the name GeNa comes from the Aboriginal word "ge-na", which means "to plant" or "to place". I wanted a name that has Australian significance.

Fascinating then to have the opportunity to collaborate with Brett on the Virtual Songlines project. Virtual Songlines is all about exploring, preserving and sharing Australian Aboriginal culture.

 

Hey Gaia peeps! Here's our first little WIP walk around the updated Gaia test environment. We finally launched our website for our game as well.

http://www.rotkgame.com/

 

Awesome work Jeff - really love the way this is coming together!

 

Thanks alot Adam!! =)

 

That honestly looks fantastic! Great work!

Sounds wonderful too. Love the sound for the footsteps in the snow and background forest effects.

 

Thanks so much for your kind words! =)

 

Pleasure!

 

I am almost done with Gena launch and will be shortly focussing on next release of Gaia. Multi tile will be delivered and I have a bunch of ideas for other things I want to do as well. Can't wait to jump into it again

 

Would love to hear your wish list of ideas - where they are practical I will add them to my roadmap!

 

I am considering doing a Gaia + Gena twitch session.. is there any interest in this ?

 

Hey guys, sorry if this has been mentioned.

1. Getting long black stripes across the terrain when I use the detail spawner. Does anybody know why this would be happening? Its only when I use Gaia, and only when using the detail spawner.

2. Not really a big issue but I thought I remembered seeing turboscapular's grass texturs as a Gaia extension, where did this go? Just got his ferns and was hoping for a one click install, again not a big issue just thought I'd ask what happened there.

Nailed the gums Adam, looks great.
Thanks for the help.

 

Oh I've got wish list ideas =) Mainly I just want you to keep it simple, easy to comprehend interface and have a selection of basic presets. =) Just multi tile would be epic! I don't want to use TC2 haha

 

Hi all!

I'd like to share a small environment I've created with Gaia + some camera effects to complete the circle

 

Erosion and "embedding" of spawned objects was suggested in the Gena thread, and you mentioned maybe doing something with it in Gaia. Embedding can be as simple as adding a negative Y offset to the spawn parameters, but it would be cooler if you could modify the terrain geometry around spawned objects, sort of like you already do with textures. The ground tends to fill in a bit around objects, with dirt accumulating around their bases. Instead of a normal "flat" spawn, it would be nice if you could do something like this:



Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, especially on thousands of trees, but if it could at least be done on rocks and buildings, it would be awesome.

 

I'd love that

 

After watching a few tutorial videos, I was excited to purchase and start using Gaia. Unfortunately, things quickly went south. Going through the intro video, I get just past the 2 minute mark when what I'm seeing in Unity is vastly different from what's in the video.

Here's the youtube link:

Instead of seeing nice looking textures in the inspector, and nice, plain english descriptions when I inspect the resources file... I'm seeing discordant images and the resources file inspector just shows garbled numbers.



What can I do to fix this?

 

@trilobyteme - You have asset serialization set to Force Text. Set it back to Mixed and it should work fine. There is a workaround if you need to have it set to Force Text... I think if you import it when you're set to Mixed then switch back to Force Text it will work.

 

Ah, I see it now... looks like asset serialization was set to forced text when I turned on collaboration (in Unity 5.5 beta). Switching back to mixed did the trick. Thanks!

 

I have never had this from Gaia, however I have seen it in Unity ages ago. Try experimenting with "Detail Resolution Per Patch" in your terrain settings - from memory dropping it down to 8 instead of the existing 16 should fix.

Turbo has done a lot of work on this, but was having some issues with serialisation by Gaia. I think he found a bug! I need to spend a little time with him to sort out how to address this. In the mean time, grass spawning in Gena is just a few clicks to set up.

Super cool - I have had this question a bunch of time and never knew what to do to fix it!

 

Apparently it's a known Unity bug.

 

Great to here that turbo will possibly have a solution. Also the black lines on grass issue seamed to be related to an interaction with advanced foliaged shader. I deleted it and lines are now gone. Thanks for the help though.

 

Looks awesome!!

What post FX are you using ? Really like the way the grass in particular is coming across!

 

Not sure if it has been asked here before, but how large is the terrain that is created? Is there a way to define the size of the terrain generated?

Thanks!

 

Yep - the terrain is 2k x 2k. It might not seem that big, but when you go down to the players level, it is a large space.

To change it, go to the Terrain Size setting in GaiaDefaults - which is in the data directory. I have seen 20k x 20k tiles, but Unity doesn't really handle large tiles well, so you are better off making multiple smaller tiles.

 

WANTED! A Goodrich approach to painful gap in the market.

Hey guys, just wanted to see what people here think about automating optimization. Please excuse the narrative like style, its just how it came out.

Lets say I'm new to game building, everybody’s on about Gaia so I buy it along with a bunch of other stuff. Now I’ve built a nice level, running Gaia, dropped in speed tree, fog/weather, particle effects, my own custom models or pieces from the store and even ramped up some performance hungry post processing and yes she looks beautiful….. just as long as you don’t move. Sadly, the frame rate is less than desired.

I totally realize that this is more than likely just myself in this boat and I’m happy to be shot down on this but I wanted to hear Adam’s thoughts and If anyone else here feels similarly to myself (and would buy said product if it existed)

Time and time again people say that Gaia saves them time. It takes something that was previously fiddly, and “relatively” complex (to achieve consistent results at least) and makes it accessible to (or faster for) non-experts.

Adam’s brilliant user friendly approach to terrain sells. Is there any demand for a similar “all in one”, “go to” solution for optimization? Before heads explode with thoughts of “the kids crazy, its way to complex” hear me out.

You’ve built your game, (or a large portion at least) but are barely getting playable frame rates. You could spend days, if not weeks, searching through tutorials and guides on everything from shaders, mesh optimizers, atlases, object pooling, etc. etc., not to mention fiddling with all the settings on each of the various third party assets you bought trying to find a balance… again weeks….OR…. instead click through a quick guide/wizard and see an immediate jump of 10 to 30 FPS (assuming poorly optimized to begin with), and scene load time improvements of ~30%. But most importantly all with LITTLE TO NO knowledge of all that stuff.

I know what I would choose.

OK so how? You firstly select the general view point or style of game (e.g.TP, shooter, top down, racer/simulator etc) put in a desired average FPS, and perhaps a minimum tolerated too, along with a primary target resolution, (and maybe even a platform e.g. desktop, mobile etc) keeping it simple on the fast guide at least. The product ships with three core features/optimization engines to begin with, the three that give the biggest bang for buck. 1. A mesh optimizer which combines meshes where possible, creates LODs where needed and generates atlases to reduce tris and more importantly draw calls (e.g. Simple LOD etc). 2. An object pooling solution (e.g. Pool Manager 5) to reduce processing/memory load. 3. A staggered loading solution to reduce scene and cut scene loading time (must have for all those interiors or dungeon transitions, or world streaming if you want them continuous etc) (e.g. parts of world streamer – others probably better). This would comprise the basics (I’m guessing) and then there could be a stack of additional more advanced options and of course 3rd party extensions. You would run it in much the same way as Gaia in three quick steps, e.g. first step optimize meshes (away it chugs for 10 mins trawling through your scenes, creating the new meshes, atlases and LODs and placing them for you etc.) Second step, the object pooling, basically enacts changes based on current best practice. Third step is to correctly implement load time improvement changes. It would then “spit out” the new changes as a “new” project along with a session number an improvement report. You could then run the old vs new to experience the improvement. (None of this is new or ground breaking, the key is….it’s simple, it reduces complexity for me, I get something implemented almost instantly and it’s still fast for future tweaks and iterations)

Ok but what if that’s too simplified for you because either/both;

1. You want more control

2. You want/need more features.

Control: One of the most brilliant things about Gaia (and any Gaia based optimizer product) would be the principled approach and ability to delve in and take control where needed, aka the advanced pathway. Here you can step through and modify each of the substeps, or even omit them if you want.

Advanced Features and Extension presets/integrations: (remember you can turn these on, off or mod them)

1. Shader optimizer (suggest replacements, or changes to settings)

2. Post FX optimizer presets (multiple to choose from) for (SSAA, SSAO or horizon, beautify, Bloom etc etc)

3. Light map optimizer (Alters lighting settings (and relevant camera settings) to optimize performance ) – This one will be contentious, but definitely worth having while many will want to fiddle with this stuff, just as many will be happy to accept and slightly tweak presets, especially for any performance gain.

4. Occlusion optimizer (This guy goes over the objects in your scene and makes sure that the calculations for object overlap are optimized – i.e. you can see though gaps in fence palings but not through rings in chain mail etc uses unity’s existing tech but in most cases widens the range).

5. View obstruction optimizer (This feature operates from your earlier input re your game style e.g. third person. While the mesh optimizer is crunching away this guy adds tags to each mesh to make sure they are occluded when between the camera and your player, except for floors or roofs which have the option to do the opposite and force zoom the camera – as an option)

6. Collider optimizer (this is just a simple one that removes excessive collider/overlap and or integrates with nav mesh if in use, guessing not many ppl would use this)

7. Particle optimizer (Just reviews the particle effects that are preexisting in the scenes only, e.g. fires, lights, waterfalls, magic emitting things etc. suggest changes – TBO haven’t thought about how that would really work)

8. Any others people can think of?

(Some features would come with the optimizer product, but some features and all extensions you would have to own, optimizer would just automate them for you with nice presets and more simplified, generalized overview interface.)

So this is just the wishful thinking of a hobbyist 3d modler who wants to spend time on the fun parts of games and would happily pay for the privilege of doing it optimization free. I just feel optimization is one of the last automation frontiers, and would love it if the solution had an Adam/Gaia user friendliness about it. (I realize I’m asking for something to come in and clean up my bad habits, I just felt it could be a good companion to Gaia and become the “must have” time saver for indie developers wanting to launch their games).

Think about this - we were ok with manual level building which was in many ways fun, but we jumped at the chance to have it simplified and automated, HOW MUCH MORE do I want automation and simplification with crappy boring optimization? If it’s done well, and I have the option for control where/when I need it. Would love to know if anyone else is in this boat.
Sorry guys for the weird post and annoying writing style. Someone plz build this.

Also if I have missed some preexisting product……I need.

I should add for anyone annoyed, if it isn't painfully obvious, that I have very little knowledge of any of this stuff (and that's kind of the point - I don't want to know too much about it), this is just a thinking out loud, wouldn't it be cool if post.

 

Great post !! Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts

The desire to make complex stuff approachable is key to the way I have approached the creation of Gaia, Gena and Pegasus.

I have also considered doing game genre specific, plus mobile and VR versions of Gaia, and automating some of the quick wins you can get with 80/20 style optimisations.

In the mean time you might be able to get some useful pointers by checking out this post from my web site : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/mobile-unity-scene-optimisation-with-gaia/

 

Hey Adam.. One thing we talked about after the last Gaia update you did was figuring out a way to make the Stamps folders something less static so we weren't locked into having to wait for updates to have categories added. Is this something still in the plans for the update?

 

Hello, has anyone come across an issue where Game Object spawning is spawning them too far into the terrain making smaller objects half hidden? Is there a setting I can set to stop this? I had a look but couldn't find anything, cheers.

 

I've used Unity's global fog for now (I plan to purchase the volumetric fog effect) +
Anti-aliasing with temporal anti-aliasing to further smoothen the edges +
few effects from "Amplify Creations":

- Amplify Ambient Occlusion (makes the grass look "more awesome" )
- Amplify Color, this one allows you to blend between 2 LUT textures, I have it set to blend between "invert colors" and "sunset" to decrease contrast a bit and improve colors. Tonemapping set to Photographic.
- Amplify Bloom for a nice leaking sky color when looking at the trees with the sky in background and cool looking sand

 

Change the Min and Max Spawn Offset Y value in the spawn prototypes.

 

Great thanks I found it. I was also wondering is there a way to rotate by 90 on X axis and still align it to the terrain?

So if it were aligned to the terrain with -1.5 X axis it would be 90 - 1.5 = 88.5 X axis

 

Have a play and see how you go in same section. Otherwise will add that to next release. Let me know.

 

Bought Gaia around a week ago (dang! a week before the sale. LOL.) Anyways, Gaia is a joy to work with. The reviewers weren't exaggerating. Had I owned Gaia before Gena was released for the $25 introductory price I would have jumped on Gena like others did just based off the strength of Gaia alone.

 

Gaia is on sale - and this is a rare opportunity to get Gaia cheap if you don't have it already!

If you are new to Gaia, please have a look at the Quick Start guide. This will get you up and running so that you get some good results immediately.

Then, to get deeper into Gaia to get more out of what it can do for you, please take a look at the Gaia tutorials - the majority of them are video based.

Between these resources you should have all you need to get productive really quickly!

Don't forget to check out Gena as well - where Gaia does a great job with terrain and your first round of level design, Gena then adds a whole lot more spawning power to the mix and takes it to the next level.

Enjoy!!

 

Yay, was just hoping for another Gaia sale when I bought GeNa on release day.
Finally I got both

 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention how awesome your quick start guide and tutorial videos are.

 

I've had the asset favorited for a while now waiting for either the price to go down or my savings to go up The former happened today so I grabbed it. I haven't played about with it much yet but have hit the pitfall of not being able to fully work on multiple terrain patches at once ( to help aligning them ) nor the flexibility of being able to make a 'near infinite' landscape which I was hoping to be able to use it for.

So, realising the limitations, I have rethought my plans and feel that I may have to fall back to my original plans of building continent and island terrains with their surrounding oceans ( at the same water level and landscape base height ) and then creating a planetary landscape layout designer to pseudo randomly position the pseudo randomly chosen terrain blocks from a prefab list. Is this theoretically possible with the current and future versions of Gaia ?

What I have noticed, however, is that there is no facility to use the terrain noise generator with different offsets but the same seed therein allowing the tiles to perfectly line up. Is this something you will be adding when completing the multiple tile ability to Gaia ?

Here are some images from my first 2 attempts at the tool using the tutorial document steps. Definitely worth the money for these simple scenes, but as you can see the water needs to go out a little further so that you can't see the end of the world ) Unless of course you have a couple of islands near each other.

 

People have done this now. The API's are there and you would need to code it up yourself as its not really something I have pursued. I will explore this when I support multi tile.

Probably. Gaia offers perlin, ridged and billow noise now as a stamping mask, but i personally prefer the stamps because of the flexibility and power they offer. I added the noise based masking on the stamps just for people who wanted that style of masking. I can explore expanding on this in the next version as well.

Nice. The creative use of atmospheric haze is a great way to mask out the distance.

 

Hey everyone,

The recent FREE Castles Update that the Village Exteriors Kit received also included Gaia Integration.
12 new handcrafted by me, Small Holdings were added to the same FREE Castles update.

This means that with just a click or two you can spawn and populate you game world with great handcrafted assets, save time and immediately have that lived in handcrafted look and feel that is essential for translating your game-world as realistic as possible while saving you hours of time should you have had to do so manually.

With all the modular assets included, you can build tons more of your own taste, style and choice to add more unique contents to you project.








Cheers
Cobus

 

Looks good, but is out of my price bracket for the time being.

 

Hi @Xrystal ,

I trust this will help, your response sparked the idea

Village Exteriors Kit -25% SPECIAL !!!
Village Interiors Kit companion package


Cheers
Cobus

 

Thanks Cobus!

The integration with Gaia in the latest village exteriors kit is very cool! These is something rather exciting about creating an environment, then procedurally spawning the small holdings, and then discovering them!

The following speed level design video shows off some of these holdings, and shows how Gena is able to use them as well. What Gena does which is different to Gaia is provide much more fine grained / artist control over where things are placed.

NOTE: In this video Gaia set the terrain up, and added the textures, and then Gena did the rest. You do NOT need Gena to be able to use Gaia - rather Gena is a nice complement to Gaia

 

Hi,

I'm looking for a terrain generation lib for unity and gaia seems pretty interesting. maybe you can answer some questions I have, i.e. if what I'd like to do is possible with gaia (sorry if they have been already asked, but the thread is so huge, i couldn't read all of it ;D):

- I'd like to create random terrain (where same seed produces the same results) in-game via c# code. does gaia provide an api for this or is it editor-only?
- I'd like to connect several terrain objects together. can the terrains be generated in such a way that there is a seamless connection between the different terrain objects?
- ideally, I'd like to create a heightmap for a let's say planetary world map and divide it into several tiles and every tile would represent a terrain object. can i feed gaia with a heightmap tile as a low-resolution map and have gaia generate a random terrain where mountains are preferrably created on the heightmap's high spots and valleys are created on the heightmap's low spots?

 

Howdy!

Our dev team is highly considering getting this asset for our development.

A couple of questions:

Am I able to run through the stamping and spawning workflows in the tutorial videos and THEN use the built in brushes included in Unity to further smooth/sculpt the terrain? What about doing the same, but then painting in my own texture layers like maybe roads, paths, or other things?

...

What about a scenario where maybe I'm not interested in using the included stamps, but want to sculpt a terrain myself to start but then use the Gaia Spawning to texture and scatter objects?

Basically, what I haven't seen in any of the videos is the ability to switch back and forth between Gaia and the default Unity tools and how well these workflows play into eachother.

 

I built my terrain out in 3ds Max and imported them into Unity. My plan was to convert the mesh into a terrain and use Gaia to populate the now converted meshes(terrains). Is that possible?

 

Hi @AdamGoodrich is asleep now in Aus, so let me answer.

As far as I know a yes on all the questions.
Gaia generates / sculpts normal Unity terrain when it does it's awesomeness, nothing special to the actual terrain, and then adds texture to it according to preset rules in the texture spawners. When you done, you can delete Gaia from the project and all still there, so it does not need Gaia there to maintain what you have created at all.

That would answer the first question as well, Unity vanilla terrain sculpting or any other sculpting and texture painting plug-inns all will work with it for the same reason > Gaia spits out normal Unity terrain.
If there are any limitations, it is a Unity terrain limitation, it will not be becasue you used Gaia to generate it for you.

Cheers
Cobus

 

That should not be a problem since you could bring your 3rd party software terrain/mesh and make a stamp of it and then BAM, stamp it.
Gaia then has the capability to export that back out even as an .obj file if want to