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

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by AdamGoodrich, May 21, 2015.

  1. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    You should probably use Photoshop to convert them to raws like I did in the video. Unity seems not to like some of the other formats.

    Will be nice to be able to represent these areas true to scale in Gaia 2.0 :)
     
    kurotatsu and BackwoodsGaming like this.
  2. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Thanks for the suggestion.

    Might take a few more secs on replaying a session but not a deal breaker - you can manually remove both the stamp and the undo from the session.

    Yep - we are battling with the way unity works and with memory management. The session manager might seem pretty simple on the surface, but under the hood its quite complex. Additionally, the open source tool I am using for serialisation causes lots of issues on one platform, so I plan to redo it largely from scratch. One of the things I want to do is every step of the session fully editable in Gaia 2.0. So 6 months later you could go an edit a single stamp (e.g. move a mountain) in the sequence and regenerate it.

    The smoothing function works - it applies it pre-stamp - not sure why you wouldn't be seeing a benefit.

    Yep Gaia 2.0 is already eating large terrains. Can't wait to get the texture spawners moved to GPU compute. MegaSpat does btw have an alpha cutout mechanism to support holes. You would need to manually switch the terrain collider off as your player goers through. Thats no different to RTP though. Either way is a hack.

    This is by design - i thought it looked nice. Just change the spawn criteria.
     
  3. jbooth

    jbooth

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    Here's the thing; 256 textures sounds like a ton and impractical for memory, until you realize that mixing and blending several smaller textures looks WAY better than simply tiling one texture across a terrain (while taking less memory than the high resolution texture). The textures I use in MegaSplat's example scenes are 1024x1024 each, and I usually use 2 or 3 variations of each. They hold up quite well at 512x512 and a smaller UV size, because the surface is constantly blending between variations so you never see anything repeat. I also provide packing modes which pack Diffuse, Height, Normals, Smoothness and Ambient Occlusion into just 2 textures, which means further savings of memory and texture samples.

    This also improves performance- because the other anti-tiling techniques in use require sampling the textures multiple times with different UVs and blending them. Combine that with having to multipass the terrain to get above 4 textures, and you have a much slower shader. Everything in MegaSplat always draws in a single pass, and the shader cost per pixel is the same regardless of how many textures are used across the terrain.

    As for which texture to go where, that's what texture clusters will abstract some of the work for you. In truth, most biomes will have some number of key surfaces, likely from 4 to 12, which determine the bulk of it's look. This is likely wise for reasons of consistency; so it's really not that different for a high level system like Gaia to choose a texture cluster instead of a single texture and get massive benefits, and let the texture cluster handle the job of picking the actual texture for each point.

    Pushing beyond this you can definitely imagine new techniques which would take time to integrate; using extra textures to blend in leaves and roots under areas of trees automatically, putting wear marks around housing, paths, etc, all in the same material/shader. That's all very exciting and potentially cool, but you'd get a lot of the benefit with a very simple integration.
     
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  4. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    @AdamGoodrich Fantastic news about the hole support in MegaSplat (not sure why I couldn't find that). I realize the alpha holes are a bit hackish, with turning off terrain collisions while providing footing at the cave mesh.
    That makes the decision a bit easier when I decide to move forward though, as does Gaia having a better path to integrate with MegaSplat based on past indication of author responses.
    As for the other issues... I'll have to look closer at the smoothing, but I'm sure it's not working right for me... probably not Gaia's fault if that's the case, who knows with new versions of everything every other day but I can't even move my mouse in Unity right now without spamming 1000 errors about failing to render textures in the latest Unity (which seems related to nvidia drivers or some such thing right now), this could even be Gaia trying to render those changes, I'm not sure, but I'm not the only one experiencing it with the latest Unity so I'm just waiting on a fix for that before I chase further on the smoothing issue.
    The ferns in the river being deliberate, great, knowing it's intentional I'll muck with the spawner.
    The real issue I'm fighting with is the undo stuff. I can respect the choice to keep the undo in the list to be able to re-enable an old stamp you might have liked and disabled temporarily, but perhaps you can offer an option that allows one to decide the undo behavior. I for one do not want to keep 100's of undos in my replay, and don't want to have to manually delete every time I don't like something and realize I've got 30-50 undos clogging it up again.
    First time I went back to my session and saw 30 stamps and undo actions I had to remove, my wrist was killing me. There is no multiselect or top level delete button next to each array item. I have to expand, click delete, expand click delete... Boggle my brain when I'm on a computer and I have to kill my wrist repeating actions like that, just my 2 cents, but it sure would be nice to just click checkbox that trashes it for me when I undo, instead of keeping it.

    @jbooth You make some compelling points for using more textures when it costs nothing to do so (other than the final size of production deployment). Of course, if you can back off from using 2k textures and use 1k or even 512 without sacrificing the quality, then you can pack in 4-16 times as many textures for the same cost anyway. I mentioned before that the tessellation and anti-texture-tiling were the 2 biggest things I was looking at the shader packs either way, but I am pretty impressed with the look of MegaSplat's tessellation combined with IK for foot positioning, gives a real nice polished look without a lot of cost for it. The moment Gaia integrates even basic support for MegaSplat I'll pick it up, but may even once tiling is out and the workflow doesn't involve going back to gaia to do more stamps and regenerate textures anymore.
     
  5. chippwalters

    chippwalters

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    Hi,
    Still learning GAIA. I have three questions:
    1. How can I "reset" the Coverage Texture Spawner? I'm trying to spawn with a different "B" material and I only see the "A" material. I have set the "A" material to Inactive and have set the B material to ignore height, virgin slope, check textures etc.. and then I have only set B to active in the spawner and I still only see A. I'd like to be able to 'reset' the Coverage Texture so I can see what's really happening.

    2. I'm using a very small terrain: 128. It's because it's a VR demo scene with a single tent. I want to change the scale of the Coverage Texture so be smaller, but can't figure out how to. I think it's the Size X,Size Y (smaller is smaller or smaller is larger texture?) but because of 1 above I can't figure it out.

    3. How do I turn off the motion of the grass? I want it to be very still or sway only a little. It doesn't seem to be tied to the WindZone-- at least I can't see that it is.

    Thanks!
     
  6. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    @chippwalters
    1) I just select the terrain texture spawner, and under the Spawn Controller, hit the reset button first, then hit spawn. Should repaint the terrain without any old textures, reset itself doesn't unpaint the terrain though until you spawn again.

    2) Edited: I read the question wrong, the Size X and Size Y should make a change, but I tried adjusting them and respawning the textures with no difference as well, not sure on this one.

    3) Grass has nothing to do with Gaia, it uses terrain grass. So this is a function of Unity. You are correct that default Unity grass does not react to windboxes, it's just animated on billboards usually. If you want more control over that, you may need to look at an alternative grass system, like perhaps using SpeedTree to make the grass reactive to the windbox.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2017
  7. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Responding on mobile device so please excuse.

    Textures are like coats of paint, Each additional rule overrides the previous one. If your next texture is not configured right then it won't paint anything. Please use visualiser to get a sense of what it will do. There are video tutorials on this on my web site.

    To swapping / changing textures out is pretty trivial. Change in terrain and then update resources from terrain. Read about resources in documentation, and check videos out on web site.

    To disable grass swaying go into settings on terrain and disable. Grass swaying is not related to wind zone wind. Surprised unity never linked them together.
     
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  8. chippwalters

    chippwalters

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    Thanks for the advice. I'll try resetting the spawner

    Thanks again for the timely help. You didn't mention the texture size issue. Was I correct in the Size X, Size Y setting?

    I tried everything to get texture B to spawn. I'll look again. I have viewed your tutes and read through the manual but perhaps I missed something. If I can't figure it out I'll create a YouTube describing the issue as clearly as possible.
     
  9. Terrion01

    Terrion01

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    @AdamGoodrich Sorry if this has been asked before, I am on the edge of purchase and would like to know if it supports the procedural features at runtime mainly the procedural terrain height and splat map or if it will be supported in a future version.
     
  10. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Current Gaia is more of a design time tool. Some people have used it at run time but I don't currently support this.

    Next release of Gaia will have 2 components. A free multi threaded version, and some additional paid GPU compute modules. Prices have not been set for the GPU components yet.

    I am aiming to support real-time / runtime generation in the new version, however I think CPU generation will be too slow. GPU compute however is blindingly fast, and the GPU compute modules will drop straight in, so upgrading to GPU compute should not be an issue at a later stage.

    If you can't figure it out then PM me and we can do a Skype. I don't really think its my place to explain the underpinnings of Unity for things such as the impact of X & Y in terrain texture setup, although there is fair bit of detail in the documentation. You can also hover over the settings and get tooltip based documentation.
     
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  11. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    Just out of curiousity, not that CPU generation is too heavy in the editor, but will the in-editor version of Gaia also be able to benefit from the GPU modules if we purchase them?
    Or will perhaps the editor automatically use them, while the paid version is only for runtime generating?
     
  12. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Yep absolutely - i am designing and testing them side by side in the editor to validate that they both work properly :)

    When I am happy that its all good in the editor, I will validate the API's for run time as well. There are plenty more cool things coming... will announce them closer to launch.
     
  13. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    Excellent. It'll make stamping over massive areas more efficient, especially when we start pushing Gaia to tile 20kmx20km at 1km tiles and want to stamp over all of the tiles.
     
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  14. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Hey @AdamGoodrich ,

    This is more of a feature request.

    Since the new UI is come along for the Stamper, any plans on introducing a procedural noise generation interface too ? As of now to create stamps I must use the built in stamps or use a 3rd party tool like Adobe Photoshop to create a stamp and then import them.

    But if Gaia features an in editor tool that helps visualize and generate stamp images ( direct stamps ) procedurally , it would make things a lot easier and also make Gaia powerful at the same time.

    Imagine being able to generate custom stamps on the fly, using the same method to generate coverage texture spawners, objects and also use the same feature to generate Masks for both Gaia and Gena.

    The same functionality currently exists in the addon Pro Stamps for Gaia and TC2. If this fits your time and budget, please do give this request some consideration :)

    On that note, can't wait to see what Gaia 2.0 brings to the table .
     
  15. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Yes. Btw I guess you didn't know that Gaia already had one. Check out the masking options. If you use the adhoc masking stamp and these then you get just noise - if you use another stamp plus these then you get a combination of both.
     
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  16. Weblox

    Weblox

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    Hi,

    I'm just starting to use Gaia/Gena and have watched the great Tutos on your channel. Playing with Gaia I have encountered all the nice functions as "conform to slopes" etc. Now I have been looking inside the spawner rules for a function to "carve" spawned game objects into the terrain (in the way that e.g EasyRoads would "carve" the road network into the conforming terrain), but didn't find a way to do it. Is that something I am overlooking or maybe something that can be implemented in a future version?



    For example if I want the spawner rule in the picture to lower the terrain inside the fences area, can I already do that? Also can I make terrain around a house conform to the GO ( flatten hills etc.) ?

    Thanks for all your work and a great product.
    Weblox
     
  17. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Actually I do. That's what I already use. But it's a bit difficult without being able to visualize what's happening as all I am doing is adjusting curves and then having to apply the stamp to see the effect.

    With a visualizer at least displaying the noise in image form, it makes a bit of sense. I don't know if it applies to others. Just a thought I always had. Would be even better if the effect could be displayed on the stamp preview real-time with GPU compute around! ;) ;)
     
  18. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Just a thought on this. How I kind of achieved an effect similar to roads was to use a stamp containing your roads and perform lower height operation, and then use the same stamp height as a mask to populate a coverage texture spawner with the cobblestone texture.
     
    Last edited: Feb 27, 2017
  19. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Gaia does not do this autmatically. You can however do it manually with masked stamps.
     
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  20. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Hey everyone -

    Gaia is on sale prior to the launch of Gaia 2.0. This is a massive massive release and will be a FREE upgrade to existing owners!

    If you have been sitting on the fence, or know anyone who might be interested then please share this!!
     
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  21. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    @AdamGoodrich
    Woo! I want to be a little bit upset about missing the sale but I just can't!
    Really looking forward to the release for tiling... is this a hint then that we're closer than we thought to the 2.0 release?
     
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  22. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Woah that's a pretty sweet deal. Gaia for 35 dollars!! Where were these offers when I wanted to buy it :'( But I did buy Gena when it was offered at 30 bucks for the Jam :) . For people who are reading about Gaia but haven't bought it yet, I just saw that RTP is on sale too going at 45 bucks (priced same as Megasplat) and not the regular 60 bucks. So hey, why not get both.

    RTP is compliant with Gaia and there was a tutorial in Adam's youtube channel made by another guy on it. (sorry sir I don't remember your handle)

    I should warn you, a couple of posts up, @AdamGoodrich too has mentioned he intends to roll out his terrain shader to compete with RTP. So if you're on a tight budget, I highly recommend you wait and see what he brings to the table as well before rushing to buy RTP :)

    Now I own both RTP and Megasplat which probably may be the stupidest thing I have done with regards to asset store purchases because I've spent on two terrain shaders instead of one. But I am still an amateur hobbyist switching to game development and I am having trouble with getting Megasplat Tesselation physics implemented correctly, so wanted to check out what RTP has to offer.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2017
  23. RonnyDance

    RonnyDance

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    It was me by the way ;)

    It's not wrong in any Way. I am owning RTP because it's out there pretty long and I am also using UBER a Shader of the same guy for objects / meshes. But anyway I will take a look to Megasplat and also to the Tool of Adam. You normally have to own different assets to be able to choose one for the right scenario or workflow. And in the End the asset must be easy, fast and state of the Art to become the "right" tool.

    Cheers
    Ronny
     
  24. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    Just adding my 2 cents, I think you'll be happy with MegaSplat, it has pretty much everything RTP has and more at this current point in time. RTP intends to add some of the missing bits, which is great. MegaSplat still has a few legs up in a few areas, but the one thing that stands out right now is that RTP tends to lend to more subtle tessellation (this could just be my impression from videos and uses of RTP), while MegaSplat has some possibilities with extremely exagerated displacements (so much so that it requires additional IK foot placement to really go that far with it).

    Some things I've noted between the two in the current state, RTP lacks the texture arrays that MegaSplat has to really take advantage of clustered splats for anti tiled texturing. You can still work around it a bit from what I've seen, but this is one of the things mentioned that RTP will have in the future but currently doesn't.

    I've looked at the RTP water and snow, and I gotta give the edge to MegaSplat there as well, might just be personal bias but I think it's more capable and looks a little better in MegaSplat. I haven't dug TOO deep into all the puddle features of both though, so there may be a couple aspects of RTP that I've overlooked on that front.

    They are very close in terms of what they will both ultimately provide, and so I think when assets get this good it starts to boil down to performance and as you mentioned the interface and usability. For performance we need some unbiased side by side comparisons on the same machines with the same scenes and same features, made to look as close to the same as possible so the entire comparison is as fair as possible.
    And not just one, but give both the opportunity to shine in their more optimized scenarios (let MegaSplat show off using 256 textures, even though RTP may not be able to do that right now, but prove that MegaSplat doesn't lose performance as the texture count increases).

    But I think another really important factor is adoption which comes back to the author's support outside of the proverbial box. As @AdamGoodrich tried to reach out to the RTP author and was brushed off to integrate with Gaia, on the flipside the author of MegaSplat is responsive on this subject and popped in to even push encouraging the integrations. That attitude played a big part in my final choice as well.
     
  25. Dramamine0001

    Dramamine0001

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  26. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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  27. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    About Tom declining to support gaia integration. I think this may have had something to do with the fact it's currently tightly integrated into Terrain Composer 2. To be honest I have both tools. Both have their differences, but personally I chose gaia at the end because I found the workflow easy and obviously Gaia 2.0 :)

    @AdamGoodrich I really hope the gpu compute modules will be affordable man xD haha. I've already burned through nearly 150-200 bucks on terrain generation. Will the gpu compute modules be compatible with Gena?

    @RonnyDance thanks a bunch for that tutorial man. Got the ball rolling quickly thanks to you :)

    @Astaelan1 Tessellation and the requirement for additional ik is what honestly turns me off right now. I don't want to spend another 50 bucks on bone controller to get the job done. Would much rather if some kind of mesh deformation came along with the tool. But I highly doubt that should be covered By Jason as he's already given enough information with an example script to get a sphere rolling down a mountain. But I am not too convinced. Curiously I wanted to check how RTP stacks up here.

    As for snow and puddles, I don't know about puddles but the RTP snow looks pretty good compared to megasplat for me. But it's a matter of personal preference.

    Two things I really find lacking in Megasplat right now is the presence of geometric shaders that let me blend the terrain and other meshes properly. It's not practical having to paint that on each mesh. Also terrain holes man. I need caves in my height maps. Jason brought in an alpha painting mode that is super kickass. While hackish this is to some degree how RTP handles the scenario too.

    So if you pit both together I'd say go for RTP while it's on sale. If not, right now Megasplat is all about great value for money.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2017
  28. Kmopsuy

    Kmopsuy

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    Hey everyone. Tree collider is turned on during spawning a tree but Is it possible to off it?

    I wanna spawn grass as tree and i dont need collider it only slows up spawning.
     
  29. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    Ah, I can respect that, I set myself a pretty healthy budget when I started, and I carved out a nice chunk of it for terrain and environment related assets.
    I'm in for like $45 on Gaia, $50 on MegaSplat, $10 on AltTrees, $35 on uNature, $35 on Aquas, $20 (per month) on SpeedTree Modeller, and I tossed another $10 here and there on some PBR textures and other tidbits. And still have another $60 to put down on UniStorm to really tie off the environment end of things.
    I feel ya on the cost, one reason I really spent some time to avoid it. Unfortunately, there are just some cases where it's too close to make a call between two assets. For me, once I realized I was in that position, it came down to which would be supported better across other assets (like Gaia).
    It's worth noting that already @jbooth has shown himself a standup guy who pops over here and keeps an eye on Gaia and other terrain engines. I think there is room for RTP to focus on it's own value versus someone elses and support many terrain gen engines without impunity. I guess my point is, RTP lost my money because of the integration issue in the end. It may have stood a chance with less differentiating factors if it wasn't for that and RTP may have had a better chance. That said, with 2 products neck-in-neck with each other like this, at any given time it'll boil down to which one has the latest and greatest feature. Eventually RTP will have texture arrays, right now MegaSplat already does.
    I really couldn't find anything in RTP that put it ahead of MegaSplat in some other way at this crossroad. A month from now it may shift the other direction. A lot of my information is also based on outdated and old screenshots and videos, at any given time the status of each is usually beyond what you can find for visual representation.

    Sometimes with other assets, it's not nearly as difficult to choose. Thankfully MegaSplat vs RTP was only one of two really close calls (the other was uConstruct vs Easy Build System). Pretty much all the other assets I've looked at with alternatives (Gaia included) had clear leaders in the area even if there was some decent alternatives they just didn't stack up yet to the leaders for one reason or another (I'm sure World Creator is great, but I'm not putting out $189 and while I realize there is a lesser version, it's like a lite beer, not for me).
     
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  30. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    I hear ya. Btw, before you checkout unistorm I would recommend if you can check out enviro. For 40 bucks it packs quite a punch.
     
  31. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    @evilangel89
    I recall looking at it briefly when I was looking over lighting, weather, and day/night systems... And for sake of not overlooking anything, I did look at it again by your suggestion.
    I may need to watch a few more videos before I commit to writing it off, but I see a number of things that give it potential, I'm just not willing to bank on it shaping up to what UniStorm already is for a few dollars more.
    That said, I do think it has potential. Enviro has a couple things I do like about it that are claimed, but the video doesn't do it a lot of justice and I can't bank on that without a lot more videos. So I'll have to check youtube before I write it off entirely, but right now UniStorm is still a pretty clear leader in anything I've checked. The closest contender I think was Tenkoku, I think another came in close to Tenkoku as well but I can't recall or find it at the moment.
    But, I'll keep my eye on Enviro to see if it shapes up in the future.

    fwiw, one of the big selling factors on UniStorm is seeing first hand how good night cycle lighting looks with proper moonlight. I dunno about you guys, but when I go outside at night I can still fairly well by moonlight as my eyes adjust. I'm tired of systems that make night so dark you can't even see your own feet without having to go all backwards adding gamma corrections or increase ambient lighting... silly. UniStorm shows very nice for it's nights, but when I get all my bits together I'll have to put out a little tech demo video or something.
     
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  32. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    Unfortunately not. I did this so that you don't get grass growing through trees as Unity does not recognise them in the terrain until run time (that little gem took me ages to track down!).

    The work around is just click outside of unity, wait a second of so then click back into Unity. I found a great solution to this in Gena, and will implement it in the next version of Gaia.
     
  33. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Why don't you speak to the author @Vondox over the forum or email and see if you can get a demo because it doesn't have much videos to be honest and enviro is fairly new. But everything unistorm has, this also does, and perhaps even more given that there's tighter integration with other frameworks like Lux. I was encouraging him to get a megasplat integration going as well.

    Performance is quite steady on this and it looks a lot better on linear color space. If I am right, @AdamGoodrich reached out to him to get a gaia integration done and he seemed interested at the time. Dunno what happened :)
     
  34. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    He just released a new version - we will be speaking in next few days i think. Perhaps for next few days I will do integrations instead of Gaia 2 :)
     
  35. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Sorry if this was already answered. I am not sure if this would help but take a look at Adam's tutorials on youtube on Resource Extensions. Gaia 1.5 . I used this to understand how the texturing masks were applied inside the fences area. Along the same lines, perhaps an extension could be written to lower the height with every spawn, assuming that terrain conformity would be handled outside the extension.
     
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  36. RonnyDance

    RonnyDance

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    If you need Night / Moon videos of Enviro + GAIA Terrain just write me a PM. I own GAIA and Enviro and as you said Moon Phases with real Lightning and Shadows also in the night were pretty important for me. You get those with Enviro. So if you need some screens or pehaps videos I can upload you some to show you what Enviro can do.

    So happy to see upcoming Enviro Integration in GAIA!
     
  37. evilangel89

    evilangel89

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    Yeah let me know too.
     
  38. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

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    Bloody murder!!!! Gattaca!!!! Trump!!!!

    I'm waiting on tiling to really start the terrain, lol.

    But integrations are good too.

    Certainly, if you have the time to put up some extra videos, I'd be interested in seeing some related to severe storms, a bit more about it's snow (it looked like a couple polygons added ontop of grass in the one video), and of course moon lighting.

    I am not completely sold yet, but UniStorm does remain at the front.
     
  39. henmachuca

    henmachuca

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2016
    Posts:
    105
    Hello there everyone!
    I would like to ask you guys between Gaia vs TC2 vs World Composer.
    I'm a beginner and I'm looking for a terrain generation tool for myself. I have read online about them and Gena seems the most beginner friendly... but visually it looks a bit off from TC2 and WC doesn't it? There something that makes it look more generic, more bland...

    I would love you hear what you think and if I'm the only one with this impression about the final terrain looks.

    Thank you!
     
  40. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

    Joined:
    Sep 29, 2015
    Posts:
    192
    What you'll find with Gaia, is a tool that just works. It does what's advertised on the box. And it's extensible. Adam is a very active member in the community who provides great support and has a healthy amount of patience in helping people.
    As a tool, it integrates well in terms of not influencing the workflow after the terrain tools are used. In fact, in the current version you can remove Gaia completely and there is a net zero impact, so the UI has little long term impact. It achieves it's goal, and isn't trying to do anything flashy (or crashy). This means currently there are no shaders, and if you want to add better definition to the terrain texturing, this is where you start looking at RTP or MegaSplat (see above conversations on this as well).

    I would argue there are a couple things that could be improved in the UI of the tool and the workflow with it. I've mentioned some before like the behaviour of undoing a stamp within the session. Another that I've found to be a little bit awkward is having to go into the visualizer to edit a number of the values associated to a spawner... I'd expect to find the values on the spawner and/or under the entries within the spawner, but I'm sure there are valid reasons why it's done the way it is.

    I would say if you are basing your final decision on the UI of the tools exposed by Gaia, don't. Base it on the fact that you can click one button, and have a nice terrain. Click a couple more, and stamp your own. Click a couple more, and modify the terrain by hand. Click a couple more, texture it all intelligently. Click a couple more, have grass, trees, rocks, all the way upto farms, villages, or cities placed procedurally. And when all is said and done, you can add a terrain shader and put final touches on it with the tools offered on that end. When you say bland, you're probably talking about tessellation, parrallax mapping, some ambient occlusion, PBR texturing and better blending approaches, etc... stuff that the default Unity terrains don't really do on their own with the standard terrain shader.

    There are a couple things I've seen that I wouldn't mind Gaia having over time. But there is a good chance that it would be more of a Gena feature and I'm due to pick up Gena to see what it's capable of as well as a companion to Gaia, so make sure you look over both Gaia and Gena as a set of tools that may bring about the full functionality you want, but Gaia as a macro tool is quite capable of getting you going for most terrains, the stamp and go workflow is great.

    Once again, make sure you understand the difference between Gaia and Gena, they serve different purposes with some sensible overlap, and you mentioned Gena here as well, that's more of a fine detail level companion tool that can help you when you move into the final tuning by hand but still don't want to be painting down every individual tree and rock.

    tl;dr

    Gaia is a great tool, well supported, has most of the best features you'll be after and author is keen on making sure Gaia stays in the lead with active development and a 2.0 version right around the corner promising a bunch of new goodies that have been asked for. The other terrain generators may offer the same goal, but the process of getting there makes Gaia top notch in my books.
     
  41. henmachuca

    henmachuca

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2016
    Posts:
    105
    Wow... amazing answer! Indeed having an active developper and community goes a long way!
    Thanks for the well thought response. I'll be looking into that and the 2.0 version got me really excited.

    One final question... Instead of creating a huge 1km x 1km terrain, is there a more optimal way to do it? Like having smaller one stiched together ... this way would allow for culling them? I don't know if Gaia supports it.

    What would be a good way of going about this?
     
    kurotatsu likes this.
  42. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

    Joined:
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    This is an aspect coming in Gaia 2.0, the tiled terrain support.
    Currently, it's pretty common to use 1kmx1km or 2kmx2km tiles though. In most cases these shouldn't actually be "huge" unless your scale is different from the norm... (are your characters ants?)

    To put it in a little perspective, it's often seen that humans walk a rate of about 1m/sec and average a running speed of about 3m/sec. We also, on a clear day, have vision that permits seeing well over 1km into the distance. Factors such as these tend to play into the size of each tile. However, there is something to be said about using more smaller terrain tiles and simply having more of them loaded. To this end, I intend to use a 10km x 10km full terrain, with 1km x 1km tiles. This may mean that upto 8 tiles in front of you may be streamed to render at any given time, but most likely only 2-4 depending on field of view and other factors. Streaming small chunks in the distance should be fairly quick, but I don't know that I'd go too much smaller on your terrain chunks unless your intention is to shift the scale entirely, in which case you're not really changing the resulting number of tiles used to segment your overall terrain.

    In the short term regarding stitching, this is the beauty of Gaia. If you want to start building smaller pieces of your terrain now, and then be able to use them when Gaia 2.0 comes with tiling this will be possible. Because you can turn your terrains into stamps, and then stamp your old small terrain onto your new larger tiled terrain. It's a winning workflow, like I mentioned before, stamps are a wonderful way to approach terrain gen.

    tl;dr
    You can turn a terrain into a stamp, and once tiling is supported, stamp your terrains back down, and it'll add your old terrain to the new terrain. Then for the final touches just whip out the smoothing tool and fix your edges, or continue on stamping more overlapping stamps and it'll start to work itself out if there is any particularly sharp raised edges.
     
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  43. Weblox

    Weblox

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2016
    Posts:
    277
    Thanks, I appreciate. I will look into the Tuto about the texturing mask possibility. Still it would be nice if we would see this feature in the editor somewhen in future. This would also help to layout larger Objects with the terrain. Thanks for the help.
     
    Last edited: Mar 2, 2017
  44. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2013
    Posts:
    3,780
    Thanks so much for taking the time to make such detailed replies :) The awesome Unity community really is what makes creating tools like Gaia worthwhile for me :)

    One of the reasons that Gaia looks different is that I use vanilla unity - and I don't sugar coat it with shaders that limit compatibility with other tools. Gaia is just Unity - and the strength of this approach is that you can then dial it up with whichever shader you like - RTP, MegaSplat, Distingo, Dynamic Nature - Starter.

    Gaia is also a complete suite - Gaia, GeNa, Pegasus.

    Gaia - Terraforming, texturing, and procedural content - big roller brush
    GeNa - Procedural content mega tool - fine paint brush
    Pegasus - Bring it alive and share it with amazing fly-throughs
     
  45. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2013
    Posts:
    3,780
    Hey everyone,

    I found this replacement for Unity Fog yesterday and it is truly stunning! Go check the check the forum and the product out. It is also free!

    It is called Screen Space Multiple Scattering by @OCASM !

    I also maintain a massive curated list FREE Unity assets here. If you have anything you think should be added then let me know and I will add it.

    Grab 20170303083916 w1906h1107 x103y104z-310r60.jpg
     
    Last edited: Mar 2, 2017
    drmanhattan, Mark_01, Xrystal and 6 others like this.
  46. Astaelan1

    Astaelan1

    Joined:
    Sep 29, 2015
    Posts:
    192
    No problem... I figure if I can take a little off your plate, it keeps you focused on making it for all of us.
    Of course, people love to see the author step in and confirm too :)

    Edit: Wow that added bloom/dof effect for the fog really does make a big difference.
    Making a note of that effect. Also need to try the new camera FX from unity just released.
     
    Xrystal likes this.
  47. henmachuca

    henmachuca

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2016
    Posts:
    105
    Hey there community....
    I currently have the AQUA and TENKOKU inside my Project but they are not under the GX -> Installed tab.

    Is there anything I need to do?
     
  48. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2013
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    3,780
    This means there is compile error in your project which needs to be fixed b4 you can continue. To work out what it is check the console window. Hit clear, and whats left in red is an error. What does it say ?
     
  49. henmachuca

    henmachuca

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2016
    Posts:
    105
    Nope, no red errors! Just warnings....
     
  50. Weblox

    Weblox

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2016
    Posts:
    277
    Hi again,

    I have been getting a hopefully small Issue with an error after creating the Water with Gaia Manager.

    Screen position out of view frustum (screen pos 960.000000, 0.000000, 1000.000000) (Camera rect 0 0 960 455)
    UnityEngine.Camera:Render()

    UnityStandardAssets.Water.PlanarReflection:RenderReflectionFor(Camera, Camera) (at Assets/RFPSP/Image Effects/Environment/Water/Water/Scripts/PlanarReflection.cs:200)
    UnityStandardAssets.Water.PlanarReflection:RenderHelpCameras(Camera) (at Assets/RFPSP/Image Effects/Environment/Water/Water/Scripts/PlanarReflection.cs:97)
    UnityStandardAssets.Water.PlanarReflection:WaterTileBeingRendered(Transform, Camera) (at Assets/RFPSP/Image Effects/Environment/Water/Water/Scripts/PlanarReflection.cs:114)
    UnityStandardAssets.Water.WaterTile:OnWillRenderObject() (at Assets/RFPSP/Image Effects/Environment/Water/Water/Scripts/WaterTile.cs:59)

    Is there a quick solution to get rid of the error? Thanks in advance.