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

Maybe I am not understanding your comment, but it sounds to me like you are asking me to fix the Unity character controller?

If it was something that I developed, then yeah, totally agree I should fix it, but there is no way I can be fixing what sounds like Unity bugs in the 2017 beta.

All Gaia does is instantiate the prefab in the scene for you - no more or less. It is a convenience feature that was added to save you a few clicks that you would have otherwise have had to do manually.

If you want a 1 for 1 scale then you need to change the size of your terrain. This is done in GaiaDefaults.

Why don't you grab a hill stamp, almost flatten it so that you get a gentle undulating floor, and then stamp your ocean floor down low. Gaia gives you a huge amount of control over how you apply your stamps into the scene.

 

Sorry @goat but it looks to me like you did zero research on Gaia before you bought it. Any tool, even Gaia, doesn't automatically do things magically. You need to put some time and effort into understanding how to use it. I honestly suggest going through the tutorials Adam has on youtube, that'll help you as much as it has helped the rest of us.

I would also encourage you to check out @Shawn67 's stamp packs if you are unable to create your own.

As for Unity's 2017 beta, it's only beta 1 and there's a considerable amount of bugs in there. I would honestly suggest going back to 5.5 (not even 5.6) . If you're hell bent on using timeline and that's why you got Unity 2017, why don't you come to that part later ?

This post is not to put you in a bad position and make you uncomfortable, but rather help you out with getting out of a sticky situation.

 

I

I agree with @evilangel89 I remembered the good old days when I was using 5.4 and tought it would be a good idea to upgrade to 5.6... yeah well.. kind of a mistake.. got set back like a week because of sorting out unity bugs that messed with my project.. Thank god the ragdoll issue is sorted out.... wrong post to nag about this I know just had to say it..

But roll back to 5.5 at least.. read manual it really maked life better

Peace out !

 

I have had a bunch of quite negative feedback on 5.6. Lets hope that 2017.1 is a better release when it hits.

 

Ermm.. says who

 

On a different note, Crowfall, one of the most anticipated MMO's of 2017 recently had a big reveal of their new graphical update, and I spent some time with their lead environmental artist Jon O'Neal last weekend.

I was literally gobsmacked (is that a word?) about how heavily they were using Gaia, GeNa, and Pegasus, and they are also now using our new (soon to be released) shader.

In this video, the terrain and texturing was done with Gaia 1.5, general environmental spawning was done with GeNa, the terrain shading was with our new shader (just into beta yesterday), and the character and camera movement was Pegasus. Incidentally, @chingwa, the lighting and weather is Tenkoku.

Was so wrapped to be able to help such amazing talent to do such cool stuff!

 

Haha xD I meant you need to know which buttons to click, which settings to tweak. Unless you're happy with random generation.

 

And apparently you did zero research as in reading my follow up posts where I quite clearly state the cause of the problem.

Also, Unity 2017 in in beta 5 now so what are you lecturing me for? When somebody comes for help for a product in a help forum for that product what they expect is help. Not lectures from people that haven't even read what the problem asked about was and how they resolved it and stated the cause of the problem before the advice givers such as yourself give lectures about 'myself doing zero Gaia research' when you haven't even read what the problem is. I'm not impressed.

 

Thanks, but I have resolved the input i/o problem.

As far as getting the type of terrain I want I will have to manually model it but then I figured I would but it'd been a while since I used such tools to try and create such a specific terrain so I thought I'd try again.

 

Really ? I am the guy who responded to you about the water assets you asked about and you lecture me about not helping people ? Go back on the thread and read a bit . I follow up this thread quite a lot more than you think. You can take what I said or leave it. At the end of the day you're the one stuck not me Sometimes help comes in disguise.

Good luck with your projects . FYI 5.6 is still released, and it's stable as hell right ? People have no issues with it whatsoever ^_^b

 

Hey @AdamGoodrich on that note, do you know if the Crowfall Team are using unity 5.6 and speed trees at all? Maybe I need to rollback to 5.5 in order to get the GPU instancing thing fixed with speed tree shaders?

thanks,
tom

 

Actually I am on 5.5 I am not sure if it's even working for me S: Btw, can the instancing be done only on speedtrees ? or any tree ?

 

Humbly, thinking I do tutorials on any new asset on the Unity version they were using for the tutorials they put up on youtube. With all the asset packages out there ... Gaia has kept far up to date then many, is putting it lightly.

With doing the tutorials on the version of Unity they were done on.. your not setting yourself up for a fail some how.
with that comes understanding on how to set say terrain size, how to invert say canyon stamps and using add or subtract ... many different functions you can get for a sea floor or anything you can imagine. IMHO this is just not only
for you but for all the new people starting to use Gaia now, in anticipation for the upcoming Gaia 2 , which i am sure will
have no issues, with i would guess 5.5 or 5.6 and a stable version on Unity 2017. Point being if you do make a separate project just for doing the tutorials on a single package, there can be no errors of any kind, this includes learning ( different poster )
from the last page 165 , that if errors that Unity Console throws, but has no real effect on your project , you would learn that if the errors bothered you that much, you can take Gaia competently out of the project, once you have made your landscape, so as to not have any Gaia related offensive errors to see, that again have no effect on your project.

More to the Point, the man is focusing all of his energy and time rolling out Gaia 2, and stopping to answer things for Gaia that will not be relevant in like 2 months since every one will be using Gaia 2 , just seems wasted energy and time,
meaning all the longer it will release Gaia 2. I am sure many here can name 2 or 3 deprecated assets of 50 to 150 $ dollars, this is since the release Unity 5. Sorry if some find this offensive and this is NOT meant to be pointed at only one person. I just wish people could use some common sense, and see that this will not be relevant in a few months.

Now if you do the tutorials in a clean empty project on the version the YouTube tutorials are done in and using the common setting for windows dx 11 ? and something then does not work, then for sure you would have the right to call the author on it and see what was wrong. Which would be user error, or a bug, and if it was a bug, a good developer
would thank you for pointing it out. Again if this is off topic or to rude, my apologizes and by all means have it
pulled. /rant end

 

No. I suggest to you to check for EasyRoads3D Pro or it's free version for testing EasyRoads3D Free.

 

They are using 5.5 and I think they are about to switch to 5.6.

Instancing requires shader support, and as far as I know, only the SpeedTree shader has this.

@goat Glad you got your issue sorted. One of my pet hates are assets that include Standard Assets as part of their package. They often break on other versions of Unity, and because Gaia requires a valid compile in order to be able to display the manager, I have had many support requests as a result.

 

There's one other shader I know that has instancing support. I know this because I went through the shader code and found that the leaves are instanced. The shader comes from customer tree importer. Lars betram. But he uses a custom deferred renderer.

What surprised me was I tried to use the instancing on speedtree just like your tutorial on 5.5. Didn't work for me. I'm sure I may have done something wrong. So will go back to taking a deeper look.

 

One of the users in this group,
Top tip(s) from @Shawn67 ( Backwoods Stamps ) here on the store started a page
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FKpJYQZiieOD1BJf-U24_ajfyMM17EXYeg90oR7Zntk/edit?pref=2&pli=1

And for any and all things Gaia and many more questions that could possibly be answered such as how to swap
out textures/ grass / trees, if you do not want to go looking through all the tutorials on youtube or Adams web site. There is this forum search here for just this fourm, since there is a great community here and Adam has kindly let a lot of semi off topics go on as long as they had something to do with creating great out door environments, there is a lot of wisdom in this fourm.

just use this handy search, for just this forum https://forum.unity3d.com/search/1971443/?searchform=1&t=post&o=date&c[thread]=327342

Back to morning coffee, that i believe will be all my posting for awhile.

 

Hey @AdamGoodrich We brought Gaia a while ago and played around with it quite a bit. However, we want to create a pretty big world (think 64sq km) and need tiling for this to ensure we don't sacrifice detail for performance. How long until Gaia 2.0 drops? If you want us to beta test it, we'd be happy to!

 

I dropped you a private reply.

 

Hmm... I have had it working fine... I also had that article vetted for technical correctness by the unity engineer that implemented it

 

Adam, maybe you already said, but in case I haven't find any post related about Gaia2.. will it be released as free-update for Gaia owner ?

 

FREE for existing Gaia owners. This includes multi-tile, new fractal spawner exploration mode, new stamp filter system, much better setup, much faster spawning etc etc.

However, the GPU compute capability which enables real time generation and instant feedback will be separate addons.

 

I've searched the forums and Google but unable to find this issue referenced. Unable to wait any longer for Gaia 2, I used v1.5.3 on a new install of Unity 5.6.1.

Everything works correctly, except when I click 'Create Camera Effects', I get the message:
"Could not add antialiasing. Please find import Standard Effects Package : Assets -> Import Package -> Effects." despite the package being installed.

Any advice welcome thanks.

 

Adam shared a post processing profile a while back on his site www.procedural-worlds.com.
Here you go
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/gaia-extensions/camera-and-light-preview/

Remove all image effects from the main camera, add a post processing behavior script to it and use the profile mentioned about in the script. Your problem should get resolved.

Make sure you have the post processing stack asset installed. It's free.

Importing the package alone and trying to create camera effects might help too.

 

Thanks, that link worked great.

 

Glad it helped! Cheers

 

With the update, and I have a long come project allready, if I update will everything fall apart?

 

I apologize if this has been asked already but I'm at a loss. I am in unity 5.6.1, and have read the entire gaia documentation as well as the quick start guide. I have done many Google searches to no avail as well, so I hope you guys can help. When I try random terrain generation, I get a flat terrain every time. In the session manager it shows it stamped things but it's still flat. If I manually stamp something it works no problem, so I'm confused. Also, when I try to spawn in the textures and foliage it does absolutely nothing. I am using default settings and a new scene, so I'm at a loss. I have all the proper asset packages installed as well, please help!

 

Did you go to random terrain and add the stampers?
It should whir about a bit.

It only then actually stamps it when you click run session

Hope that helps

 

Well I am flat out dumb because I overlooked the "Click Play Session" part of the quick stay manual after reading it about 15 times. That definitely was the step I was missing. I very much appreciate the help!

 

damn!

 

I read these with some trepidation thinking to myself - what have they broken with the latest Unity 5.6 - because I really want to keep my eye on the ball and get Gaia 2 out ASAP - it is that much of a step change that doing anything on Gaia 1.5 really does seem like wasted effort.

So, I am pleased that so far all of the problems so far have usually been simple. Whew!

 

No. Gaia 2 will happily work with pre-existing terrains - in fact that is the way I have largely tested it it. The idea is that it just adapts to and augments what is there.

However, some aspects will not be backwards compatible. For example, old session files may not be still usable as the new system is largely a rebuild from scratch.

 

awesoome! What have been your "target" due to this update? what have changed?

 

Adding Game objects and detail spawner:

quick tutorial on a existing project? I want to change my details, game objects..without really screwing something up..Im afraid of the clear details button

 

Lots here - http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

If you are worried, create a backup before doing it, or create a fresh project and play so that you can learn how to use it.

 

I did it . worked great =) I understand it now.. but "seeds" can I just put a random number?

 

Yep. Change to your hearts content.

The idea behind a 'Seed' is that all subsequent generations will be exactly the same for a given seed. This is called 'deterministic' generation and is very powerful when used with networked games.

 

Just had to share this. Gaia 2 generated in a minute of playing, standard 4 texture terrain, then textured by our new terrain shader. Stunning!



Whats sort of cool about this - is there this is the same 4 textures that comes with Gaia!!

 

@AdamGoodrich , do you intend to release both Gaia 2 and the terrain shader together ? Any possibilities of entering a paid beta or something of the sort for the terrain shader ? I've been using both RTP and Megasplat at one point but it seems like yours is simple and probably the perfect fit for my project.

 

The next Red Dead Redemption 2? ^_^

 

I just got Gaia, and I'm extremely impressed. Any word on when Gaia 2 is dropping? Also, someone on this page mentioned tiling in Gaia 2. Would that be similar to a portal or stream system or is that just for splitting terrain?

One more thing -- I have Stix's Grass Shader, and I'm wondering if material grass, rather than texture, will work with current Gaia or Gaia 2. Sorry if this stuff has been asked already, but I'm not reading through 8k posts.

 

OH MY GOD! Are you serious!??!?! Absolutely stunning Adam!!

 

I dont remember if I´ve asked before but was it posible to spawn the grass with DX 11 grass shader in Gaia ? (like any other detail)

Thanks!

 

By the way, my water is not showing up in game. I imported standard assets before Gaia. Water was working last night, but now it's not. If I drag the water pro prefab into the scene -- no problem. How can I fix that? I reimported water to no avail.

 

Have you added the Gaia controller?

If so the water might have gone on the main camera, and not the player camera

 

Rebooted my pc and now it works. idk maybe was something on my end. Still curious about the grass shader though.

 

Edit: Nevermind, I see you have it working again. But I'll leave these questions in just in case someone else has a similar problem that couldn't be resolved.

Is it visible in the editor?
You used the Gaia Manager option to add player, wind, water and screenshotter?

If you believe you did, check to see whether you have Player, Wind and Water objects in your hierarchy under Gaia Environment. This is where Gaia places them when you ask it to set them up.

Once you have found them and it still isn't showing, select the water object and see whether it's y position has been adjusted. It should match your sea level option for Gaia and x and z should be 0.

What did you do after it worked yesterday and before you saw it not working ? Maybe something there has adjusted something that effects it.

 

I'm not sure what I did, besides reimporting. Now I notice black squares in the trees. I reimported the speedtree directory and regenerated/applied, as instructed in the quick start, but the black squares remain. Water is working fine now though. What settings can fix the trees?

 

Hello Everybody.
I'm new to Gaia. I have heard in one of the videos, that it is possible to create your own custom stamps from unity terrains. However, I can't find anything related to that in the documentation. Neither in the 3 stamper videos from Adam. Could you guys indicate me?
I would like to convert some unity terrains that I have made into stamps, to use them as parts of my Gaia terrain.