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

New fractal based stamping in Gaia 2.0

 

Yep

 

With Gaia 2.0 comming out will i need to purchase an asset likw world streamer or will gaia handle that for big worlds?

 

The answer of Adam:

So if you want "real" streaming you should consider World Streamer. The answer was posted 3-4 sites before

 

I had someone recently go off on a rant because I said I would not support scene streaming and zero point relocation.

I would love to but the reality is while they may sound simple on paper, the devil is in the detail and I have no idea what it would take to build.

I suspect these are not trivial problems to solve, and so I am recommending the people use the assets that do solve them.

 

I got world-streamer the same day I got Gaia because it was said so many times that Gaia will not do it. I can't be the only one that saw that

 

It is called wishful thinking.

 

I hope Gaia 2 will carry more FREE Real Rocks, Grasses , Tress and New tools.

 

I am sure you do

 

To be truthful I am more than content with what Gaia has already given in 1.0 . SpeedTrees are anyway expensive, but the grasses man, those grasses from turboscalpeur . Good stuff and for that price tag. It's the best.

 

Other kind developers have allowed Adam to use these models to get you started. If you want more trees, buy them yourself. Give back to the nice folks who gave you a few free ones.

 

@AdamGoodrich I consider buying Gaia and would like to ask if there will be more information about the new shader before the price will increase again? I also consider buying MegaSplat at the moment and wonder if I really need it as you are shipping your own shader anyways. Some important featues of MegaSplat to me are tessellation, puddle painting and snow. I already saw that your shader will provide us with procedural snow. Can you tell us more about other features?

I also wanted to thank you for providing us with this great asset as I am following the development for a very long time now. It's come a long way and is still improving. I also really appreciate the time you put in the asset and community support.

Looking forward to Gaia 2.0

 

I don't think the shader is going to be part of Gaia. It is an asset that he is developing with another asset developer. Pretty sure it is being developed as an entirely different asset. So Gaia would be a totally separate purchase.

Adam, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I got the same impression as well, initially I thought he was talking about it as part of Gaia but the last few posts about it seem to point to a separate asset.

 

I have bought all of your assets and never have I been able to achieve the clarity I see in those pictures. Seriously, how are your assets so crisp and clear while mine look fuzzy and pixelated?

 

Yep - the new shader will be a separate asset. I have shown it off a few times here as this is where I primarily communicate and because terrain shaders and Gaia tend to go together

My position on Gaia has always been that it should work with standard unity, rather than replace it, and as such it is unlikely that Gaia will ever ship with terrain shaders as this would break this compatibility focus.

The advantage of this approach is that Gaia never forces you to make a choice not to use your favorite shader or other environmental add-on. If it works with Unity terrain then it works with Gaia.

Last and not least. Its a collaboration between @NatureManufacture and I and has been a long time in the making. We have bought our collective expertise into its creation and think it will add significant value to anyone who uses it.

The reality is that much as it has been crafted with love, this is also our primary business and we need to get paid for our work.

 

I do wonder if some times people forget that Gaia is just a software tool that creates and populates scenes.

One of the things I tried to do with Gaia was wow people with a great experience out of the box, and I will be forever grateful to the following amazing and generous authors who agreed to share samples of their beautiful work!

The fabulous textures come from gametextures.com
The beautiful grasses are from Turboscalpeur
The gorgeous trees are from SpeedTree
The awesome rocks are from Motuproprio
The amazing buildings and props are custom made pieces from 3DForge Village Exteriors Kit

This has worked amazingly well for everyone, and if you know of any other authors would also be interested in including samples of their work and have me set it up as part of Gaia, then please reach out and ask them to approach me

 

Thanks for clarifying that the shader will be a new product besides Gaia, I should've read the recent messages more carefully.

I am looking forward to the shader and hope to see more of these awesome screenshots soon - Keep up the good work!
I'd love to get Gaia, Gena and your new shader as an Environment Tool Package though. Any possibility that there is a little discount if you purchase all 3 assets in the future?

Thanks.

 

The shader is by a different asset developer. Why not support them and buy all three separately?

 

@Teila I'd love to support them once I am able to do so - Right now I have to check what's possible with my little indie budget to achieve my game prototype. There is no question that Gaia is worth more than the current price anyways and I certainly don't want to get a discount so it's not affordable for Adam. We just consider buying all three tools and wanted to check if there might be any discount offer in the near future, once the shader is released. So it's just a matter of budget right now as we have to outsource most of our art.

 

Hello @kiknchikn, first of all you can find most of the important tips on my Forum when using my Grass Assets.

Going now to make a new Reply, with some more explanations to help in it as well.

 

Yep, we all have to watch our budgets. My advice is to buy one at a time when you can afford it. Bundles are probably not easy to do on the asset store and in fact, I have never seen one not sponsored by Unity and those are rare.

All of us have to do that..one thing at a time, prioritize, etc.

 

there is much you can do with the Gaia default package and the awesome free (included) samples mentioned above

 

Good. really good. Most of Gaia images preset forest, jungle and desert. what about frozen terrain, like Iceland ?

 

i have not made a frozen terrain yet, so can't help you there
2 options i can think of :
- buy an ice/snow shader on the assetstore .. there is many
- try to be creative and experiment

 

This is simply a matter of putting in assets that have the appropriate colours / textures. Gaia will happily use them.

 

For anyone interested there's a massive 30% off 3d models and the Village Interiors kit from 3DForge (@S4G4N) is there at 45$ ( 15$ less ). You won't find a better interiors kit that goes with his exteriors kit. I bought both kits on sale ( one today and the other before ) and the value these assets provide is remarkable.

 

There is also a very cool integration with Gaia in this - a whole bunch of villages etc.

 

Is there going to be an easier way to add MegaSplat to GAIA in next update like Suimono can be added by pressing a button?

Cause right now adding MegaSplat is PITA. I just spent like an hour trying to fix issues after messing up a terrain (somehow, no idea what happened, it just vanished) having added MegaSplat "successfully" before. I had to scrap the whole thing and start with a fresh terrain to get it all working again.

Spending more time doing all that than designing a level..

 

I am talking to the author @jbooth and the intention is to do an integration with Gaia.

 

Please, make it happen. I was able to make it work somehow thanks to tutorial on GAIA site, but changing things here and there ends up breaking the whole thing, rendering whole GAIA terrain useless, forcing me to delete and start all over again (I can't tell what is going wrong, it's annoying). The whole process of assigning textures and then their ID's is just a waste of time as well, it needs to be streamlined.

Thanks. Until the integration, I'll just use simple GAIA terrain avoiding MegaSplat for now.

 

Can someone please tell me what this grass collider object is when I spawn my trees onto the map using the default spawners:





It seems to be adding duplicate capsule colliders to each of my speed trees? I already have a script in place to add capsule colliders to each of my trees (so they can be harvested) and this works great. I also have "Enable Tree Colliders" uncheck/disabled on my terrain.

Can I, or do I need to, remove the capsule colliders put on the _GaiaCollider_Grass object? If so how do I do it?

 

I am assuming what's at play here is to prevent either grass or tree spawning on top of each other. Or even to allow placing objects to conform to the terrain. @AdamGoodrich would be better suited to answer this for you.

 

They are specially labeled so that they are ignored by grass spawners, but paid attention to by other spawners.

If you leave them then they will be disabled at runtime. Alternatively, you can delete any time you want.

The problem I encountered is that tree colliders are not active in editor mode, and I needed a way to stop trees and houses and rocks etc spawning through trees.

I found a far better and much faster way to do this in Gena, and will port that across for Gaia 2.

 

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Qna...user:kent1337:playlist:6IjDl5eRczFdgZkKYXhuHZ

Should make this the official Gaia song

 

Thank you @turboscalpeur. You simply have the best grass available. Hands down. Hopefully you won't mind sharing some of your secrets. Would Beautify help? I think I am getting closer. Soory Adam for hijacking the thread for a moment.

 

If you need any helps, don't hesitate to pm me.

Beautiful Screen btw

 

Again some really nice looking environments cretaed with Gaia and turboscalpeur's grass. The grass looks really nice in still and close pictures/views. But, is the any way or shader to make the grass look good when moving the camera and on far distance?

 

One of the biggest issues I have with the asset store is that it can be misleading. When I bought Gaia, I thought I was getting everything I saw in your videos. Now one could say it was my fault for assuming they were included, but on the other hand developers should always include what assets they used when they advertise their product and if it's included or not. Just so the buyer knows completely what they are getting into. But like I said, it goes both ways..(giggity). I'm still happy with Gaia regardless.

 

Is it possible to manually place a point of interest? I want to deliberately place several of the points of interest that come with Gaia on my terrain in specific locations. Any thoughts here would be much appreciated.

 

How many tiles max would be possible ?
Will you have a feature to Hide/Show tiles to improve performance when using Gaia ? Or an option to lock a tile to say it is the only tile modifiable, but it will show neightboor tiles and painting or sculpting will affect neightbor tiles edges.
I think this ability to toggle tiles visibility would be usefull to rise performance when working on a particular tile.

 

As an asset store user, I always do my own research. Adam has often given us lists of what he has used in his scenes and has been very open about what is and isn't included. My suggestion is the next time you buy something, go to the forum, read through as many as you can, and ask questions about what is included.

I know it can be difficult. I had to toss a few of my first packages because I found out that without the fancy un-included shaders, the models did not look very nice at all.

Since Adam makes a lot of sample scenes and the asset store changes a lot, folks should ask if they don't know what is or is not included. If you read the description on the asset store, it describes a tool for making terrain, texturing, and placing objects, including trees. It does not say that the houses and grass and other objects are included. He does though, include some sample objects for you to use, which is very nice of him.

 

I am genuinely confused - sounds like you think you have been mislead?

There is just one video on the Gaia page on the asset store and it was created with the assets that were delivered with Gaia. What you are seeing is exactly what you get.

The video shows what Gaia does and how it does it. Additionally, the description says what is included in the product and what it can do. It states clearly that samples have been provided, and not the entire kits.

What was it that made you think you were getting something else ?

Gena can to this very precisely. In Gaia its less precise as its designed to do large areas. You can however make your spawner smaller by changing its range. Take a look at the tutorial here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/spawner-overview/

Its such a hard question to answer. Gaia has no hard limits - the limits are your development system's memory.

Why so hard - Unity terrain is not particularly efficient. The tiles themselves have a heightmap. Then every texture you apply has a splat map. Then every grass has a density map. Then there are all your trees and game objects. So - the denser you get the more memory you consume. So whatever the memory load is per tile, multiply that by the number of tiles.

My development system is in the middle of developing, and its not done yet, but when it is I will run up some sample numbers. So far have had no issues running up highly detailed environments of 20k x 20k, but have not even touched the surface of what it can do yet. I think that 50k x 50k should be achievable on my 16gb machine, but that's not a promise or tested.

To get larger environments, just run a series of these up one at a time. I have some ideas on how to joint disparate environments together seamlessly, but again not tested and not proven, so I wont promise this. In this scenario clever level design is what will keep your big big worlds all working together.

The next part of the puzzle is runtime memory and resource management. That's where tools like world steamer come in. As previously commented, I don't know how hard this is to support, so the solution I am recommending is World Streamer, or perhaps Sectr if that is your preference.

Unity inherently gives this to you. Not sure why I would re-invent it. Will consider some sort of locking system as well.

 

I'm curious about that in terms of the player moving too far from the origin. I doubt I'd ever even attempt doing an environment anywhere close to that large, but would you start running into floating point precision issues? I have a space game where things start to kind of wig out beyond 5k from the origin. So I implemented a simple "floating point origin" system that shifts the entire world back to the origin as needed. Even for my simple use case, there are some pros and cons to that.

With a huge terrain filled with stuff, I would think trying to move things around could be problematic for performance reasons, plus I'm not sure it'd work right with anything marked as static.

Just curious if you've given that subject any thought. I don't have a particular need for mega-huge environments, but it's interesting to know what's possible. (it also makes me shudder at the thought of filling such a big environment with gameplay, but that's another subject)

 

Gametextures.com currently have an amazing ice pbr texture for ice or free. Worth checking out

 

This is why you need World Streamer. It fixes that problem.

 

Gaia 2 has been an epic effort already, and I am just focusing on getting it out the door. I may address zero point after I have had some time to breath and enjoy a few weekends with my family again. In the mean time there is World Streamer.

Am with you on making huge worlds and I have made this comment many times. Imho, unless they are matched with interesting game play, which requires a significant amount of skill to create, then they are just hugely and infinitely boring.

 

thanks for the tip

 

My favorite place to get textures.

 

Just crazy how you turn your Scenes @sarum and how you are using the Post FXs, I really curious about your tweaks^^ ! if you don't mind...