GAEA -- Awesome New Terrain Creator (with free version!)

hello everybody's my carrot cake from scratch did you know that Gaia was the Pro deity from Greek mythology that was basically synonymous with the earth gave birth to all the Titans very important character in Greek mythology and to carry on the history lesson the word Terra actually comes from the Roman name for Gaia well I mention this because Gaia actually has two Spelling's GA ia and GA EA and frankly they're the same thing and on top of that there is a landscape creation program called Gaia it's a unity plugin I covered it about four months back and then a couple weeks ago about a week back I got a couple of requests for why don't you cover Gaia and I said I did no no no it's brand new it's a landscape tool no no I did well I didn't actually that's that's kind of a mistake I made so my apologies this is Gaia the same guy we're talking about the same thing basically Gaia means earth and that's what we're talking about here it is a new tool for basically creating terrain from the ground up using either network of nodes or a stack of notes we'll see exactly what this means in just a moment now Gaia itself was created by a quad spinner we're here on their website of course I will make all the links available and a link down below but what you are most interested in is this download link right here and here's where I lose a couple of you it was nice talking hopefully enjoyed the history lesson Gaia is for Windows only so if you are a Linux or Mac user I don't know if this will run under whine hopefully it will run under whine and one of you can let me know in the comments down below if you get it running but this is right now a Windows product now it was just released on February the 28th so I'm about a week in a bit behind the curve next time you know when people say something to me maybe I'll pay a bit more attention but it is still recently released from early access and some of it is still actually kind of early access that we won't look at today but what we will look at today is guaranteed to be impressive so go ahead and download it's only 45 megabytes and the most important part is the community version is completely free they've actually got very good licensing structure here so this is - a bit of this right away first off they're all useful for commercial use so you can use them to make money your major limitations are on the free version you are limited to 1k basically the ultimate output from this is height maps and you're gonna have a 1k resolution limit on it you're also going to have limited access to erosion studio which frankly barely works right now so I wouldn't sweat that one too too much at the indie level you've got 99 bucks the cool thing about that 99 bucks again that is a perpetual license that is not a per year thing so you buy it and own it in that case it bumps your limit up to the 4k and you get access to the 4k directed erosion at the professional level at 200 bucks you've got scripting on top of that full access to erosion and then at Enterprise it's mostly about floating license and automated scripting and that kind of stuff so with the details out of the way let us jump in and take a look at Gaia so here is what you get when you first launch Gaia you've got options of creating a graph a layer opening an existing file Quick Start or the directed scripting is all down here again I'm not gonna really get into that but what we're gonna show you right now is creating it using a graph so you can either create a graph of nodes or a stack of nodes I'll come back and show you stack later on graph is the more powerful but definitely more difficult way of creating things and here you see we are now in Gaia and the power of it is down here you can see we've got a network of nodes a mountain node a displacement node and an erosion node and they're generating this height map that you see up here now using the middle mouse button we can pan orbit you can scroll in this way and you can hold down alt and then left mouse button to do like a track or trackball kind of rotate here you can see the end result over here so this is the final as you switch through the graphs it gets to that point in the graph so this is with just the mountain node applied this has a déplacement effect applied on top of it and then an erosion effect placed on top of that you'll see for each one of these settings you can control the settings available over here so I could change up the random seed on the erosion and we will get a new erosion amount as a result although I'm not seeing any changes or we could change base level in the down cutting and again I'm not seeing any changes let's go back here let's do over the mountain you see the effects much more pronounced there so here we're gonna change out the random seed on the mountain generator and there you see a very different mountain being generated as a result you can change the scaling you can change the edge so every tool has its own set of customs here now you'll notice over here we've got some variable values like C a B and then I was hovering and I'm getting no details or feedback speaking of feedback if you are one of the developers this is my feedback to you you need a little bit more tooltip explanations for what the heck this stuff does on top of that we also need better help integration because there is basically none so you are going to spend a lot of time stumbling around trying to figure out how to use this guy but it's not that hard now the cool thing is we got up here so we are now in a typical 3d preview we can switch over here to FPS view and then we can navigate around the view using the lost keys in your mouse and the left mouse button like you would with any first-person shooter and it will flip back here back to our normal 3d view you've also got an orthographic view and then you've got to show a 2d viewport now what this is is ultimately the height map that's being generated that is generating this so you notice here the black is level and then the white the level of whiteness is determining the amount of rise in the terrain that's a pretty standard format in almost every game engine out there is going to support height maps in some way shape or form however you can also bake this out as polygons as we will see later on now the magic of this guy is ultimately over here so this is where you put everything together I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna box everything in here and I am going to delete all of the nodes now it's not gonna update this guy which is kind of weird it doesn't actually start a new result until you start your own new graph so let's look at that next now the cool thing here is I can actually take this side view of all the different graph nodes that we've got and you can expand it out so depending on the resolution of your monitor or your workflow you can size it accordingly unfortunately I don't think you can undock which I really wish you could now what we can do here is bring in so we've got primitives just like you've got cube or poly like polygons and spheres and so on when you're working with 3d these are your primitives when you're working with your height map this is kind of your starting point so you've got things here like Perlin noise or Veroni noise we've got plates Veroni line noise file constant dunes and so on so let's start off and we will create a dune so here you see we've got a dune in the world and that is your typical sand dune again we can change out the scale of it or we can change out the random seed and get a completely different results so there we go we've got a sand dune I'm content with it so that is the starting point of our mesh now let's say we wanted to also have a tremor or fault line running through this well we can do that as well let's bring in a fault note and what you'll notice here is the fault node is a completely separate result so when I select it there is the fault it is generating just so-so you see we got a fault running right through the earth line and we select here we've got our dune but what we want is the dune and the fault to kind of be combined together somehow how are we gonna do this oh wait we can come over here we can do a combine so drop a combine node in the world we drop the output pin from the dune into the input one we drop the output pin from the fault line into the input two you'll see it goes from red to whatever color that is greenish and now you see we have a combination of the two now we can actually flip the percentage between the two values so if we want to focus more on the fault and less on the less on the doones we can do so and there is your end result we have now a giant fault line running through our dunes and we could keep doing this we could keep bringing in so if we wanted to have a mountain in the world we could bring in a mountain as well and start mixing and match them in you can also do things now like so we've got our world say we're happy with the base results we've got here we can start bringing in say filters so we've got our combined result right here let's filter we're gonna add some rocks to our world so just gonna drop that and if you drop something directly onto a node it will automatically pin to it so now we have a bunch of rocks and are rolling we could Jack that way up so we have like an earthlike so sorryi moon-like surface or we can drag it way down so we've got a little bit of rocks going on and say I don't really like the results of said rocks so then what I could do is say has come in and for example do a I could do an erosion over time so this will Road down the entire thing a bit this will take away some of the peaks in your world and there you see the end result of all of that so at this point in time we might be pretty content with our world now let's say we want to I don't know maybe we wanted to have a little bit of water in here well we also got that option up here we got a few options here we can change out the material that we're rendering with like here we can change out the lighting so we can change the point source of our light in the world we can change the brightness the ambient this etc this is to actually changing a lot of those as I'm switching it around let's actually go back to where we were though it actually looks better less light and we've got control over the water so we can say yep we want some water in our world and then what you're essentially doing is tell it what level or what height line to bring the water at so what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring it up till it slowly fills that fault line we created there you see so there's the water starting to permeate into our world and that is kind of it to be honest we're at the very basic side now you'll see there are a ton of different adjustments primitives erosions and so on that you can go ahead and work with and figuring out exactly what they all do well that's gonna take a lifetime but it's at least getting you started and I think we've kind of in this simple example kind of shown you at least some of the power of Gaia at least and now what you would generally do is pick an output node so let's say I'm gonna click the erosion here I'll right click and say mark for export then what I can do is to go ahead and build this guy the results gonna come up here so you see we've got this erosion node is being exported all of her different things about it now the key thing is we have to say export at 1024 otherwise we were going to get a watermark we pick which format we want our height maps to be in I'll stick with ping they're generally pretty small and then you pick where you want to build it and let's jump this guy in temp now I always find that this ends up being a different process than what I expect it always gets a little mad at me for some reason so maybe I'm doing it wrong but there's my build destination I'll go ahead and start my build and then it complete yeah so then it completely ignores it so if I got another piece of feedback why do you have that in there if you're just gonna ignore it when you hit the build button as anyways I'm gonna go ahead and call this guy Gaea yeah I'll call it gali YouTube and export so now what it's doing is going ahead loading up its builds forms now this is one of those areas where if you're building really complex ones you can get distributed builds for the professional version etc but I never found the build speed to be that painful and you don't do it too too often so well it just built up dunes fault combined rocks and erosion map erosion is the one I ultimately care about the most so here we go ahead and this should be it 380 note it's where's my youtube yeah YouTube well use extort ignores the filename - that's kind of annoying alright so what we ultimately get as a result here is the texture map that you would use as a hate map and you got the other versions of it so you've got for flow and so on so you've got various different height maps you can now use in your ultimate game or however you're gonna end up using this what I would imagine game is the most common thing now another cool thing that we can do here let me make sure that I don't have any of the type maps open because this actually aired out on me last time so I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna close this node out and I'm gonna skip that and I'll actually take that guy out of there so we'll remove mark for export and we're gonna add a new node in here and it's a measure node and drop that on a row so what this is ultimately gonna do is create a political mesh of our texture here so we can go ahead and let's Jack the vertex count down to like 121 you gotta go the other way alright so we want to have a lower vertex count I think you say how many ello DS you want to generate I'll get it to generate two LEDs and what this is gonna do is build me a wavefront obj static mesh file so go ahead and build this out start the build and then assuming we don't get an error this time did you ah see and I don't know what's going on here okay so I'm just gonna skip it at this point in time it's a bug I've got to assume in quad spinner based off the order that I'm going in but if I do the mesh build immediately what we do is get an obj export from it but in this case I am I'm not getting that so I don't know if I'm hooking up to the wrong note I don't know if this is user error or them but what this note ultimately should do is create an obj file that you could then load in blender or max or Maya or game engine and it is the exact mesh that is being generated here now keep in mind there normally about 50 megabytes in size except for the LOD version so do be aware of that now one final thing we're going to talk about here is coloring this guy so if we want to add some texture or color to our world we can do that actually we can do that based off all different ways you've got the color nodes here so I could just say biome drop a biome on on erosion map right here now you'll notice everything disappeared what this requires is you need to pick which one and say pin for color and then this guy should theoretically work should didn't hmm I'm not sure if I'm making an error again here or not that should let's see if I drop it to my combined pin instead input nope alright so instead of doing a biome what I'm gonna do is the Sat map bring in the Sat map node like so and what this does is basically so pin in connect there we go so now what this is using is the satellite data so it's using cut the mesh data from here for your height map and if you didn't do this part by the way so if I didn't come in here and say pin for color your Sat map will be flat it will have no geometry information so that's what you're saying you're saying use this nodes output for the color data so pin that back up and they'll go back over here and we're gonna see this at maps and what this is is a bunch of basically color textures based off various different heights for you know various different regions around the world so you know say in Peruvian mountains it might look like this where is it an air at desert the SAP Maps might look like this I can use this to quickly texture based off of height and you can do a whole bunch more like we're not going into full detail in here first stuff because again I'm stumbling over some of this as you're seeing from nodes not working and because frankly they're not perfectly documented and it gets a little bit more challenging but you do have other tools down here like for example a masking tool so I could drop a mask tool into the world like so and then we can define and paint in the mask channel and then you basically edit masks it brings up an editor and it allows you to see there's the downside to branching into unknown territory but what it allows you to do is paint off certain areas and masks that will only be used now again what you just witnessed is what I kind of wanted you to see too though I experienced that quite a bit when I went into certain areas or in my exploration of this guy so do be aware it was just released from early access so don't be surprised if you experience a crash or two but that does allow me to segue quickly into the next part the cool thing is with Gaia will load up and we'll show you the other mode now so this is create a train by the way there is a recovery so we can get back what we were just working on if we so wished but there is a create a train via there's often instead of graphs and this could be kind of thought of as easy mode so instead of building a graph of nodes you're basically building a stack of notes so this has done the same thing the last one did so it created a mountain applied on a plate a displace to it and then an erosion on top and then this one works exactly the same it's just there's no node Network what you're doing instead is building a stack so if I want to apply something on top of all of this so let's say I get rid of the mountain like just come up here and say delete and then our world will have no mountain in it and there's nothing to display so then what I can just come back here and we can select our perimeter so it's the same basic process but as you can see is so let's do Veroni plus so there we've got our base world I'm gonna apply that put that back to the top and then the display should be able to work on it so there you see now we're displacing it we can I wrote it down so we could erode more over time so it's just kind of a different method of creating the same thing it's just stacked based so this applies to this this applies to that now where you kind of fall apart is you don't have the parallelism you would have from a graph but this was also kind of a simpler way to go at the same time I should be able to go the same route we did now what I'm finding though the color options aren't here they may be hidden somewhere else but they're not shown right here which is kind of a bit of a bummer so I don't think I can apply the satellite map as an example but we could just keep building on top apply adjusters so I could do a sign on top of this guy no idea what that's gonna end up doing but we'll see and then for each one you add you do again have all the control points over it and there you see the effect of our sign let's reduce that down by a whole lot be a little bit less aggressive and it's results should be anyways so regardless of the end result you see the two different approaches to work flow with Gaia you've got the one where you can kind of come down here and do the graph that we saw the first time then we gotta come to this simplified version that used stack but has less power over all you do have a couple of controls down here but otherwise it is the same basic tool and that's kind of it that's basically gaia on a whole you're ultimately generating height maps that are gonna be used for creating train you do have that option to come in and kind of manually tweak and edit so you can push and pull it's more of a paid and premium feature and as i mentioned earlier on my performance running it was just appalling so i'm not gonna really bother showcasing it right now but i have a feeling that that is the functionality that is definitely going to improve over time it does seem to still be marked as early access the sculpting features and i'll showcase them at a later date in this channel I mostly wanted to showcase Gaia itself kind of wish I hadn't shown it with quite all the warts you saw but you know what that is also a good reflection of what to expect when dealing with software especially young and new software but it's interesting Gaia is definitely one to keep an eye on I do appreciate again there's their pricing structure I think this is quite clever there are other tools out there and I think what's gonna really threaten Gaia the most is that this functionality is more and more commonly just built in and being expanded upon by the game engine tools themselves now I know one of the things that was kind of funny is unity had a height mapping tool in there for something like eight years and they only officially actually had a developer working on it as of like last year but they are improving their height mapping tools and Unreal Engine has height mapping tools unfortunately doe doesn't it has some feel module but it is definitely one of those candidates that could really benefit from a height map generator like this and there are other height map generators out there definitely Terrigen is the granddaddy of them all should probably check that out on this channel as well at some point in the future but regardless that is Gaia a guy out with a ga EA if you're interested there is also a unity plug-in called Gaia with an AI and it's also really quite cool to be honest so check out my video for that alright so I'll let me know what you think guy ad I'm sorry I'm a bit late on this one like I said I got a little confused by the duplicate name in the duplicate space but it's definitely one to check out I think it could use a few more of these new releases with bug tips bug fixes and such but for the most part it is a very impressive program with a very impressive workflow what did you think are you using guy yourself are you gonna be checking out in the future let me know in the comments down below all right talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 87,409

Rating: 4.90625 out of 5

Keywords: Gaia, GAEA, Gamedev, Game Development, Terrain, Height Map, Game Engine, Art, Landscape, Voxel, Sculpting, Free, Review, Tutorial, QuadSpinner

Id: 21mFsshqc2s

Length: 20min 8sec (1208 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019