Gaea Tutorial: Some New Features in Gaea BE 1.2.0.1 and going over the Distribution Data Node.

hello and welcome to another pwn design studio tutorial in this tutorial we're going to go ahead and go over some of the new things that are in Gaia in the new bleeding-edge version not a whole lot that I want to cover with the older notes there's a few I want to cover that just came out with the new bleeding edge version just really quick but the majority of this tutorial is going to be focused on easy distribution in Gaia so you can export maps and import them into other programs and use them for like distributing things like rocks plants so on and so forth so without further ado let's go and get started and we're going to start with one of the new primitives available and that is the multi fractal primitive you'll notice that this fractal has a lot of stuff going on so if we were to compare this to something like purlins which is still good in its own right you can see we have our regular Perlin noise here all basic settings here then we have our multifractal and you're probably thinking well this isn't necessarily all that different looking like top-down and there are some differences if you haven't noticed them already but the majority of the differences are going to come in the settings here so like with purlins we have fbm we have rigid and we have billowy those are all very basic noise patterns that come into law 3d programs multifractal however however mixes together multiple different fractals to get what we want and by default Auto octaves is checked and I recommend that keeping that checked unless you have a very specific work use or work case for it or use case essentially octaves is the detail in the noise so if the size is how large the noise is the octaves is how much detail is in the noise we went over that in a different video before but as you can see here that is like no detail then we start getting more and more detail as we increase our octaves I recommend keeping Auto octaves checked because it's going to guy is gonna do its best to automate the the amount details you need but if you want you can always uncheck it increase octaves all the way and then you've got all of your octaves there and keep it checked here though now the size again all this stuff here remains the same as everywhere else when it comes to size it's not not much to see there fractal gain is important here because this is going to show us the the difference between just purling and regular or regular purlins in fractal so as you can see here we have our base shape being created by our seed and these other variations but as we increase the fractal gain you'll notice that we start getting more and more fractal noise in our landscape while retaining that overall shape except for when it's way too high so this is where multifractal comes in handy because it'll warp your base shape and it'll also add additional details on top of that where with this Perlin noise we don't have those options we kind of just get the base shape and the noise on top of it all in one so we have a little bit more work or use cases for this because now we can go down here and can change our seed around to get a different shape overall shape of our landscape we can change some of the offset that much offset I'm still kind of figuring out exactly how to use it for now we're gonna keep that there all set just offsets everything I suppose but I'm not gonna mess with it too much so we can play with our variation which as you can see down here we have these really cool little hoodoos or whatever going on little variations in our noise and if we were to increase it we start making more variety here and there starts changing our overall base shape so this is pretty cool I'm gonna keep this at default and we have our smoothness and that's going to I assumed soon move out additional variations I guess so if we were to increase the smoothing there we go we're gonna have some variation but if we increase the smoothing you can see how that's smoothing out those variations if we were to decrease the smoothing then we get none so play with that as you will but you need to have a little bit of variation either direction I suppose for smoothing to work and you can see here smoothing is just kind of smoothing it all out making it flat and this can come in handy if you need some areas to be selective with noise so you can have a couple multiple multi fractals just copy this node and then keep your base shape with this node let's get rid of this purple copy this multifractal and then in one have everything set up how you want the other ones start playing with the variation and the smoothness and you'll get some interesting looks I imagine then we have bias bias is gonna work just like bias in any other image application probably a little bit easier to see what's going on if we have some variation but you can see here if we start changing or bias we start changing the overall high and low values of our terrain same thing with contrast it's just another basic image processing tool that's in pretty much every image processing application so play with that as you might and keep those at default as well and now we're going to look at the variations here so we have a secondary fractal which will be what's controlling I believe if I if I know but if I assume this correctly is going to be controlling maybe our overall shape but I could be wrong if you hover over these and some of them give really nice tooltips but it doesn't look like multifractal is gonna give us a tooltip so I could be wrong on that but from what it looks like is we have our noise that's on top of our base here then this variation is the variation in our base but we have two options secondary fractal and self modulation and if we select self modulation we lose the bias option but left with everything else so we can kind of just modulate this how we please until we get what we want so you're still left with very similar controls you got your smoothing and you have your contrast which will help you increase or decrease those high and low values again and then you have your offset which that's offsetting the entire landscape at that point so alright anyways I'm gonna keep it on the the secondary fractal here and we're just going to go ahead and set all these defaults I suppose till we get what they need there we go alright what I like to do with this multifractal now that we've kind of broken it down a bit this is a very cool addition to Gaia I recommend playing with it I can see it's gonna turn into one of my most favorite and well used nodes I like to combine it with slope noise I've been playing with it all day and I found that combining it with snow slope noise gives us really cool rocky outcrop B features so it looks like it's like the side of a mountain face or you're down here looking up mountains it looks really big and large and in charge so we're gonna use it with the slope noise but I also what I haven't done is I haven't tried playing with stratified so let's see what it looks like a stratified actually doesn't look half we have these cool cliff faces down here about right in this area right here and this overall stratified shape I think I like this quite a bit now what we're gonna do next is we're gonna throw in one more node that and I want to talk about all these nodes eventually with you guys but I'm going to talk about one more node and it's the warp node and this is kind of like the new younger brother to the displace node which I used all the time I mean I think I use it in pretty much every tutorial and what the warp noise node does is again it kind of just displaces the landscape that you are you make that you're creating however instead of just displacing it in any which direction up or down or whether it's just a simple displacement or a rugged displacement this actually adds warping to your landscape so you can see right here in this area right here you've got some warping going on as well as up here and back here and what this does is it makes it look really at least with these current default settings that makes it look like it's lava rock and it's really really cool and then again some very basic simple settings here that are common in most notes so we're gonna skip over those size strengths yeah yeah then we have Z scale Z scale and I'm not entirely sure exactly how to describe it but what it's doing from what I can tell is that it might be warping more on that axis but I'm not not too sure on that one actually I got a look at some documentation for it if it exists makes it looks like it might be making these little Peaks but but I'm not entirely sure it's kind of like squashing it - all down making Peaks so we're just gonna kind of add a little bit there just to give it some randomness and then we also have our noise variations so we have a purlin fbm and then all the Voronoi options that we have and if we were to look at our Voronoi node real quick is it this one yeah so we have all of our Voronoi options here they don't have the function but we have the form so we have all the forms of Voronoi in here at least some of them I didn't quite look see if it was all of them but we have some of them in there and what that's gonna do is it's gonna change the the noise patterns of the warping to be either per lane or Voronoi depending on which ever you choose and those are gonna give you a different look so I just recommend playing with them I don't want to explain them all to you because a lot of this stuff is visual so yes have to understand that Voronoi is like cellular based and line based patterns and then purlins more of your natural landscape patterns then we got the plot complexity which is kind of self-explanatory if we were to decrease the complexity we don't get as much complexity in our warping and our noise type so I'm just gonna leave that at default and then we have our roughness and again if we decrease the roughness this is probably all to do with our noise type we have less rough noise and if we increase it we increase some roughness in our noise in our warping ways you can normalize it which is pretty cool so we can get all the values out that's actually quite nice it's built into the nodes you don't have to worry about another node and then we have our edge behavior we have mirror or edge and I imagine this is just gonna be dependent on your your needs but if you look at the edges over here if we do mirror it's gonna mirror whatever it is that's over here I suppose and then if we just do regular edge it's just gonna make an edge like it gets cut off so it's pretty nice pretty simple then they have our seed of course and seed is just everything else that see it is and it's just randomizes your overall values so what the next thing we have is iterations and again iterations how many times it gets these settings get applied over and over again how many times they iterate so obviously that's too high and that's probably too high and I imagine you want to really control this really well if you're gonna use any iterations but for now I'm just gonna use none we have our mode we have vector field bitmap and vector field integral defaults to vector field I couldn't tell you what these modes do right now I have to read or ask and see if I can get some description on them but I'm just gonna leave the vector field there by default I'm also gonna change the seed of our multifractal real quick there we go there's just a few things after we applied the warping that I didn't quite like all right so one more new node in the latest bleeding-edge version there's a lot of stuff that's changed in the tool box and what I really like is this surface right here so what surface does is it adds tiny minor micro amounts of small noise and detail to your landscape to make it look more realistic so if we were to add that it's really hard to tell but if you look like right in these areas you'll see it just adds a tiny bit of sharpness but we have some really cool options here and again a lot of them are self-explanatory so we don't have to dive too much into those but if we were to move really close up to our surface maybe down here we can see the before and after let's change this the rocky sometimes they have to click off and click on a few times for it to go through so we have this flat looking area right here put rocky on now we're introducing more detail let's go ahead and increase the resolution to 1k real quick and if we go back to regular warp and then surface you can see we're adding all these small amounts of noise and detail it makes it look a lot more hard less less soft more hard and then with rocky we only have a strength option and that's because all we need to do is increase the strength to increase the amount of detail we're adding to our landscape overall it needs to have something to play with though so these flat areas where there's no information to play with it's not going to add anything so we're just gonna get nothing there the roughness option is one that I've liked playing with the most when it comes to making a hard surface and I also like stacking it so I noticed that I get really great results when I stuck it so if we keep the straight that's 60 but we turn the coverage up you can really kind of see it change in the 2d version the 2d field right there when we increase the coverage you notice that overall some of the detail gets lost at higher values if you were to decrease it more detail comes in but then it starts looking a little bit more Pocky so I like keeping the coverage a little bit higher I think the default value of 33 is actually pretty decent then we just have the density which just increases how much of this roughness is covering our surface so I'm not going to use that much on the density and I'm gonna increase the strength just a bit more and I think I will decrease the coverage just a bit more there we go okay maybe the density bit Wow these values are super strict okay so anyways without further ado let's let's let's move on so anyways those are except for the slope noise these three the multifractal warp and the surface are probably my most favorite so far surface I like using quite a bit especially stacking it after eroding and whatnot and being selective with it and speaking of erosion let's go ahead and just we're gonna do a simple erosion for this video because I don't want to spend too much time talking about how to build out a landscape because I already have videos that do that plus I plan on making more in the future I want to kind of just get to the distribution options which is an older node that's been around for a while and I've been wanting to make a video on it I just have been able to get around to it too now so now that we have it eroded you can kind of see how that surface option node whatever surface node is kind of affecting our landscape so with surface and then when you wrote it adds a little bit more detail here and there makes things look a little bit more sharp and crisp and really nice okay so we just have these really cool like rock siding here I'm gonna change the erosion a bit so we select the processing area to be the precipitation amount the reason why is because we're gonna get these softer areas like these Tallis's and whatnot that are gonna add a little bit more opportunity for us to use the deposits to use them as a mask for our distribution alright so let's go ahead and add in our data here so the data will be distribution and all this does it's very underwhelming if you're wanting to use it for something else so you can use it for a whole bunch of things like a mask for adding in like specs to like a rock surface or something if you're a texturing inside of Gaia however in this case all we're doing is we're adding it to our erosion and actually I did that wrong we want to add it to our deposits so we want to use the mask from our erosion and our deposits to the distribution that whoops I keep doing that that way we only get the distribution in mostly our deposit areas from our erosion so you can think of these little white dots as a tiny little instance inside of your 3d application so right here that could be a rock that could be a rock that could be a plant it just really depends it's all gonna be if you use this specific distribution map everything here will be a rock but you can make multiple distributions for different things so you can maybe rename this to rock this strut and then you can make another one attach that to something like maybe the flow and this is just very simple you can use more selective options like the select the the slope selection or even the height selector whichever and then you can name this one plant distro and that way you know that this is your gonna be your rock map this will be your plant map and you can use all of these to kind of just distribute plants in your environment so we can make it look more realistic if we were to be more selective with it but let's just use these two just for display purposes so anyways the distro data node has an occurrence density and a seed so the occurrence is how often these occur so if we increase this they will occur all over the place more often and if we were to decrease it they would occur less I suppose they don't mistake that for density because you can have very high density and that might take a minute to build which will increase the density in all these major areas so the occurrence will be hey we're going to peer here but we're also going to appear here in the nether area so if we were to be more cautious with it we can reduce it down to 20% and that way they mostly appear in our deposit mask rather than everywhere else and then if you need more you can increase the density quite a bit in this case it's always nice to have a little bit of plant here and there or rock here and there without too much pocketing going on and then in this one we'll just keep the regular defaults because we don't want to spend too much time on it so because all of this is just for visualizing things we might tone down the occurrence I guess let's see that might be good so I want the majority of the plants to be in the flow lines just so I can show you what it looks like all right we're not gonna worry about texturing the landscape either we're just gonna mark this for export mark this for export mark this for export there we go and it's really nice that you can build out these really cool detailed landscapes and spend like no time doing it it's it's really awesome I just really really love Gaia it's turning out to be really good and I haven't been so excited for 3d landscape application a very long time so that's saying something okay so at least sense geoglyphs geoglyph sparked an entirely new refigure ation inside of me for world machine and I liked world machine it was awesome I love it still but man it I needed something different and this is exactly what I needed all right so I recently got octane twenty twenty point one so I'm really hoping that it will work with cinema 40 or 20 it should because I mean it's been developed for our 20 already but I guess we'll see how it goes I'm gonna go ahead and build this out and then I will be right back with Saima 42 set this up okay so let's go ahead and quickly set up our scene the way we normally do so we're gonna use a thousandaire and the width and height segments we're gonna throw in a displacer we're gonna drop through this place or under the plane as a child and then we're gonna go to shading we're gonna turn off the tiling options under mapping so we don't get those annoying edges and we're just gonna go and find our stuff here sometimes I don't know what it is but I have to go in because I have my outputs here I wonder if I can just drag and drop I guess I don't know hope so yeah all right cool sometimes I don't know what it is but it won't cinema 4d won't show the build items inside of a folder and I know it's a cinema 4d problem because they're obviously here so it's not a guy problem but it's super annoying all right so let's put that down for the time being and let's increase our object size here so we're given 1.5 reason being is because it's a very small 4 meter by 4 meter landscape and that is not very big so we don't need a whole lot of displacement going on there all right so that that looks about right okay so we're gonna right-click our plane go to current state to object and that will make our plane a 3d object which we can see here so that'll make it so we can distribute stuff across it so what we're gonna use for distribution though is going to be octane scatter and what we're gonna do first is we're gonna change the distribution the surface and then we're going to drop our plane down under surface and then we're gonna reduce the normal line down to like point zero one zero two or something the reason why I don't want to go all the way down because I want there to be some variation in their alignment so that they aren't poking straight up and down all the time they're kind of off a little bit off to the side but not much all right so the next thing we're going to do is we're gonna throw on a shader so we gotta use the drop down menu and this is for octane but this should be the same for any other distribution program that you're using or any other app that you're using it's masks work the exact same way as anything else but in octane all we want to do is use an image texture let's go inside the image texture and let's load up our it's not going to be there because it's bugging out we want to load up first our rock distro I think would be a good one to start with and what we're gonna throw in is we're just gonna use let's see here I'm gonna use a forester there is why I'm using our 20s because I miss Forester and I don't have the updated version for it yet for our 21 so we're just gonna have to stick with that okay the rock parameters we're going to randomize our rock we're gonna apply a minute material as well we're just gonna find one that looks pretty decent no it looks ugly right now but that's that'll change okay I think that will do and we're just gonna copy this rock a few times and we're just gonna randomize it apply a different material to we're just gonna use a different mixture of materials on them and call it good well that one we already have two of alright and then we're gonna drop them all under octane scatter um as children there we go and let's let's move on that all the way to so let's over here we've got to change the size of them are also gonna be ridiculous looking so to do that we're going to go into the rock properties and we're going to reduce the rock size so actually let's zoom out here a little bit let's bring these back in a little bit so we got a rock for we're just want to reduce the rock size to whatever it is that we need so then super small so if we go to point zero one that's how big our rock is which is probably too big so we're gonna go to point zero zero one maybe not that small zero zero five and that will do alright then we're just gonna copy that and we're just gonna apply it to the other rocks we want to change the base size because if we want to get really creative which I might spend some time doing maybe not it really depends on how I feel then we want to make sure that we have some different sizes and variation going on but we're not gonna worry about it alright so we have our image texture loaded with our distribution that we made and what we need to do for it to work now is we need to increase the minimum here by at least point zero one before it'll work and depending on our values here we might need to yeah there we go now we can see they've changed from that green color to this black line as you can see they're these little black lines and now they're just all over where our distribution was so they're here in the deposits where I want them to be because that's where the rocks gonna go as it breaks down over time and into the erosion and whatnot and they're also we could also make another district district octane scanner to get them in this flat area over here but I'm not gonna worry too much about that alright so we got our material on our rocks and we got I'm just distributed across everything using masks being selective with it a bit so let's this is actually looking really cool I should have just stuck more time into making a texture for it anyways let's go ahead and add a Sun so we can see what we're doing let's rotate it around so we got some interesting shadows maybe something like that and then let's render it up yeah all right so the rocks might still be a bit too big and they're being scattered everywhere this is where you want to be more selective and everything so you want to scatter them maybe not at high areas like this but lower areas yeah that that looks totally fun so that's where they're being scattered to as you can see it right there so they're all being deposited exactly where we said they would be inside a Gaia so if we were to go back and look at our rock distro they're piling up right here around here and up there and in cinema 4d they're piling all over the place where we told them to super nice so that makes distributing things a little bit easier in in your 3d application outside of Gaia but at least guy gives you the tool which is awesome so let's go ahead and make one more octane scatter and we're just gonna throw in a plant so we're just gonna do a multi floor I suppose and let's do what is the library right there okay let's just throw in I like this hairy bro so we're just gonna copy that a few times we actually have to check an option here to randomize the seed a bit so let's select that keep clicking on that to randomize the seed and just keep clicking it that's all you do we don't want to change the materials or anything we just want to change the overall model so all right let's go ahead and load that under and we're nope not that there we go okay I'm just gonna do the same thing here we're just gonna take our plane drop it in there change the surface and we're gonna drop in yin lady crazy okay first of all we need to change the size okay to do that since it's being really slow bugging out on me I pause it I have new graphics cards coming in 2080 or 2070 Super's I'm super excited because I love my Titan Z's but they are aged there beastly rendering machines but playing games and autumn is kind of rough sometimes and they're starting to get there with octane as well so I'm getting pretty excited about that I've changed a multiflora size let's hide these for the time being and drag that out so we can see what's going on all right dude yeah okay so we got to keep changing the size in here freaking out over here there we go alright now we'll be able to tell the size a little bit easier maybe right there will do so we'll just use that same size across the little same thing we do with the wrong so yeah 20 70 supers the reason why I got those instead something higher like a 20 atti is because I can get two of them for the same price as 120 atti and I can also get better performance out of them using the env link option as well granted the 20 atti has more vram up front but I'm I don't know how env link works with octane just yet but it's alright because right now I only have six gigs of vram and I'll be up in that to eight as well as getting better performance so overall it's a good investment I didn't spend a whole lot of money I'm quite happy so I've been saving up forever for those as well so I mean there's there's that alright so we're gonna take this plant distro I'm just gonna drop it right into actually know what just make sure that it will work properly I'm going to throw in the image texture here then we're gonna drop it in dang it there we go all right nope and we'll call that good and again we're just gonna increase this to 0.1 and let's increase the amount we have here so I wait rocks did we throw in there we threw in two hundred thousand will do that with plants too and then we're just gonna change the normal or line down a little bit maybe there that'll probably do it then let's see what we've got going on getting a little bit slow getting a little frustrated alright cool as you can see here if we were to zoom out where we have the rocks being distributed on our deposits we now have the plants being distributed among our flow lines like that so that is really nice and simple of course this isn't natural one you'll have you'll want to do other things to distribute things along and make things look nice and I probably wouldn't use the erosion maps that are created necessarily but you can you get the point now so anyways that is the distribution node inside of Gaia very powerful very fun to use you can use it for all sorts of things this is how I use it typically when I'm when I actually do use it I tend to overlook a lot of the notes that I really like because I'm too much focusing too much on using new ones because I want to learn everything so but this one is definitely one that I have not overlooked very often because as you can see here how powerful it can be driving your selection so you can be more selective of your stuff so anyways I hope this was informative for you and I hope you like it and I would like to see you chime in on the live stream that will happen either tomorrow or Sunday I tend to do it around maybe 4 5 or 6 p.m. MST but I will start a live stream we're gonna go over some of the more new features in guy in the latest version and we're actually gonna try to hit off a couple requests that I got so I will see you guys possibly tomorrow or Sunday most likely tomorrow though alright bye

Channel: Dylan

Views: 712

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Gaea, Bleeding Edge, Terrain creation, Landscapes, 3D Landscapes, New Nodes, Distribution, Node, Octane, Scatter, Cinema 4D, Quadspinner, Dylan, Yarbrough, PWN Design Studio, Tutorial

Id: -M-kzbfCncU

Length: 38min 17sec (2297 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020