The Best FREE Landscape Generator You Haven't Heard Of #blender #gamedev #3d

hey everyone welcome back to another video today I'm going to be showing you this cool program which I found and I'll tell you a little story about how I found it so if you like me and you want to create really cool looking terrain systems for you know your games maybe uh Blinder projects um you you probably have been online before and you've searched up um you know like terrain generator maybe for Blinder and you'll come across something called World machine and well weld machine costs an obser amount of money if you want if you want like a decent version of it I actually don't even know if there is a free version of it however I did some more searching cuz I was wondering if there would be a free version of a program like that and I found this one called Gaia and what Gaia is is it's a Terrain generator uh as a program you can download it uh for free although it doesn't have some of the more um higher limitations of uh the paid version however there are plenty of features which you can use uh this is not at all sponsor this is just a really cool um piece of tech which I found uh so when you open up guy you'll be presented with someone like this um and let's go ahead and just open up uh you know what let's let's do mountain to really show what this is made of so if we go ahead and uh click into the first person view here let's also drag these around as you can see it generates this like pretty basic Mountain um and at the bottom what you can see is it says graph and what it means is if we pull this up you can see that we have these nodes very much how you would find you know a visual scripting system or maybe uh a Blinder node system um and this is actually really cool cuz what you can do is we can grab this output node out of the mountain and pass it through a few features but first let's actually change a few settings on the mountain maybe we want it to uh scale make it a bit bulkier and as you can see it's going to do some rendering and voila we have a much bulkier and cool looking mountain and this is actually where it gets really cool cuz like look how detailed it is and this is before we pass through um things like erosion and not to menion erosion can just be done through this wizard here we can we can go here and we can go fast erosion go classic crazy deated anyway change you can change all these settings um I haven't really found that they do too much however this uh this phase uh phase two here is really what changes things cuz you can add things like mild erosion now let's let's uh apply our changes here and let's see what happens it adds these little pockets um and you know we can uh change this even more maybe Rivers apply changes see see what that adds and it adds these kind of like pools where you could probably add some water in and you could get some really cool looking areas like this um maybe Hawaii for these ones look really cool you get these kind of um nice valleys um but this is actually just a really cool Tool uh to have a play around with and you might be thinking well can it output a 3D model you bit your ass it can and I'll show you how to do that if we take the output node of the wizard drag it in and let's start typing to search as it says here and let's um search up for a measure node and we're just going to plug that straight in uh and the way we can bake this first of all top left you can actually change the resolution of the hyp map um I would not recommend really going anything higher than 1K nor can you actually export um anything higher than 1K with the free version uh because it it is just so um you know so powerful um then uh yeah it's not available for the free version but anyway you don't want it any higher than 1K because uh if you actually go 4K you'll get this message saying processing a nose such as erosion uh may become quite slow and requires 64 GB of RAM or more so it's yeah it's pretty unusable anyway yeah this is what it looks like at 1K resolution and I mean from a distance this looks completely um you know like pretty realistic if you ask me you know throw some textures on here and it'll look amazing so let's actually throw this into blender and we'll uh have a play around with it so if we click on our me Noe and right click it we can go Mark for export or alternatively we can click the F3 key uh but let's go click and go Mark for export um now under build here uh and that's the top right panel uh you'll see it says measure and that's exactly what we want uh and let's actually we need to select 1,24 um which means it's actually going to be really extremely small um and we actually don't need to change anything else we can quickly uh select where we want it to build to now my build for is actually fa so we're going to go ahead and start that again um yep number one yes Save saveing case it's going to do all that again awesome so as you can see it's going to export it as mesa. obj and let's actually go ahead and pull that into blender go file we can import as an obj cuz we saved as that uh let's go into our documents let's go guia let's go builds and let's import mesh obj and as you can see it Imports it now I actually like to scale this a little higher um but you don't need to uh anyway uh we're going to figure out how to clean up this MCH cuz as you can see it's looking very Jagged and that is simply because um it can't export very high however we can do a bunch of postprocessing on this using um the modifiers inside a blender to get some really cool looking results so let's go ahead and also just set uh shading to Auto smooth real quick uh yeah go smooth uh makes a little look a little bit more nice uh and let's go ahead and go add modifier um I'm actually going to keep it a flat for now cuz so we can see what the modifiers do so let's add a subdivision surface modifier and this might be get a little laggy uh but obish my computer's pretty good so I should uh be able to handle this uh so I usually find two subdivisions works pretty well uh to a point where you don't really notice it um if you're actually using this as a world you can run around in what you might want to do is uh split it up into chunks and render it that way um however I would actually just recommend you use this for background mountains or anything like that um and let's go ahead and apply this modifier awesome so now we have this um and let's just set this a small smooth shade now um and let's go ahead and um you know what I'm actually just going to show you how to do something real quick Let's uh let's go ahead and set up a quick terrain Shader for this cuz I mean it's super easy too we're just going to need a geometry node uh we're going to Output the normal into a separate yep oh I had the right one separate uh let's go Z z uh let's go color ramp boom and as you can see when we change around this col color ramp a bunch uh we actually start getting it on the uh on the sides as like as you can see um so obviously you can uh if you think about it for 2 seconds we can actually use this as a mask um so let's go ahead and do that but first let's also uh copy this exact same thing let's input position um and let's plug the color in in as well and we get the tops and the Peaks so what we can actually do is do a little bit of funny business here like this and look at that so we we're now getting the peaks of the mountain so let's plug this node straight back in and let's set up a little bit of um colors so go mix mix col no plug that into the factor um and we want to set uh one as a brown or maybe a Stony color so maybe a gray um this is not going to produce realistic results the Shader but it it gives you a good uh start point which you can add on to um and that's that's really important you can obviously swap out these for different colors and all that um all that good stuff let's also make plain for the water cuz you know what let's make an island right islands are fun are super fun uh go water do a little bit of little bit of shininess on the water we got this uh let's plug in the mix I realized this video's kind of gone from um being a tutorial for Gaia and turn it and turn it into another Shader video on my channel uh which is interesting um and as you can see if we do something like that we get this cool little effect where it looks like uh this snow is um is only forming at the tops um and actually this should be around the other way that should actually go into there there we go I finally got around the right way anyway uh this was a cool little Shader I've taught you how to do of which should told you about guia um yeah I I wouldn't recommend really um putting this into uh you know um like exporting the color data uh but you know it works as a cool Shader and uh if you do a little bit of noting uh this actually could work pretty well let me let me just quickly show off some other things that guy can do cuz it is a pretty amazing uh tool not only can you do Landscapes you can also uh do a lot of other things Rock noise this stuff this stuff is quite helpful so what this is is let's actually just quickly turn up the resolution so you know looks a bit better so what this is um is you could actually use this on a ground uh for a little bit of noise and I know you can plug in P noise but this has these like kind of PE looking things here um I mean turn off the octaves you know maybe I should have uh ho the octaves maybe that was a bad idea anyway have a play around with this tool it's really cool uh especially like this this is what I was trying to do you get really uh spaced out rocks and it looks really cool uh especially when you put it somewhere like 2K um we'll see how that looks so obviously 2K is actually four times bigger than 1K um yeah look at that use this along along a ground for a bunch of extra little details everyone just get buding in here uh this is actually after I finished editing the uh recording this video um and I actually realized that you can also do lot systems in this I got to do up to eight LS look at that and going all the way from 4 million vertices all the way down to 64 you can also change the verx count here uh so that is actually insane you can also go one unit is is equal to 1 M and 1 unit is equal to 1 km which I think is actually just insane amounts of tools for pretty much no no reason that it for it to be this good uh create walls I don't know what that means but yeah yeah look at this look at this stuff this isn't this a great way to finish off the video are you telling me you don't want this in your Blended projects look at this anyway guys I hope you enjoyed if you did don't forget to like don't forget to subscribe uh also I did did this video I did a video with Jason Wyman the other day it was an amazing an amazing experience absolutely chill guy uh we did a interview I interviewed him a bunch of game Dave Creations if you guys are interested in that link is in the description for that video anyway have a wonderful day and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Joe Rickwood

Views: 13,073

Keywords: Blender, Terrain, Unity Terrain, Game Dev, How To Make Landscape Blender, World Blender, Unity3D, Blender 3D, How To Make A Game, How To Use Blender

Id: 9wAUcM1pAww

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024