Trouble with texture masks

[Crowsinger]

Hello. I'm trying Gaia again, and this time I've imported a terrain map. The terrain looks good, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to make snow come a little farther down these mountains. It's on the top of these mountains, and it's on the higher encircling mountains and a higher part of the zone. But I'd like some serious snow on the sides of these foreground mountains, fading out before you reach the plains.

I've tried setting the min height for snow to 0, to -1000, and nothing is changing. I've also played with the slope, since there's a lot of slope up there. Could someone tell me what I'm missing? Thanks!

Edited July 5, 2022 by Crowsinger
added something about slope

[Bryan]

Can you please show me the inspector of the spawner settings? 
Also, are you using tod? 
 

[Crowsinger]

7 hours ago, Bryan said:

Can you please show me the inspector of the spawner settings? 
Also, are you using tod? 
 

Thanks for responding! I'm not sure what tod is, sorry. Context: I've been building this landscape with other tools, but I'm not really satisfied with the look of mountains. So I imported the terrain into Gaia as a height map and I love what Gaia did to it. But working with spawns in Gaia is very different than VS, and I'm especially having trouble with textures and getting any NatureManufacture grass to spawn at all.

I inverted one of the curves and got snow on the mountaintops—and all the way down the mountain, which I don't want—and I'm having trouble getting it off the lowland ground.

Here is the snow:

Here is the grass:

Here is the stone moss:

[Crowsinger]

Here is the current result:

[Bryan]

The main masks at play here are the height masks and slope masks. 
I recommend turning on the visualization (the eye ball) and turn them into a color that you can see. 
Then play around with the min and max height. 
The strength curves will help get things to show up. 

As far as the grass is concerned, this I am not 100 percent on. 
Are you using a spawner for the grass using Gaia or something else? 

If you are using the Gaia Spawner for the grass can you please show me that? 

 

[Crowsinger]

7 hours ago, Bryan said:

The main masks at play here are the height masks and slope masks. 
I recommend turning on the visualization (the eye ball) and turn them into a color that you can see. 
Then play around with the min and max height. 
The strength curves will help get things to show up. 

As far as the grass is concerned, this I am not 100 percent on. 
Are you using a spawner for the grass using Gaia or something else? 

If you are using the Gaia Spawner for the grass can you please show me that? 

 

I have been using the visualization, but I still get a situation in which I can get the snow level to rise halfway up a mountain, but it still covers the flatlands

As for the grass, this morning I've settled on one grass prefab to try, and turned off masks. These settings give me this lonely cluster of grass.

I'm wondering if I should stay with the VS Pro spawner if I can use that with a Gaia terrain (with GeNa to fill in the gaps). I already understand how to use that one, but these spawner windows are a mystery to me.

[Crowsinger]

I was going to try working with the texture spawner again, but I can't get rid of the trees, even if I'm in the tree spawner and have everything checked in "Clear the following" and From any source and for all terrains. Clear Spawns now doesn't do anything.

The problem could be that the spawner keeps wandering way over here away from my map. The Alpine Meadow Biome object itself is over the map, but the individual spawners are way over there. If I move the "Alpine Meadow - Trees" spawner to 0,0,0 and try Spawn Local, I get "You must have at least one terrain visible". Spawn World makes me nervous because what if I add more zones? Is it only going to spawn over the terrain scenes Gaia made for this zone, or for any additional zones I make? If I click Spawn World with nothing selected in the spawner, it removes all the trees, which is great—and the spawner jumps back off the map again and over there

A few things that are making me scratch my head while learning this.

[Bryan]

On 7/7/2022 at 10:25 AM, Crowsinger said:

I was going to try working with the texture spawner again, but I can't get rid of the trees, even if I'm in the tree spawner and have everything checked in "Clear the following" and From any source and for all terrains. Clear Spawns now doesn't do anything.

 

This I would set the spawner to remove. 
Then you can either spawn world (which will remove all the trees) or spawn local, and just use a distance mask. 

Here the only thing I would do if you are going to use VS PRO is remove it globally. 
Just make sure you turn off the Masks at the top level of the spawner (just disable them) then hit spawn world.

 

On 7/7/2022 at 5:14 AM, Crowsinger said:

I'm wondering if I should stay with the VS Pro spawner if I can use that with a Gaia terrain (with GeNa to fill in the gaps). I already understand how to use that one, but these spawner windows are a mystery to me.

 

You can use VS Pro with a Gaia Terrain correct. 

 

On 7/7/2022 at 5:14 AM, Crowsinger said:

I have been using the visualization, but I still get a situation in which I can get the snow level to rise halfway up a mountain, but it still covers the flatlands

 

You could use a slope mask and remove everything else. A slope mask and height mask might do the trick. 


Here I inverted the Slope Masks, and adjusted the height masks. 
The main color red shows the actual snow cover while the blue shows the snow drifts. 
Then the platforms are still green for the grass. 

[Crowsinger]

Thank you for your help! I'll try this again while referring to your settings there

[Bryan]

No problem! 
 

[Crowsinger]

On 7/8/2022 at 4:40 PM, Bryan said:

You could use a slope mask and remove everything else. A slope mask and height mask might do the trick. 


Here I inverted the Slope Masks, and adjusted the height masks. 
The main color red shows the actual snow cover while the blue shows the snow drifts. 
Then the platforms are still green for the grass. 

Hello. I wanted to let you know that with a bit of adjustment, the settings you have here worked for me. I'm very happy with how this turned out. (Though a bit more noise on the transition area halfway up the mountains would be good)

However, the grass spawner is befuddling me. I disabled all the spawn rules, copied the first one to a new one, and replaced it with a grass prefab from the NatureManufacture Mountain Environment asset. I did that with three different grass prefabs, and you can see that in the visualization, it looks like it's going to be all over the low ground:

When when I tried Spawn Local (and then Spawn World just to be sure), I don't see grass anywhere. Is there something I'm not understanding about grass and tree spawning?