How to stop Gaia Pro 2021 grass from floating a little above the ground when generated?

[Kaori]

As the title says, how can I stop the grass and some other objects from floating a few inches above the ground after I hit `Stamp` in `Stamper` in Gaia Pro 2021?

Here's the issue : 

[Kaori]

Is there even a way to stop this when Gaia Stamps the Terrain?

[Bryan]

As an example I will use one of the preset biomes: 
You would need to the .asset file of the biomes: 
Assets/Procedural Worlds/Gaia/Gaia Pro/Assets/Biomes/Alpine Meadow.asset 
Click on that and in the inspector you have the activations: 


Make sure that the grass spawner doesnt have the add prototypes activated (P). 
Textures I believe are usually the only ones enabled unless they have been altered. 

[Kaori]

@Bryan : So I unchecked the "P" like you said for grass and when done generating, I still have grass floating in the air? o.o;

[Kaori]

Can someone please help? I don't understand.... 😞

[Kaori]

*small bump* I already feel embarrassed for having to ask such a stupid question... 😞

[Bryan]

Can you please set the spawner operation to replace and spawn again is this still happening? 

[Bryan]

haha its all good, its always the little things that happen sometimes. 

 

[Bryan]

Also, can you please tell me if you are using Flora? 

 

[Kaori]

How do I replace?

[Kaori]

Yes, I am using Flora.

[Bryan]

To set to replace: 


This is on the grass spawner itself.

 

[Kaori]

It is already set to Replace.

[Kaori]

Yes, it still does it when I hit "Clear Spawns Now", then hit "Spawn Local"

[Kaori]

I'm also using 'Coniferous Forest'

[Kaori]

here's a screenie : 

[Kaori]

someone?.... 😞 This is so embarrassing...

[Bryan]

If you were to use the paint details through the normal Unity terrain system, does it still do this? 
 

[Bryan]

It could be something with just this resource. 
I cant tell but it looks like only this (grass) is doing it correct? 

 

[Kaori]

@Bryan The grass AND the plants. But it seems only the billboard plants.

Here's a screenie : 

[Kaori]

???

[Peter]

@Kaori This is a common issue with the terrain detail system in unity: per default the grass system does not rotate the textures / billboards to terrain slope, which results in gaps when the terrain is not 100% flat. An additional issue is that the grass textures that we use leave a small gap to the bottom of the texture:



This gap is intentionally, because multiple terrain textures are copied together by unity in an atlas texture, when the grass goes all the way to the bottom in the texture, you will start seeing those visual artifacts:



This is the bottom pixels of the other grass texture "bleeding" in the next, this is why we (and other grass textures that you can buy on the asset store) avoid to draw the texture all the way down. This issue is pretty annoying as those pixel artifacts also flicker in movement.

You can optimize this a bit to find the "sweet spot" where you make the gap as small as possible by editing the textures, but if you are using Flora that should not be required, if you start the scene note that the grass rendering changes and e.g. grass is rotated to slope now:



With Flora this issue should not be present during runtime anymore. Can you please check to see if your grass is rotated to slope during runtime & how prevalent the issue is there?

[Kaori]

No. It is not putting the grass and plants on slopes in that rotation...

[Kaori]

Someone? I just want to fix this issue and be done with such an embarrassing question...

[Peter]

If the grass is not rotated to slope, it means Flora is not running on the terrain. Can you please check if you have this component on the terrain:



This component is responsible of swapping out the unity terrain details with the Flora ones during runtime. Whether Gaia activates Flora or not is controlled here in the spawner settings:

If that checkbox is on for at least one of the terrain detail items spawned by Gaia, you should get the component on the terrain that swaps out the rendered items with the flora version during runtime. You can find more information about Flora here:
https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/written-articles/advanced/flora-detail-system-r12/