Biome - Texture Amounts and Custom Terrain Shader Questions.

[SkullAndSmile]

Hello everyone,

Hope you're all doing well! 😊

I've been enthusiastically diving into the tutorials on Spawners and Biomes, and I'm currently working on implementing them for the new Synty Studio Biomes from Season 2 – the Alpine Mountain, Arid Desert, and Enchanted Forest. It seems like the perfect time to embark on this adventure and finally bring my Dream World to life using Gaia Pro.

I'm planning to create spawners for each terrain type, such as one for Meadow Forest, one for Arid Desert, etc., and also spawners for textures, trees, and the like. Is this the right approach, or would it be more suitable to create multiple biomes for each terrain type?

Each of these biomes comes with 6-8 textures for the terrain, and I'm curious about the correct way to layer them when aiming to spawn a unified world with these distinct areas. I believe Unity Terrain Shader supports up to 8 textures, is that correct? I'm considering using the Vegetation Engine for the vegetation shaders – should I also use their Terrain Shader, and would that be supported?

With all these biomes, each having around 8 terrain textures, how do they fit into Gaia's terrain creation process? Are there any extra steps needed to seamlessly integrate them?

I've heard about Nature Renderer and was wondering if it might be a better option for performance. Admittedly, there are still many aspects I'm not familiar with, but I'm eager to grasp how all these systems come together in the end.

If there's someone out there with more experience who could shed some light on these questions, I would greatly appreciate it! 😊

[Cliff]

You can create multiple biomes and mask them in Gaia Pro. Procedural Worlds has a video tutorial on youtube in one of their playlists about mixing biomes on the same terrain, which I believe that is what you are wanting. I will say that if you are going to be using the terrain loader and floating point fix for a large world, make sure you study those tutorials like you were studying to become a brain surgeon, because from my experience, if you don't do things right, it will cause hours if not days of troubleshooting the what's and why's of something not working or errors etc, and can promptly cause you have to start completely over on your scene.

From my own personal experience, you don't necessarily have to use all 6-8 textures of each biome to create something that looks amazing. Many of those textures won't even be noticeable, except by maybe you since you placed them and are intently looking for those textures, and could possibly be covered up almost completely by foliage and ground details. On the contrary, if you feel overly adventurous, you could take said textures into a program like, photoshop for example, or some free image editing software, and merge them to create one texture using masks in the software or noise etc.. whatever your creativity can do, and you will be able to use all of your textures and also cut down on the amount of textures used. It might take some trial and error if you've never done it before but it can be a good way to optimize a bit with the amount of textures drawn to the unity terrain. Anything over a certain amount if I remember correctly causes the terrain to be drawn twice, so on and so forth.

As far as Nature renderer, I've used it and have had mixed results with it. It does have a few more options than the standard unity terrain grass system, which is where this software will save you the most is in the grass, but also keep in mind, that instancing your grass should be standard practice at this point, and Unity is actually doing a pretty good job at it now tbh. I believe Gaia Pro 2023 just takes advantage of the unity details system for the grass and stuff too, which means they aren't really needing to use a special custom solution in their Gaia Pro 2023 which should say something at least.

It all comes down to the amount of grass you have and the draw distance and density over a viewport range. You actually don't need as much grass as most people think to make it look excellent and definitely don't need it to be maximum grass density drawn at maximum range. That will kill your performance no matter what solution you use. Really close, give yourself some good density and as the view distance goes further out start making the density less and less until it's culled. There comes a point where things like adding more grass to "make it visually better", you can't even tell a difference because the density is so high that it all just blurs together and the average human being can't tell, and I can assure you the players aren't going to be sitting there counting grass blades lol. All that does is kills performance. So my word to you on that, is try the unity terrain detail system first before you go spending tons of money on systems you might not even need, or at most will save you maybe 10 fps, which in the grand scheme of things, isn't a game breaker unless your fps is horrendously low, which at that point, you should be looking at other optimization and not just your nature rendering (think lighting "point lights in realtime, shadows "grass shadows can cause massive frame rate descreases", etc...) Also, one of the biggest killers of performance is having poorly implemented materials and having meshes that use like 10+ materials for every game object in the scene. Less materials used is ideal and will save you tons of performance.

Don't think of things like nature renderer as a tool that will just work magic and miraculously give you huge frame rate boosts without taking into account the bible of other optimization techniques. World design smart, watch your material count, make sure you instance your materials that are going to have a large amount of said game objects in the scene, use mixed lighting and bake your static objects, use light probes for better lighting visuals and lighting all around (baked or realtime, realtime if you aren't going to be using a metric crap ton of probes", instance your tree materials ( and also use your trees and foliage smart, you don't need to have every tree or plant all over the scene, play with scale and rotation as well of the same tree or plant type to save on performance and add variety), grass is limited in forested areas, so use things like ground details which are often cheaper to render than a butt load of grass where it doesn't naturally grow anyways, etc... I could go on more and more on this kind of stuff but you just have to read, and read, and read some more from a lot of different sources to find what works best for your scene (every scene is different and it's not a one size fits all kind of thing). Bu this should be a good starting point.

The procedural world guys can speak more in depth on their products. I know their stuff works, it can just be VERY tempermental at times, so be prepared to get extremely frustrated when things break or something just isn't working right, unless you are already a Gaia Pro Pro lol. I just know me and Gaia pro 2021 have a love hate relationship right now... I'm sleeping in the bed and Gaia Pro 2021 is on the couch...

Have fun and get creative!

[Cliff]

Oh, and I almost forgot, if you haven't checked out GENA Pro, check that out. I find that I often use GENA pro as well for some manual placement as it gives a TON more control and often easier control over placement of what you want, where you want it, how you want it, where as far as I've learned so far, Gaia will just spawn the stuff where the mask is, everywhere that the mask is, then you have to go manually remove stuff you don't want for placement of things like buildings or towns as I find Gaia just kinda places the buildings and towns kinda wherever and however with rotation and the such. You want your towns to be more believable to a point and more control over those towns especially. That's my 2 cents.

[Bryan]

Thanks Cliff pretty spot on 

[SkullAndSmile]

Thank you Cliff. That was a really good summery and its good checklist for me! 

A thing I learned in between my message and reading your response was that many people I talked to get a lot of performance from Nature Renderer but the important part always was "Its easy to convert to." So Its nothing I need to concern myself with now. I will try following your advice and I can still try nature renderer in the end after everything is in place. 

 

Thank you for your time and support.