Strange issue with GeNa road Carve extention

[Ernbot]

Hey,

Just bought GeNa Pro to use in an existing project in which we already have Gaia Pro 2023 (plus easy roads, and dreamtek splines), using Unity 2022.3.4 with HDRP

When trying to use the carve extension we get some really stange happenings as below. I've installed GeNa to a blank project and the issue does not occour.

I obviusly dont want to have to remove everything from our existing project and start afresh, could there be a setting somewhere etc that might fix the issue? I've re-installed the package and said yes to the DLL thing.

Chers 

[Peter]

Hi @Ernbot,

this looks very unusual, my first guess would be that there are some extreme noise settings set up for the carve extension. Have you tried removing and adding back the Carve Extension again? (So that it resets to default settings). 
Another idea would be to test if this happens in a fresh scene within the project showing the issue (just make a new empty terrain from the scene "Create" menu to test. This would give the info if the issue is bound to the project or that specific scene / terrain only.

 

[Ernbot]

Hey - yeah, it does look like the values are gone haywire somehow - here are some more screenshots in a different scene and a fresh scene, the values seem all good in the inspector at least 

[Ernbot]

Any ideas? Would like to keep the ball rolling on this project 😀

[Peter]

Hi @Ernbot,

I had another look at this issue and tried to replicate it, but no luck so far, the carve feature behaves correctly in my replication project. I noticed that the visualization seems to be somewhat correct along the spline, but then goes wild in the shoulder / noise area besides the road - what happens if you reduce the shoulder width to 0 and deactivate noise altogether?
What is the unity target platform (WebGL? Mobile?, etc.) of the project? Do you use a custom HDRP render pipeline asset? If yes, could you swap in a default one, or the ones that come with Gaia for testing purposes? The visualization and the carve are handled in render textures on the GPU, and anything that affects that might influence the carve effect. 
Is it possible for you to upgrade to the latest Unity LTS version 2022.3.16 ? 
If the above does not bring any new insights, is it possible that you can send us the project so we can have a look? We could send you a link for file upload via DM.

[Ernbot]

Hey, might be on to something...

We just tried in a test project which already contained Gaia Pro 2021 (v3.4.1-c5) and get the same broken result.

In a fresh project with Gaia Pro 2023 it works fine.

In our main project, although we are using Gaia pro 2023 (4.0.4-c5) we previously had version v3.4.1-c5 installed and migrated the project according to the guide on the canopy forum.

Maybe its a file/setting leftover from the previous release causing the issue?

Cheers

[Peter]

11 hours ago, Ernbot said:

Hey, might be on to something...

We just tried in a test project which already contained Gaia Pro 2021 (v3.4.1-c5) and get the same broken result.

In a fresh project with Gaia Pro 2023 it works fine.

In our main project, although we are using Gaia pro 2023 (4.0.4-c5) we previously had version v3.4.1-c5 installed and migrated the project according to the guide on the canopy forum.

Maybe its a file/setting leftover from the previous release causing the issue?

Cheers

Interesting, I did make a test install of the older Gaia Pro 2021 in Unity 2022.3.4 HDRP to check, but it still seems to work for me regardless, so it must be something happening after the fact that the older Gaia version is / was in the project. 



I could not think of any leftover files that might cause this either, Gaia 2021 might change the project config a bit, but nothing that breaks the road carving comes to my mind. Could you please answer my other questions from the post before, there might be information in there that gives some more insights:
 

•  what happens if you reduce the shoulder width to 0 and deactivate noise altogether?
• What is the unity target platform (WebGL? Mobile?, etc.) of the project? 
• Do you use a custom HDRP render pipeline asset? If yes, could you swap in a default one, or the ones that come with Gaia for testing purposes?
• Is it possible for you to upgrade to the latest Unity LTS version 2022.3.16 ?  (Disregard that if you have another unity version that also shows the issue)
• If the above does not bring any new insights, is it possible that you can send us the project so we can have a look?

[Ernbot]

Hi yes sorry i forgot to answer those

1) Just the same issue

2) Currently just windows desktop

3) No nothing custom have experimented with unity default and gaia default and no difference

4) When attempting to upgrade the previously affected test project to Unity 22.3.17 I'm now stuck on this error:

Assets\Procedural Worlds\Gaia\Scripts\Utils\GaiaHDRPRuntimeUtils.cs(270,94): error CS1061: 'PhysicallyBasedSky' does not contain a definition for 'numberOfBounces' and no accessible extension method 'numberOfBounces' accepting a first argument of type 'PhysicallyBasedSky' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

---

One possible anomaly is in the project (and the test project) we have some PS5 plugins installed, one is for input and one for HDRP?

cheers  

 

[Peter]

Hi @Ernbot, regarding this issue:
 

Quote

 

4) When attempting to upgrade the previously affected test project to Unity 22.3.17 I'm now stuck on this error:

Assets\Procedural Worlds\Gaia\Scripts\Utils\GaiaHDRPRuntimeUtils.cs(270,94): error CS1061: 'PhysicallyBasedSky' does not contain a definition for 'numberOfBounces' and no accessible extension method 'numberOfBounces' accepting a first argument of type 'PhysicallyBasedSky' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

 

Please see this thread here:

https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/forums/topic/10995-exception-after-installing-gaia-pro-2023-405/#comment-19174

This is a bug in unity where this "numberOfBounces" field suddenly disappeared from one version to the other. I  wrongly assumed this was fixed, the thread I linked has a patch to work around this until there is a fix from unity.

Quote

we have some PS5 plugins installed, one is for input and one for HDRP?

The HDRP one might be a hot trail - the preview is calculated using compute and regular rendering shaders - if there is anything in that HDRP plugin that influences how render textures are being processed, this could cause the problem then. I assume this is the com.unity.render-pipelines.ps5 package? This does not seem to be publicly available, can you try to uninstall it or test in a project that does not show the issue yet what happens if you install it there?

A colleague also has pointed out that the GPU / platform would need to support compute shaders - but I assume this is the case; the GPU would need to be quite old for this to be an issue.

[Ernbot]

Hey,

We did some more testing and found the problem to be caused by using Vulkan API rendering in the player settings. Switching back to D3D solved the issue and seems reproducible in other projects. We are still using 2022.3.4 and have not tested other  editor versions.

Appreciate all the support, hope this can help someone else in future