Managing single objects with Gaia

[Guidos]

Hi, I've deployed Gaia to spawn terrain, trees, particles on my world designer created tiled world. 

I've also added manually objects (such as buildings and rocks) from other asset suppliers (Daz and the Unity asset store).

As I watch the runtime I can see how Gaia is loading and unloading the tiles but of course, my manually added objects just stay loaded all the time.

So is there a way to have these single objects that are placed manually at a specific location to be managed by Gaia and loaded and unloaded along with the tile they are located within?

A simple drag of the object to under the terrain tile in the hierarchy doesn't seem to enable loading / unloading. 

Thanks

[Peter]

Hi @Guidos, the following two things should work:

Method 1: Try to add your individual object as a child of the terrain in question, Save the scene that contains the terrain



Method 2: Try to add an empty game object at the root level of the terrain scene and make sure this game object has the same transform position as the terrain. Then add your individual objects under that newly created empty game object, save the scene.



The reason why it might not have worked for you is that Gaia may change the position of the root objects in the terrain scenes at times, this has technical reasons (floating point precision / floating point fix). By adding the objects with one of the two methods above, you should be able to work around that.

[Guidos]

Hi Peter, Ive tried both and neither work for me. See attached.

I also tried adding it to the Gaia Game Object Spawn and once saved it showed up in the spawn hierarchy list but still appeared at run time when the tile wasn't loaded. 

 

[Peter]

Hi @Guidos, please note that the terrain tile is still LOADED in both of your screenshots, but not RENDERED in the scene view - There is a feature in Gaia that will automatically cull (=not render) terrains when they are not visible on the camera. Unity does  frustum culling by itself automatically, but we found if we additionally disable the terrain drawing off camera with our own method, we can save a little bit of extra performance.

I think what is going on here is that the pavillion is being loaded and unloaded with the terrain correctly, but when you investigate in scene view that parent terrain is currently not rendered in scene view due to the culling feature, and it looks like the pavillon is loaded without the terrain.

Can you please try the following: 

For the sake of the investigation, please turn off the terrain culling in the Gaia Player settings:



Then during runtime, try to move your camera / player very far away so that the parent terrain deactivates / unloads - then the pavillion should disappear completely as well and should come back if you get closer to that terrain again with your player / camera.

[Guidos]

Thank you Peter, I can now see the pavilion has disappeared. It'll take a longer test to see if it appears with the player (automated over an hour).

I'll start to move all the other objects under each tile. Thank you for your time.

[Guidos]

I've placed my character in the tile with the pavilion and observed in run time.

(I've also turned back on enable terrain culling, is that correct?)

The pavilion appears in the tile but as the character moves away and the tile becomes unrendered the pavilion stays rendered. 

[Peter]

1 hour ago, Guidos said:

The pavilion appears in the tile but as the character moves away and the tile becomes unrendered the pavilion stays rendered. 

Yes, this is correct and exactly as it should be. When the terrain stops being rendered by the terrain culling feature from Gaia, only the terrain rendering will be disabled, other objects will not be affected by this. Those will remain visible in the scene view camera.
Note that this does not mean they are being rendered on the Game View Camera: Unity performs frustum culling automatically for each camera, which means it will only render the objects in the view cone of the camera by default. But that is not visualized in the scene view, there all the stuff still remains visible, even if it is behind the game camera at the moment.
This often causes confusion because users think frustum culling is not working, please see this forum discussion for example:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/frustum-culling-by-default.48384/
 

[Guidos]

OK thanks Peter.