Integrate Nature shader/renderer to work with Gaia Pro's asset packs

[Ruchir Raj]

Is there I could upgrade all the provided asset packs to use nature Renderer/Shader in a way which doesn't involve doing practically each one of them by hand?  🤔😔

[Ruchir Raj]

Also, how can I remove all the assets except the stamps and audio?

Would it be safe if restructured Gaia folder's content according to my project conventions?

[BunnyViking]

Nature Renderer (and TVE) work fine with Gaia. What are you actually trying to do ?

[Ruchir Raj]

By default Gaia seems to use flora system, and I need to manually convert each tree and grass mesh to use nature shader right now.

2 hours ago, BunnyViking said:

Nature Renderer (and TVE) work fine with Gaia. What are you actually trying to do?

 

[BunnyViking]

Gaia only uses flora if you tell it to use flora. I'm not sure what you mean by having to convert things to use nature renderer... nature renderer just replaces the unity detail system (like flora does) so it works basically the same way... add NR to your terrain then you can just add whatever prefabs you like to the detail system.

[Peter]

I do not know what Nature renderer requires for setup, but if the tool does not provide some sort of automatism for setting up the vegetation items that it renders, e.g. by "ingesting" a terrain or something I'm afraid you would need to go through that manual process. Maybe that is also something worth exploring with the Nature Renderer team.
If this is something that can be done with scripting, it could be worth to write a script that does this for 1 terrain, which then can be executed on all terrains in the scene. If Gaia's terrain loading is used, there is a way to excecute a function call on every loadable terrain in the scene, so Gaia will load in the terrain, execute the function, and unload it again. You can use the static function GaiaUtils.CallFunctionOnDynamicLoadedTerrains for that.

[Ruchir Raj]

1 hour ago, Peter said:

I do not know what Nature renderer requires for setup, but if the tool does not provide some sort of automatism for setting up the vegetation items that it renders, e.g. by "ingesting" a terrain or something I'm afraid you would need to go through that manual process. Maybe that is also something worth exploring with the Nature Renderer team.
If this is something that can be done with scripting, it could be worth to write a script that does this for 1 terrain, which then can be executed on all terrains in the scene. If Gaia's terrain loading is used, there is a way to excecute a function call on every loadable terrain in the scene, so Gaia will load in the terrain, execute the function, and unload it again. You can use the static function GaiaUtils.CallFunctionOnDynamicLoadedTerrains for that.

We generally just need to add a single script to terrain for nature renderer to work, but it's just inconvenient to do this with multi-terrain and multi-scene setup.

My main request would be to work with them and make your vegetation (tree and bushes) work with nature shaders.

 

And one more thing please make it easier to remove all the sample asset provided along side with Gaia and Gena and provide them as separate asset packs, it really bloats our project. there are hard references to standardAsset (FPS and TPS controller) in main GaiaUtils script which just makes the process even harder than it need to be.

You should instead provide just placeholder art by default and include other asset as unitypackage which we willingly import in our projects.

[Peter]

7 hours ago, Ruchir Raj said:

My main request would be to work with them and make your vegetation (tree and bushes) work with nature shaders.

This would be a good request for the Priority Requests section, could you please post that in the February thread so users can vote for it?
https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/forums/topic/207-february-requests/

 

8 hours ago, Ruchir Raj said:

And one more thing please make it easier to remove all the sample asset provided along side with Gaia and Gena and provide them as separate asset packs, it really bloats our project. there are hard references to standardAsset (FPS and TPS controller) in main GaiaUtils script which just makes the process even harder than it need to be.

When we were running on the asset store only this was difficult for us to do as the asset store infrastructure would only allow us to upload a single .unitypackage. With Canopy it is a different story - we have added a feature in Gaia recently that allows you to create a "scripts only" package of Gaia:



This will create an unitypackage that does not contain all the Gaia assets, so you can make your own reduced version of Gaia with that for installation. We plan to release this version in the downloads in the future so you can download the reduced version without the assets as well. This version currently still contains the water and the player controllers, but we plan to make those more modular for easier removal in the future.

[Sorra the Orc]

Perhaps you can do a core Gaia package plus the vegetation as separate packages. Charge for the Veg packages but make them free to anyone who owns the appropriate Gaia asset.

You might make a few extra $ and it would be a sales generator for Gaia through additional search hits and (if priced right) win some friends to your work. As a bonus this common feature request will stop coming in.

[Ruchir Raj]

8 hours ago, Peter said:

This would be a good request for the Priority Requests section, could you please post that in the February thread so users can vote for it?
https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/forums/topic/207-february-requests/

 

When we were running on the asset store only this was difficult for us to do as the asset store infrastructure would only allow us to upload a single .unitypackage. With Canopy it is a different story - we have added a feature in Gaia recently that allows you to create a "scripts only" package of Gaia:



This will create an unitypackage that does not contain all the Gaia assets, so you can make your own reduced version of Gaia with that for installation. We plan to release this version in the downloads in the future so you can download the reduced version without the assets as well. This version currently still contains the water and the player controllers, but we plan to make those more modular for easier removal in the future.

When I do that I get this:

 

Any idea?

 

EDIT: This happens only when I don't import flora folder

Edited January 19, 2022 by Ruchir Raj

[Adam]

Yep. It's always been a bug bear for us.

We view the assets we supply as sample assets only (despite the fact that we went to a lot of effort and cost to create them). 

The same goes with a large part of the runtime - its designed to help the average newcomer to get a half way decent experience without needing to know anything. A pro would most likely ditch all but the streaming system.

The challenge as you know, is that many people do not read, even when it is written in front of them, and by not 'automagically' everything, then we would get a lot of 1*'s and support requests.

The pro's making their own games create their own biome's and their own look, and would not use Gaia for much more than it was originally intended - which is to be a powerful world and scene generator.

Now that we have Canopy, we are reviewing all of this. We are also looking to remove the old legacy controllers, as these cause more issues than they solve, and Unity finally seems to have created alternatives for them.

@Sorra the Orc  and @Ruchir Raj can you please put this onto our priority request list in the way you would like to see it. We could at the very least create a lightweight installation for Pro Subscribers.