Gaia Biome no longer restricted by image mask

[mroshaw]

Me again, sorry.

This is driving me mad. Everything was working perfectly with my multi-biome setup. Had it all looking great, but seemed to be missing some texture on my snow biome. Went into the biome, respawned, and it plastered the whole terrain with snow texture.

Now ALL of my biomes are doing the same thing, they seem to no longer stick to the image mask that I had applied and was working perfectly before.

If you look at the screenshot, the blue visualisation represents the image mask. But for some reason, there's this purple / pinky red area being rendered in the visualisation, and the Gaia spawner is spawning across the entire map. This weird pink thing was not there before, and the spawners were sticking perfectly within the bounds of the image mask.

Here's without the visualisation. You can see the coverage of the whole terrain with the purply / pinky / red colour. Gaia obviously thinks there's SOME mask that is asking it to spawn across the whole terrain.

This is killing me. I spent hours on this, and it's now just gone to sh*t. I cannot understand why the image mask has broken all of a sudden?!

Really appreciate your help with this!

[mroshaw]

Just to add, my terrain is 2048x2048. Every time Gaia adds a Biome, it's placing the biome, and all of the spawners within it, at 1024, 0, 1024 in world space, with a range of 1024. That leaves the spawner covering a fraction of the terrain. I have to manually update every, single, biome and spawner, to move it to 0, 0, 0 and increase the range to 2048, so that it actually spawns within the mask area.

And now and again, Gaia seems to UNDO those changes, and move things back so they are not covering the whole terrain.

This seems to be part of the problem. When I apply the spawn, the biome spawn transforms dance around all over the place. I think the pinky / purply thing is a red herring, pardon the pun.

I'm starting to suspect that this is to do with the image mask somehow changing from "world" to "local". And by somehow, I mean I must have changed it.

[mroshaw]

Okay. seems it might not be entirely my doing!

I've restarted Unity, just to check something, gone back to my Biomes, and the spawners are all messed up again:

Before I restarted Unity, the position was (0, 0, 0) and the range 2048.

Why has Gaia changed this?

The texture spawner is now offset and if I ran the spawn again, would overwrite parts of the terrain that it should not.

[Peter]

@mroshaw I'm not 100% sure, but I think this might just be the difference between having the image mask in local space vs. in world space: If the mask is in local space, it will "follow the spawner around".



If it is in world space, it will sit at a certain position in world space and not move with the spawner.



This becomes especially relevant when your terrain exceeds a certain size so that the spawn is performed in multiple iterations. When this happens and the mask is set to "local space" the mask will be applied in smaller sections of your overall world as the spawners move over the world in multiple steps.
If the mask is in world space that will NOT happen, as the mask will always just display the correct segment of the image in that spot, even if the spawner is iterating in multiple steps.

Could you please try to switch the masking to world space to see if it fixes the issue?

(The images were taken from the Canopy article on masking, which has more info on the topic as well)

[mroshaw]

Hi @Peter,

Yes, it's definitely to do with the image mask needing to be "World" space.

What I have noticed, though, is that when I close and re-open my project in Unity, while the image mask retains the "World" mask space setting, the spawners themselves have been "moved" within world space:

I have to remember to either manually reset them, or click the "Fit To World" button, for every single spawner. If I don't, and I go to respawn the biome, the spawner is applied to a subset of the world image mask, instead of across the whole image mask.

Can you think why the spawners are being modified in this way, on closing and re-opening Unity?

[Peter]

@mroshaw On closing and re-opening unity I would not know, but when you spawn the biome and the spawner is part of the biome, the positioning and range of the spawner will be altered while the spawner is being used to iterate over the terrain during the biome spawn.

[mroshaw]

Thanks Peter.

The problem is that this is happening even when the spawner is "World" space. It may be that Gaia needs to modify the transforms as it applies the spawns, but it's not leaving things as it found them. I have to ensure I manually reset the spawners to "Fit to World", after Gaia has done it's thing, otherwise everything is messed up.

I'll make a video of the behaviour, just so I'm clear.

Thank you again mate, really appreciate your help!