Major problems creating 12x12 tile world in Gaia

[iPaul]

Not only is Gaia Pro very hard to use for large worlds but so is this forum.  Someone already started a thread on the exact same topic as me (even the same number of tiles as me) and not only couldn't I reply to that thread but I couldn't post my own under Gaia -> spawning.  They were all greyed out except for AI GameDev Toolkit.

Someone else mentioned that the "fit to world" button was greyed out for them on the stamper and it was stamping outside of their 12x12 tile area.  I'm having the exact same problem.  Why does Gaia Pro let you go that large if it can't handle it?  I want to make a huge continent that takes up 12x12 terrain tiles so that they are seamless, apply stamps, spawn trees and other detail based on altitude and save it.  Is this possible?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[iPaul]

Could you give me the steps to create a 12x12 tile terrain and  apply stamps and make it one big forest?  Would it be possible?  No matter what I do, it will generate 12x12 (144) empty tiles in Terrain Data and load some of them into the scene (4 or 6, I think) and only stamp and apply the biome to tile 5_5.

 

[Peter]

Hi @iPaul, the reason the other forum sections were greyed out is that your account is not registered as a customer yet. Please send us your invoice number or order number from the "contact us" page so we can assign your account to the customer role - you can then post in all product sections of the forum.

Regarding the issues at hand: 

13 hours ago, iPaul said:

Someone else mentioned that the "fit to world" button was greyed out for them on the stamper and it was stamping outside of their 12x12 tile area.  I'm having the exact same problem.  Why does Gaia Pro let you go that large if it can't handle it?

There are hard technical limits inside the Unity API & the surrounding tech to process heightmap data on the GPU  that restrict how large an area can be that is being changed at the same time. You will find the similar limits when working in unity directly without gaia with the terrain inspector. When your heightmap exceeds that limit, the "Fit to World" button becomes inactive.
Normally it is not recommended to apply a single stamp across a large area all at once either, because you would effectively be wasting heightmap resolution. If you e.g. have 12 x 12 terrains with a heightmap resolution of 1025 x 1025 each, that would be a total heightmap of 12,300 x 12,300 pixels - a single stamp image of 4096 x 4096 pixels would need to be upsampled to that size, making it blurry and the terrain will be less detailed than it could be if you would choose to stamp multiple times and apply multiple stamp images instead to cover the area.
If you want to do so however, you can do so via the world designer - you can assign a stamp image in the base terrain shape settings of the world designer. You can then just generate this base shape without adding any further stamps / world details, and the single stamp will be applied to each terrain tile while the world is being generated, effectively circumventing the limitations of the Unity API this way. Let me know if this sounds interesting, and I will provide more instructions for this.
 

11 hours ago, iPaul said:

No matter what I do, it will generate 12x12 (144) empty tiles in Terrain Data and load some of them into the scene (4 or 6, I think) and only stamp and apply the biome to tile 5_5.

When you are setting up a scene of 3x3 terrain tiles and beyond, Gaia Pro will automatically add terrain loading to the scene, which can load / unload terrain tiles automatically during design time and runtime as well. You can deactivate this during the world creation process by unchecking the "Create Terrain Scenes" option in the world size settings. You can find more information about terrain loading (and how to control which terrain tiles are being displayed in the scene view) here:

https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/written-articles/creating_runtime/2-terrain-loading-streaming-in-gaia-pro-gaia-pro-2021-r64/

 

 

[iPaul]

Thank you Peter.  And, also, somebody on YouTube reminded me that i was not using Gaia Pro 2021.  I was using an older version.  Above all, I need to take care of that first.

Thank you very much.

Paul