Terrain Addition--how to do it?

[gecko64]

I purchased the Gaia 2021 Pro upgrade strictly for the Terrain Addition feature -- which I believe means that I can add additional terrains around my core terrain with continuous topography, right? But I can't find any documentation or tutorials about how to actually to this. Are there any? How do I do it?

 

thanks

Dave

[Bryan]

10 hours ago, gecko64 said:

I purchased the Gaia 2021 Pro upgrade strictly for the Terrain Addition feature -- which I believe means that I can add additional terrains around my core terrain with continuous topography, right? But I can't find any documentation or tutorials about how to actually to this. Are there any? How do I do it?

 

thanks

Dave

Here is an article that I have wrote on this topic: 

 

[gecko64]

Thanks for the link. But I guess I totally misunderstood what 'Terrain Addition" feature was. I thought it meant I could add neighboring terrains and GAIA would generate edges on those terrains that matched the topography  at the edge of the existing terrain. (Which seems like a pretty cool/fancy feature, but that's why I thought it was worth the 2021 upgrade price.) There's no way to do that, right?

[Bryan]

On 6/18/2022 at 10:31 AM, gecko64 said:

Thanks for the link. But I guess I totally misunderstood what 'Terrain Addition" feature was. I thought it meant I could add neighboring terrains and GAIA would generate edges on those terrains that matched the topography  at the edge of the existing terrain. (Which seems like a pretty cool/fancy feature, but that's why I thought it was worth the 2021 upgrade price.) There's no way to do that, right?

Terrain Addition feature would look like this: 

This is a world that I created using the Random World Designer- just a small world. 


This is still preview state but I choose the small option in the Gaia Manager - Create World tab - World size small. 
Even though I have selected the small in the gaia manager I can still increase this world size by the World Settings in the World Designer. 



This would allow me to enhance this world size. 

Now if I generate this world and want to enhance it you have two options. 
The first option is the one I sent which is using the scanner and scanning the tool. 
The second option is increase the world size and center this already made terrain. 

Say I wanted to take this small terrain and now make a 2x2 world I can. 
Then I would Recenter on update and you can visualize what this would look like: 



Then you would simple select Update Terrain(s). 
MAKE SURE THAT YOU BACK UP THE PROJECT BEFORE DOING THIS!!!!

Now you can add the stamper - Gaia Manager - Advanced - Tools - Stamper
Then you can stamp on the larger world. 



Here I added the stamper - added a distance mask - set the influence to global. 

Now the question becomes which option should you do: 
That depends on how large this world is going to be. 

If you are using Gaia Pro 2021 and you are wanting a pretty decent size world then the 1st option would be preferred because you can take your existing world and create a multi-scene setup for a larger world and you will save performance, memory, etc.  

If you are creating a slightly larger world - lets say 1024 size world in general then you probably wont have issues. 
In my example I went from having a 512 world to a 2k world. More than likely I wont run into performance issues as long as I optimize down the line. 

If this world was much larger lets say a 1024 world and then I created a 4k world then you could potentially run into performance issues (if you are not world streaming). 

Remember that each terrain that you create generates splat maps - each terrain has multiple splat maps that are stored into the memory (hard memory) that you can not change. They will always eat the same memory / ram usage. 
Then you would need to texture them etc. This could get very costly in performance the larger the world and the more detail you have. Not to mention all the game objects you might fill your world along with the update calls from your scripts etc. 

When you use Gaia Pro 2021 world streaming and separate these into multiple scenes each scene has its own ram usage, stored memory etc. So its splitting that world up and you can save performance. 

Hopefully this helps! 

[gecko64]

Thanks for all that. I am familiar with all the performance aspects, but I'm still unclear if this will do what I want, which is to add new terrains around my core terrain with continuous topography (without changing the core terrain topography/heightmap). For example, if I add neighboring terrains, then start stamping on them, I will have to  modify the core terrain's heightmap to get continuous/seamless topography at the junctions between the terrains, right? There's no way to "extend" the topography from the core terrain out onto the neighboring terrains? 

[Bryan]

No you can still keep the same height of the world etc in the second option. 
This would give you the option to add terrains to the existing world.
I just also gave a bit more information regarding the rest of the world and what would happen for terrain additions. 

 

[gecko64]

Okay, thanks, but I'm not seeing anything new in your post above about the added terrains extending the heightmap topography.... Could you restate it since apparently I'm blind?

[Peter]

43 minutes ago, gecko64 said:

Okay, thanks, but I'm not seeing anything new in your post above about the added terrains extending the heightmap topography.... Could you restate it since apparently I'm blind?

You can extend by adding new terrain tiles and manually stamp on them as described by Bryan above, but that would not meet your goal of Gaia automatically creating new topography that aligns with the already existing terrains. The problem with that is that the stamps in Gaia are individual terrain features that are applied to the heightmap, but there is no continuous, deterministic method of applying the topography created this way to a new neighboring terrain that you add in at a later stage.

Terrain Generators that can do this are usually based on deterministic noise patterns - unlike the stamps that Gaia uses, those noise patterns can be extended in any direction and will automatically align with each other across terrain borders. You can mimic this in Gaia by removing the stamp image from the stamper and adding a noise mask instead:



The noise pattern then acts as your stamp, so to speak. When stamping this one down and moving onto the next terrain, the pattern will align across the terrain borders since the noise pattern is calculated in world space and "goes on forever" in each direction.





This kind of generation might work for your use case, you can also combine multiple noise masks on top of each other to get macro and micro features going. However those noise-based terrains are always looking a bit artificial and generic since they are missing the more realistic terrain features of the stamp images.

[gecko64]

Thanks for that explanation. That's cool -- but it won't help me, with an existing core heightmap that I don't want altered at the edges, right?