Seasons

[newcolours]

Hello Hello!

I actually learned about the GTS release through Forge3D. While I was looking at the store I see you wrote 

Quote

Integrated Snow & Weather Support.

GTS is nicely integrated into Gaia and our new HDRP Time of Day system. Changing weather now works seamlessly across all Procedural Worlds tools... from terrain to grass to trees, rocks, snow and rain!

I really want to be able to update weather/seasons & snow at runtime. Will GTS enable this? Do I need GTS for this of does Gaia Pro already enable this?

Thanks

[Isaac]

Hello,

Gaia Pro alreadys allows weather to be added onto existing compatible objects. For BuiltIn and URP, a Gaia Weather component can be added through choosing the Procedural Skies option:

Snow and other effects can be enabled through this component:

For newer unity versions, in HDRP the Time of Day component allows these weather effects. You can add the Time of Day through Window -> Procedural Worlds -> HDRP Time of Day -> Add HDRP TOD. Weather settings can be adjusted in the panel Weather Settings panel:

As for GTS, it currently supports snow, which can be enabled in the snow settings panel

A new update for Gaia should be released soon that will include support for GTS affecting the snow on trees. 

Enabling snow will affect the terrain, as well as objects that use the Gaia's shader, such as the trees. Changing the Min Height and Snow Color parameters should apply to both the terrain as well as the trees. 

So Gaia and GTS can individually control weather, but should also work together when in the same project. 

[newcolours]

Help me to understand what we get (in terms of weather) by adding GTS, even though I'm being a bit slow here...

So GTS takes care of automatically adding tree and ground coverage when snow is active?
(Presumably maybe also for other weathers, eg. sand,  in the future?)

Can GTS/Gaia allow the snow effect to be localized? (I.e. not affect the whole terrain)

Is there documentation for Weather and/or GTS? I'm interested in whether its possible to create our own scripts to add snow to building roofs for example?

 

[Peter]

3 hours ago, newcolours said:

Help me to understand what we get (in terms of weather) by adding GTS, even though I'm being a bit slow here...

So GTS takes care of automatically adding tree and ground coverage when snow is active?

GTS will take care of displaying snow on the terrain, but not on the vegetation - this is something that the tree / object shaders in Gaia already do.
 

3 hours ago, newcolours said:

(Presumably maybe also for other weathers, eg. sand,  in the future?)

It is possible already to swap out the cover texture from snow to e.g. sand, but currently restricted to a single cover texture only (so either sand or snow, but not two at the same time.) I would need to test but it should be possible to swap out snow and sand textures interchangabely to have either the one or the other in the same scene in alternation.
 

3 hours ago, newcolours said:

Can GTS/Gaia allow the snow effect to be localized? (I.e. not affect the whole terrain)

Currently only by height & slope, but not via a mask texture or something like that where you can define "the upper left corner of the terrain".

3 hours ago, newcolours said:

I'm interested in whether its possible to create our own scripts to add snow to building roofs for example?

I don't think that is explicitly explained in our documentation, but this is relatively easy to pull off with the Gaia shaders: Please take a look at the house prefabs found in 

Assets/Procedural Worlds/Gaia/Asset Samples/3DForge/Prefabs

Grab one of the houses, and pull them in the scene:


Those houses are set up to use the Gaia shaders, if you select the material (fe_village_base) on them you can see the shader settings:



Note the shader has a "cover" option, try to increase the progress on that:



And that would be it already: If you wanted your own building models to get covered by snow, you would need to set them up with the Gaia shader. The "progress" would increase automatically when it starts snowing in Gaia, if you use some other / your own weather system, you would need to increase that progress slider on the material from a script.
If you add a different texture / color tint, you can get other effects going, here is sand coverage for example: