4. Increase your world size / resizing the world

This article describes how you can add additional terrains to your world setup. There can be situations where you want to increase your world size, or change the size of your terrain tiles later in development, which is possible with Gaia.

Update your World Setup with the Gaia Manager

When bringing up the Gaia Manager for a second time after the world creation, it is possible to set up new World Size Settings in the "Create World" tab to adjust your current setup. It is possible to change things like the world tile size, heightmap resolution, texture resolution, or even switch to a terrain loading setup (or away from it as well). 



The box gizmos in the scene view will give visual feedback about how the update will play out. 

The red box represent the existing world size
The magenta boxes represent the existing terrains in the new setup (that might be resized or moved according to the new settings)
The green boxes represent new tiles that are being added to the setup

Gaia will - within reason - try to keep your existing terrains as part of the world setup. In the screenshot above the original terrains were a 3x3 setup with a tile size of 512 - since the new settings in the Gaia manager were changed to a tile size of 1024, the magenta boxes are larger than the original world size. When clicking the "Update Terrains" button, Gaia will create new terrain tiles at the desired size, but migrate the existing terrain into the new setup:



As you can see the new scene is now using larger terrain tiles than before, and the original terrain shape & texturing was copied over to the resized terrains.

By adding more terrains on the X and Z tile axes, it is possible to add additional tiles to the world setup. This works both with and without terrain loading setups. With the above example, we can increase the world size to 5x5. Note how there are new green boxes being displayed, indicating Gaia will add those terrains when we hit the update button:



Please note: Gaia will add, flat empty terrains as new terrains. These terrains need to be populated with your existing terrains using the stamper workflow. It is currently not possible to use the world designer again to only partially design the new parts of your world.

By default the new terrains will be added to the top and right to your existing terrain setup. You can influence this layout by adjusting the X and Z offset in the scene view panel:



There are also two additional checkboxes:

Recenter on Update: Will move the entire layout so that the world is centered around x=0,z=0 afterwards. Choose this option if you want the middle of your world to be located at 0,0 as it would be in a "fresh" Terrain setup created by Gaia.

Show Terrain Toggles: Shows toggles in the scene view for each terrain box. Toggling these boxes off will allow you to remove single terrains from the layout. This allows you to create non-rectangular terrain layouts, e.g. this would create an L-shape after the update:



By bringing up the Gaia Manager again and choosing the desired settings for your new target layout you can increase the world size, or change the existing terrain tiles.

Adding single new terrains to your scene (and into terrain loading)

The Terrains that Gaia creates as output are standard unity terrains. This means you can also add new terrains manually through the scene hierarchy "Create > 3D object > Terrain" menu or through the Unity neighbor terrain feature. The terrains created this way should just work with the Gaia tools, you can e.g. add a neighbor terrain to your existing world and use the Gaia stamper and biome spawners on it. 
Using the neighbor terrain feature is recommended as it will prevent seams between the two terrain tiles and also make sure the terrains share the same settings and resources like terrain layers.

But what if you want to add a new terrain that you created manually to an existing terrain loading setup in Gaia Pro? In this case you can use the "Add Terrain" slot on the Terrain Loader Manager:



Clicking the "Ingest" button will turn that terrain into a part of the terrain loading setup in Gaia: