Gaia - Scanner - Importing Real World Terrain Into Unity 3D

This video shows how to import real world terrain into your Unity scene by downloading and ingesting heightmaps from a website using the Gaia Scanner. Be sure to open the description below for additional notes.

Terrain Heightmaps: https://cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/

Gaia - Basics - Creating New Stamps With Gaia Scanner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3z1qJoGjsY

NOTE: 1. When scanning images to use as stamps, the quality of the image makes a big difference. All JPG's and most PNG files are only 8 bits per channel. When this gets converted to a stamp this means that you can only represent 256 possible height values, and the resulting stamp may appear terraced. You can address this by smoothing the terrain after stamping, but if possible use 16 bit textures as the resulting stamp will of better quality. RAW16 is better texture format to use.

2. Image compression will also cause artefacts in the resulting stamps. If possible, please ensure that your source image is not compressed, and regardless, make sure that you disable compression on the texture in Unity before you use the scanner to convert it into a stamp. Make sure you disable the sRGB setting on the texture so that it is imported purely as data.

3. Terrain scale is important. These heightmaps represent quite large areas, so in order to get a more realistic scale make your terrain 4 or 8km sq, and increase the Y scale as shown in the video. This is the type of scenario when streaming is important as well, so in Gaia Pro, make your terrain tiles around 512m sq, and enable separate scenes and streaming.

4. You can also use these stamps as the base for much larger environments using the world designer. To do this use the world designer, and then select Image as the Shape Input Type, and then your new stamp in the World Shape section. You can add more detail or not as you choose.

For version differences and detailed text based tutorials check out https://www.procedural-worlds.com/products/professional/gaia-pro/gaia-pro-tutorials/.

Видео Gaia - Scanner - Importing Real World Terrain Into Unity 3D канала Procedural Worlds