Redefining Terrain creation !!!

This tool is going to be a must have to generate, texture and populate terrain in Unity.

It is both for developers and artists placing powerful, intuitive tools in your hands enabling you to get those terrain ideas you have always had in your head, out and onto the screen.

Finally you are going to finish that terrain and get on with the rest of your project.

The Stamper, the Visualizer,the Spawners and all the other tools are all well explained in the easy to understand documentation.
With great tutorial videos already available, terrain is not a stumbling block anymore and it does not have to be flat and boring.

The Holy Grail of terrain creation has been discovered :)

*** EDIT v1.5.3 ***
WOW !!!
Thanks for the NEW features and enhancements that you have worked on and added.
It is completely understandable the for the amount of time taken when you look at the LONG list.
I just want to say thanks for the dedication and the great support that you are providing to all your user.
Gaia has hit the Asset Store by storm and you just keep setting the bar higher and higher with the deliverables that we are receiving.

Keep an eye on "Session Play" , it is going to be BIG !!!
Recording the start to finish of a FULL Gaia scene and then share that "session" via a couple 100kb file with a friend that has to same resources installed, and he can recreate that EXACT scene down to the last blade of grass.


*** Now where did Unity put those extra stars to through at extra special assets ?

Thanks Adam


** PS Now in the time it took you to read this review, you could have done one complete random generated scene and be running around in it. That is one of the coolest new functions added and refined with the latest Update.
** v1.6.0 Thanks for keeping Gaia up to date with more current Unity Editor versions

This review was submitted for a previous version of the package. Version: 1.0.0

You'll be creating worlds in no time at all

I'm the first one to admit that I'm not terribly creative, and have had terrible experiences trying to get terrains to actually look like they're not just a random collection of blobs, let alone texture them and then place trees, grasses, etc. on them so that it doesn't look like a 3-year-old has been let loose with paints on a canvas.

I was at a point in my personal game development timeline that I was seriously considering ditching everything I'd done up to that point and start something completely fresh. Nothing was going to plan, nothing seemed to look anything other than 'programmer artwork'.

Now, for those who've followed the forum thread on Gaia, it's no secret that I've been one of the beta testers on this (as evidenced by the screenshots I've been sharing).

I would have happily paid for Gaia as it was back in the early beta. It allowed me to experiment with what I wanted my terrains to look like and thanks to the stamping system that Adam has developed, creating them is quick and simple, with results just from this that will astound you.

Then we come on to the second part of Gaia - the spawners. Everything is controlled by a set of rules for each texture, terrain tree, grass detail and even GameObjects - what height(s) on the terrain it should appear between, any slope restrictions that should apply (so you don't get trees appearing on near vertical rock faces), etc. This is initially confusing and, to be honest, overwhelming, but even then once you understand the whole process and how Gaia works, it becomes almost second nature and you'll soon be interpreting the various rules you've selected for each element to go on the terrain very quickly.

The texture spawner alone is a godsend. You're only limited by the number of textures that Unity allows on terrains, so the sky's the limit, but because of the way each texture is overlaid on the ones below it (again, following the rules for where each texture can appear), it all blends in with each other to give you results that would take you hours if you were to try and do it by hand. Even with very large terrains, this would be done in a matter of a minute or two.

Asking Gaia to place trees, grass details, etc. gives you some natural looking results, even if everything is procedurally created - but this means that if you accidentally remove all the trees from your terrain, simply get Gaia to run through the tree spawner again and they'll all be back where they were before you removed them (assuming you haven't altered any settings, of course).

This is going to be one of those assets that you just wonder how you managed to do your world building without it before.

This is probably some the best money I've ever spent in the store.

This review was submitted for a previous version of the package. Version: 1.5.3

Reviewer was gifted package by publisher.

One of the easiest (if not THE easiest) terrain creation tools available!

I've had the pleasure of helping with the testing and evolution of Gaia over the past several months as one of the beta testers. I owned products from other competitors, but never really could wrap my head around them. I could take a week trying to get things the way I wanted but was never able to get the islands (and surrounding ocean floor) details the way I wanted them. With Gaia, I have created several island environments that I have been happy with within a day's time. (two tops)

The tools within Gaia allow me to quickly stamp out a terrain, stamp additional features, blend stamps to fade out at the edge, as well as perform a lot of other terrain creation functions. I can do this easily in a couple of hours. Then spend a couple of days tweaking my spawners which spawn everything from ground textures, to grasses, to trees, to game objects! I can create my spawners to spawn over the entire terrain, or I can setup different spawn groups for different biomes of my terrain. For my island environment, I have completely different biomes to spawn coral, wreckage, sponges, etc underwater than I do for above sea level. And then above sea level, I may have different biomes set up for a swamp area than I would my coastal area..

At any rate, don't get me wrong. Those other tools are great but due to some health issues I have effecting memory, they were just too hard for me to learn and retain. Gaia is the opposite. Easy to learn and easy to remember. Terrain creation is now fun and something I look forward to. It is no longer something I dread because I know I'm going to have to spend a week just getting back up to speed on again.

Bottom line... Gaia ROCKS!

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EDIT: 1.5.0!!!! WOW! Just when you thought it couldn't get better. I absolutely LOVE the new session playback system. I can create a terrain and spawn it with my spawners in a test environment and as long as I have the stamps and assets in my production project, I can just make a package with the session files I need to recreate, import that package into my production project, and BAM! There is my terrain.. Stamped, textured, and spawned exactly how it was in my test sandbox! Talk about an awesome addition!

But wait! That's not all! rofl (sorry, I couldn't resist.. heheh)

Points of interest (POIs) are amazeballs! This is something I asked for way back in early beta. The ability to take my homestead layout and drop it onto the terrain and have all the individual objects fall where they should be in relation to the ground directly under them. With 1.5 and the new POI system, TOTALLY possible!!!

There are lots of other new things in 1.5 that almost makes this release as (or maybe more) amazing as the original release. If you have been sitting on the fence about what terrain tool to buy, THIS one is the one!

Great job again, Adam! Amazing work! :)