Gaea 1.0.20: Drawable mountains, Tiled Output, new feature enhancements, and more

Tiled Output (Splitting)

We are very pleased to deliver one of the most requested features: splitting output into tiles so it can be consumed easily in game engines and other applications.

Please note, this is not Tiled Processing — where any high resolution terrain can be processed in chunks. That is something we will ship later this year. Tiled Output, specifically marked as “Split Only”, builds the terrain as you normally would in a single build process, then splits it into tiles as a post-process.

At this moment, only power-of-2 tile sizes are allowed (128, 256, 512, 1024, etc.). We will add support for +1 (129, 257, 513, 1025, etc.) and Unreal Engine specific sizes (127, 253, 505, 1009, etc.) in the near future.

Draw Node

Last week we released the Island node where you could draw islands and continents. Now with the Draw node you can draw mountains of any shape and size, using similar procedural generative algorithms. These mountains are pre-prepped for erosion.

You can watch a video of this feature here.

Cracks

The Cracks primitive let’s you quickly create sharp cracks that can be subtracted from other shapes to create broken landscapes.

Bomber v2

The Bomber node was difficult to use and get proper results from, so we went back and rewrote the node to make sure you work half as hard for twice the results. The new Bomber “just works” and now also accepts multiple inputs so you don’t need to string together a bunch of additional Bomber nodes.

Post Process Stack Upgrade

We know you love the Post Process Stack. It was built to alleviate the burden of adding simple nodes to fine tune the output. This new upgrade takes the Post Process Stack to the next level by adding support for clipping, simple displacement, equalization, and two additional blend modes: Min and Diff.

High Quality Displacement

Last week’s update added iterative displacement to the Displace node. This week we add another update that improves the quality of the displacement by adding multi-directional distortion.

If you like the bi-directional displacement, you can always uncheck “High Quality” and even change the direction by using the new Rotate slider.

Hover Previews

Hover previews are back! We had to take them out to address a performance issue, but now they’re here to stay.

This seemingly tiny feature guides you by showing what value you will get if you click anywhere in the slider. This is very helpful as sometimes with high value sliders, it is difficult to anticipate what value a specific location will give.

As we always recommend, in Gaea, clicking will give you faster performance than dragging a slider. Making that a habit will save you a lot of reprocessing.

Complete Changelog

New

• Tiled Output (Split Only) now available as an experimental feature.
• 4 new presets (3 x Displacement, 1 x Combine)

Node Updates

• New Draw primitive node.
• New Cracks primitive node.
• Bomber v2 with easier usage and results.
• High Quality iterative displacement in Displace.
• Rotation option for Low Quality displacement in Displace.
• Swap Inputs option for Mixer.
• Non-Uniform scaling and other options in Transform.
• New options in Voronoi+.
• Transform rotation now goes from -360 to +360.

Improved

• Connection dots in nodes for easier cognition.
• Build Command Line now accepts Filenames.
• Slider hover-previews are back.
• Post Process Stack upgraded with new options and UI.

Fixed

• Better handling of TIFF and PNG formats.
• SatMaps and Vegetation would rebuild unnecessarily.
• Vegetation Distribution output was broken.
• MRU list would not respond to NumKey1.
• Node Upgrade would not create missing ports.
• Small memory usage improvements for very large data.
• First node would become falsely broken on load.
• New File command would reprocess existing graph.
• Bypassing multiple nodes did not invalidate descendants.
• Save Incremental failed on a previously unsaved file.
• Toolbar popups were misaligned.
• Build Manager would not show colored labels in some instances.

Run Gaea to update, or download from https://quadspinner.com/gaea/download