Intro to Gaea

Introduction to Gaea

Node based terrain system. Can be buggy and prone to stability issues.

1. UI

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Toolbox

• Contains all terrain nodes
• Has two modes, Standard & Expert, which hides/shows categories of nodes.
• Slider on the top right toggles to commonly used nodes.
• Position can be changed between Right, Bottom & Full.
• Nodes can also be accessed from the Graph using the Tab key

Graph

• Main work area
• Has several different node styles which cab be changed in the Preferences.
• Multiple graphs can be created & colour coded
• ‘Mark for Export’ marks a node for export

Properties

• Adjust the properties for each node

Control keys

• U - In graph view to toggle mask view mode
• F6 - In graph view to toggle 2D view
• Alt + Left Mouse - Rotate
• Middle Mouse - Pan
• Mouse Wheel - Zoom
• F4 - Auto Layout Nodes
• Ctrl + R - Reset current node properties
• F8 - Mixes 2 or more nodes together, same as laying down a Combine node
• Rotating the viewport is fixed to the centre of the world.

2. Nodes

Mountain

• Create a basic mountain
• Edge - pushes the mountain down, creating a circular crater
• Seed - Variants of the mountains
• Shape Style - Switch between classic & dune style mountain

Voronoi

• Create procedural noise
• Enable dual for dual voronoi
• If using high scale values, can be clamped to never exceed past a certain threshold
• Warp can be used to warp the noise. Useful for creating magma flows at higher warp frequency.

Voronoi+

• Completely different to standard voronoi
• Can be used to create cragly rocks similar to the Giant’s Causeway.

Slope Noise

• Noise on a slope
• Stratified - Useful for making terrace like cragly terrains

Plates

• Strong profile with lot of directionality

Draw

• Allows for custom shapes to be drawn

Igneous

• Large mountains with a lot of soft canyons & underlays.
• Can be used with the clamp to reduce noise influence

Heal

• Works similar to denoise
• Attempts to softens a lot of high frequency noise but keeps the high peaks
• Blue node blurs everything