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