I've been trying to learn Gaea but have gotten so overwhelmed with many of the tutorials (no hate to the creators). This one was very much needed. Thank you for this!
Excellent tutorial, thank you. Gaea 2.0 is an awesome piece of software. I bought it to work with Blender too. I got the pro version during the Black Friday sale last year that included the future (then) 2.0 version. It's a great upgrade from the previous version.
Love your tutorial, very easy to follow with it being my first day learning things in it. A couple of things to point out that I experienced. I'm using Gaea 2.0.3.0 professional and: 1. The Rivers node has been updated to have a Rivers plugin added right above depth. If I used your shown method then I couldn't get things to turn out like yours did. I had to connect from the new "Rivers" plugin into "Adjust" and leave depth untouched. 2. Once I adjusted those, then my map colors ended up being reversed- blue covering my landscape and the landscape color I used showing in the river beds. I ended up flipping the colors in the two SatMaps (Blue was on the top, and the other on the bottom originally) and then everything turns out to match yours. I'll be back to watch more of your content on this. Thanks!
Thanks for this video Martin, I loved your environment course on cgboost and can't wait for other videos about gaea from you. You're a great teacher! A big ciao from Italy and long life to Blender (and gaea :) )
make a full tutrorial of Gaea 2 beacuse after lot of research data and watched videos ,finally you clear some my confusion related to GAEA 2 ,beacause I'm begineer in Environmentlist and landscapes designer.So please make a tutorial on this
Cool tutorial! I also want to add that ever since Eevee Next came out I have been using displacement node in the shader instead of the modifier and it actually works amazingly well. The main drawback would be the fact that you can't use box mapping for texturing in blender but for a preview or if using just Gaea textures it works flawlessly. Subscribed and hoping to see more videos on Gaea 2.0!
@MartinKlekner good point! if you don't mind me to switch the topic, I did the same thing shown in the video last night and had my computer completely shut off after getting the rendering to about 20%. My best guess right now is the cooler for my cpu because when I replicated the situation I looked at the temperature of my cpu and it was at max 100 degrees. I had the subdiv modifier put to 6 I think, the statistics showed around 10 million polygons total. Have you ever had that your pc shut off when rendering large scenes like this? I have never had it happen with scenes way more complex than this. (specs: ryzen 7 3700x, rtx 4070)
Quick tip for the free version, that I don't know if they fixed. You can export maps at larger than the resolution the free version is locked at if you just simply ignore the fancy exporter and export from the file menu. It'll export at whatever resolution you have the viewport set to. So I think the free version is locked to 2k (or maybe even 1k), but you can get 4k out of it just fine, but you can't if you use the full exporter. If you need 8k or higher, tossing it into an upscaler that also adds detail usually does the job. In 99% of cases you won't see that extra detail anyway. I don't know if they've patched that "exploit" or not, but I've been using a version that's a couple years old just in case. Haven't had any problems with it, and the maps export perfectly crisp, so no need to update. Another quick tip, is that if you use image generation for things, there's some Loras you can pick up that make terrain maps. Sometimes it's worth it to generate one in there, and toss it into Gaea as a base, or just erode it and use it as is. You can do the same for landscapes you generate with ANT Landscape in Blender as well by exporting it as a heightmap and feeding it to Gaea.
I would be interested in seeing a tutorial on how to use these terrains practically on a more ground level human type scale, perhaps with scattering and placement of characters and props, as opposed the distant aerial view.
I just discovered something today. when you export a mesh from gaea using mesher it does weird things with the normals. (you can see this at 13:42). the way to fix it in blender is go into edit mode then select all faces and press Alt N then select "Set from faces"
i think two very underrated/unterutilized use-cases of Gaea are rock/ground texture creation (by tiling your "landscape") and using it to generate smaller landscape patches for the foreground of a render. Instead of bashing together a ton of photoscanned rocks, you can just create one single mesh featuring everything you need. Have you looked into these?
I'm lost. I'm at the point where you've reviewed the steps taken, but for me, the highest parts of the map are still blue as well as the rivers, with only a faint colouring of the browns in the middle areas. I also had to choose invert on the FX Adjust node in order to have the rivers be blue rather than the entire map. I've gone through a couple times and just can't find where I'm messing up.
I don't know why, but it keeps telling me that "the current build resolution is higher than allowed by your edition ", even though I set everything to 1024x1024. Any thoughts?
Ok, good tutorial, but I do a have quick question. You said we can export the mesh or the texture, then went onto showing us exactly that in what I assume is Blender 4.1 or 4.2, right? Now, when importing the mesh result, you've clearly seen these artifacts that persist even after adding the material and putting the viewport into render mode. It happens both in Cycles and Eevee and there's basically no way I've found to make it disappear. However, simple import into 3.6 and changing of shading eliminates these artifacts, so I'd say it's more of a Blender than Gaea problem (although it may obviously also be a Gaea problem). Any idea what it is, how it happens, why it happens and what to do to eliminate it in the newer version or even in the export? Because I'd say it's the first time in like more than fifteen years of blender workflow that I've seen it and I am completely baffled. Any response appreciated, even the ones saying you don't know how to deal with it, either. :)
Is there a possibility to import geometry to use as a base shape for the terrain? Or to sculpt the terrain by hand? Relying solely on the generator is tiresome and rarely produces result exactly as you intended.
I doesnt really fit the concept of the course, where only Blender is used. But I might do a longer tutorial here, creating a full environment using Gaea and Blender :)
@@MartinKlekner thx Martin. I get ur point. But maybe one topic could be very inspiring to architecture designers. For example customizable terrain based on those software like Gaea, which could fit the terrain to the project like bridge…etc. Since we all know displacement or any other generated terrain is really hard to modify locally and give it a geometrical constraint….
I don't think that's needed for 99 percent of projects, personal or commercial. I think its only for special cases. Indie version is quite enough for individual users, I think :-)
@@MartinKlekner Gotcha. I haven't gone through your environment course yet, but are terrain generation tools more so for establishing shots when it comes to animation? Because the only way I could think of using a high resolution is if you wanted to zoom in on a specific area for character shots. But I don't know how well that would actually work.
I've used both and prefer Gaea. Gaea is easy to use, realistic, and is good for both large and small scale terrains. I thought that World Creator seemed focused on smaller-scale terrains and localised areas, rather than entire worlds, which is what I was going for.
Martin do you run any antivirus? I own Gaea 2.0 and I got virus/trojan warning when unzipping from zip file, and unzipped files got deleted. I wrote Dax about it, but no response on that. I guess you either do not run antivirus or if you do, you got no warnings? Greatfull if you let me know, I'm not sure what to do about it. I paid for Gaea 2.0
Haha, I wanted to make everything as simple and straightforward as possible with minimum amount of nodes. However, you can of course simply output a Normal node and then set it for export :-)
this is so disapointing to see that in 2024 we're still waiting for months for a program that works on heightfiields, we still can't model really 3D geological features in no software, if you don't know nodes in houdini you're doomed and it still looks shitty even if u know how to do it...pointless to even try to approach realism, i'm so tired of these costy softwares that do nothing
Although I do agree a three axis displacement approach would be a great improvement the results gaea delivers can be really good. Whats shown in this video is merely a quick introduction imo. If you need concave rock formations you can still sculpt those in by hand or use other displacements on top
@@aurelwedding6041 yeah, it would be great at least a gaea plugin for zbrush where you could apply gaea type modifiers to meshes or any type of software that can erode custom shapes, displace them, fracture them etc. I am not a programmer but if I was I'd create a software Geology or something where I'd incorporate AI too and help people create custom megascan type of assets for alien landscapes, realistic landscapes etc.
workflow is still better just using displacement and weights inside blender....once you get used to it you would ask yourself why you would bother buying a 3rd party piece of software...I would never do that. I have to say, this seems more like an infomercial.
I have done my fair share of displacement work in Blender and Gaea is infinitely faster and more convenient, with realistic Erosion and all. I have been waiting for version 2 for a long time and decided to this tutorial in excitement. I do not run any affiliate with Quadspinner and this video had no commercials. So… yeah 🤷🏻♂️
@@MartinKlekner fair enough. To each his own, my point is still the same. as far as the "infomercial" that is just how it comes acrss to me. In a world where blender and FOSS in general is and was(should be) about freedom..all of a sudden I am seeing this tremendous push for asset stores across the board. It might just be my personal politics, but I feel free should be freedom for knowledge and expression. The blender market is a big push against this. If people want to create and sell, fine...but the blender market seems like the wrong direction. I refuse to pay for any addon. either I will make it myself or just use the tools available to me...but not everyone has this option.
@@nowherebrain thats just plain dumb. gaea is one of the most fair and accessible softwares in this money-focused industry. its a one time payment and you own it for life. on top of that, there's no way to replicate what gaea does in blender without significant more time and effort and potentially paid addons. you cant expect an foss general 3d package to compete with a specific software designed for a specific purpose.
@@aeonbreak4728 ok, just using regular old blender is still cheaper and easily as or more powerful. it's the artist not the brush..call me stupid all you want...you are just using a qualifier to discredit me, so...meh..in the end it's a meaningless argument. Saying blender is unable to do all those things out of the box is what is actually ignorant....just because YOU cannot do it does not mean a person cannot do it. Besides the foundation of blender has always been about making quality production software that is free so it could be for everyone....not to pay for stuff...ignorant.
Awesome. PLEASE more Gaea 2.0 videos. I recently bought this software and would love more learning materials!
More Gaea 2 videos please, this was perfect!
I've been trying to learn Gaea but have gotten so overwhelmed with many of the tutorials (no hate to the creators). This one was very much needed. Thank you for this!
So glad it helped you!
Perfect. Just taking my first steps with Gaea. You demystified the basics and I would love more Gaea-Blender tutoirials!
Thanks for putting out a quick tutorial video since gaea 2.0 was released!
Excellent tutorial, thank you. Gaea 2.0 is an awesome piece of software. I bought it to work with Blender too. I got the pro version during the Black Friday sale last year that included the future (then) 2.0 version. It's a great upgrade from the previous version.
More of this!! Would love an intermediate step-by-step course on Gaea as they are difficult to come by.
Well done. Definitely do more Gaea videos and even maybe a course!
We are all demand for GAEA 2 tutorial ,Vote for GAEA 2 tutorial
More Gaea tutorials please!
I will!
Love your tutorial, very easy to follow with it being my first day learning things in it. A couple of things to point out that I experienced. I'm using Gaea 2.0.3.0 professional and: 1. The Rivers node has been updated to have a Rivers plugin added right above depth. If I used your shown method then I couldn't get things to turn out like yours did. I had to connect from the new "Rivers" plugin into "Adjust" and leave depth untouched. 2. Once I adjusted those, then my map colors ended up being reversed- blue covering my landscape and the landscape color I used showing in the river beds. I ended up flipping the colors in the two SatMaps (Blue was on the top, and the other on the bottom originally) and then everything turns out to match yours. I'll be back to watch more of your content on this. Thanks!
Really nice tutorial, perfect balance of being informative but concise!
love it, please more tutorials and even paid version
Amazing! I hope more Gaea 2.0 tuts are on the way.
Martin, your explanations are always so wonderfully clear. Thank you!
Glad you like it! 🤗
exactly what i was looking for! although i would appreciate an even more in depth tutorial sometime soon.
bro just casually gave the best gaea intro ever since the software came out. DO MORE GAEA TUTORIALS MARTIN. WE DEMAND IT
Thanks for this video Martin, I loved your environment course on cgboost and can't wait for other videos about gaea from you. You're a great teacher! A big ciao from Italy and long life to Blender (and gaea :) )
My pleasure!
@@MartinKlekner The plasure is mine. Can't wait. Have a great day :)
make a full tutrorial of Gaea 2 beacuse after lot of research data and watched videos ,finally you clear some my confusion related to GAEA 2 ,beacause I'm begineer in Environmentlist and landscapes designer.So please make a tutorial on this
Great video!! It could be possible to explain how to texture them in a realistic way? Did you pay any course about Gaea?
I can go more in depth on texturing in a future tutorial :-) I read the manual and fiddled around with the software, no course is yet out, I think :-)
@@MartinKlekneryeh taking stuff made and texturing in a logical way is the thing I was to know most if anything
If you want to know more about gaea, there is a guy called Maarten Nauta that is so good at it, and also textures the mountains in blender.
I’m sure there’s a similar method to texturing - something like tri-planar mapping. Simon Fuchs has a good tutorial on mixing several mats.
Yoooo more mask tutorials for 2.0 plzzzzzz + I subbed keep up the great work boss
Always look forward to this! Thanks ❤❤❤
Very nice and clear tut. Please, do more my friend :)
Another banger! Very useful! Nice job Martin!
yes, more of gaea please !
Cool tutorial! I also want to add that ever since Eevee Next came out I have been using displacement node in the shader instead of the modifier and it actually works amazingly well. The main drawback would be the fact that you can't use box mapping for texturing in blender but for a preview or if using just Gaea textures it works flawlessly. Subscribed and hoping to see more videos on Gaea 2.0!
Good point. A drawback would be that if you wamted to spread particles on the shader displaced terrain it wouldnt be possible right?
@MartinKlekner good point! if you don't mind me to switch the topic, I did the same thing shown in the video last night and had my computer completely shut off after getting the rendering to about 20%. My best guess right now is the cooler for my cpu because when I replicated the situation I looked at the temperature of my cpu and it was at max 100 degrees. I had the subdiv modifier put to 6 I think, the statistics showed around 10 million polygons total. Have you ever had that your pc shut off when rendering large scenes like this? I have never had it happen with scenes way more complex than this. (specs: ryzen 7 3700x, rtx 4070)
Quick tip for the free version, that I don't know if they fixed.
You can export maps at larger than the resolution the free version is locked at if you just simply ignore the fancy exporter and export from the file menu. It'll export at whatever resolution you have the viewport set to.
So I think the free version is locked to 2k (or maybe even 1k), but you can get 4k out of it just fine, but you can't if you use the full exporter. If you need 8k or higher, tossing it into an upscaler that also adds detail usually does the job. In 99% of cases you won't see that extra detail anyway.
I don't know if they've patched that "exploit" or not, but I've been using a version that's a couple years old just in case. Haven't had any problems with it, and the maps export perfectly crisp, so no need to update.
Another quick tip, is that if you use image generation for things, there's some Loras you can pick up that make terrain maps. Sometimes it's worth it to generate one in there, and toss it into Gaea as a base, or just erode it and use it as is. You can do the same for landscapes you generate with ANT Landscape in Blender as well by exporting it as a heightmap and feeding it to Gaea.
Nice, gotta try the ANT tip!
any of these height map generators work with fooocus?
@@aeonbreak4728 I don't know. I just use Auto/Forge. If it can use a lora, then yeah.
I love gaea! I didn’t know gaea 2 came out
I just heard about this today. Timing on this video is perfect heh
This is awesome!
Cheers, Cov!
I would be interested in seeing a tutorial on how to use these terrains practically on a more ground level human type scale, perhaps with scattering and placement of characters and props, as opposed the distant aerial view.
Great tutorial, short and clean, thanks!!
Glad you enjoyed it!
GAEA 2.0 Draw Video would be cool :D
I just discovered something today. when you export a mesh from gaea using mesher it does weird things with the normals. (you can see this at 13:42).
the way to fix it in blender is go into edit mode then select all faces and press Alt N then select "Set from faces"
i think two very underrated/unterutilized use-cases of Gaea are rock/ground texture creation (by tiling your "landscape") and using it to generate smaller landscape patches for the foreground of a render. Instead of bashing together a ton of photoscanned rocks, you can just create one single mesh featuring everything you need. Have you looked into these?
Good tip for future tutorial :)
a big plus is that you can buy it once and not worry about the passing days... there is not always time for a hobby...❤
I love that Quadspinner didnt go the subscription path 🥳
Please make a full tutorial on Gaea2 and explain step by step as here in this videos
thanks for the tutorial , the new unreal plugin is also amazing add , that being said , 2.0 is a crash machine , I hope there is a patch on the way
Good stuff bro
Awesome!!!!
THANKS!
thank you for this!
I was just wondering does thing work with other 3D software like maya ?
I'm lost. I'm at the point where you've reviewed the steps taken, but for me, the highest parts of the map are still blue as well as the rivers, with only a faint colouring of the browns in the middle areas. I also had to choose invert on the FX Adjust node in order to have the rivers be blue rather than the entire map. I've gone through a couple times and just can't find where I'm messing up.
Hi, do you know if it is possible to export the erosion as an animated sequence of meshes or heightmaps?
Are the portals broken? I can't figure out how to connect portals from one node to another node, in two separate tabs.
wow that's awesome tutorial !! By the way, How we make it from specific site terrain in google map?
I will investigate!
the best!
my landscape got all blue after i added blue to the river, do you have solution for that?
that biggest disadvantage of gaea over world machine was speed especially for erosion simulation. now it looks like that has been solved!
I don't know why, but it keeps telling me that "the current build resolution is higher than allowed by your edition ", even though I set everything to 1024x1024. Any thoughts?
Bavilo, diky!
It's pretty buggy but it can yield amazing results.
Does anybody know how I can combine vegetation together with rivers and lakes? Gaea 2.0 beginner here
Ok, good tutorial, but I do a have quick question. You said we can export the mesh or the texture, then went onto showing us exactly that in what I assume is Blender 4.1 or 4.2, right? Now, when importing the mesh result, you've clearly seen these artifacts that persist even after adding the material and putting the viewport into render mode. It happens both in Cycles and Eevee and there's basically no way I've found to make it disappear. However, simple import into 3.6 and changing of shading eliminates these artifacts, so I'd say it's more of a Blender than Gaea problem (although it may obviously also be a Gaea problem). Any idea what it is, how it happens, why it happens and what to do to eliminate it in the newer version or even in the export? Because I'd say it's the first time in like more than fifteen years of blender workflow that I've seen it and I am completely baffled. Any response appreciated, even the ones saying you don't know how to deal with it, either. :)
in blender you have to shade smooth or shade flat probably
@@aeonbreak4728 I did all that, still no improvement. Right now the only option is to export as exr and not a mesh - the mesh is glitchy.
Hey martin!
this was awesome!
can you do a follow up with Vue also since that is also avbl for free now.
Hey! Ill consider it, but currently Im focusing on Gaea ... ;-)
Can we use Gaea to create tileable close-up ground textures? Such as rocky dirt ground, sandy ground, and cracked mud textures?
Sure, you just slap Seamless node at the end :)
@@MartinKlekner cool thanks !!!
Is there a possibility to import geometry to use as a base shape for the terrain? Or to sculpt the terrain by hand? Relying solely on the generator is tiresome and rarely produces result exactly as you intended.
The Object node through which you import your objects into Gaea is still under construction, but it should be available in the near future.
@@MartinKlekner Thnx for the info. So until than World Creator 3 it is...
wonderfulll
Please do more,
✌🏻
it would be great if you can including this GAEA tool into your environment masterclass.
I doesnt really fit the concept of the course, where only Blender is used. But I might do a longer tutorial here, creating a full environment using Gaea and Blender :)
@@MartinKlekner thx Martin. I get ur point. But maybe one topic could be very inspiring to architecture designers.
For example customizable terrain based on those software like Gaea, which could fit the terrain to the project like bridge…etc. Since we all know displacement or any other generated terrain is really hard to modify locally and give it a geometrical constraint….
I'm looking at the indie and pro versions. I'm curious, in what cases would you go for the extremely high resolution like 256k?
I don't think that's needed for 99 percent of projects, personal or commercial. I think its only for special cases. Indie version is quite enough for individual users, I think :-)
@@MartinKlekner Gotcha. I haven't gone through your environment course yet, but are terrain generation tools more so for establishing shots when it comes to animation? Because the only way I could think of using a high resolution is if you wanted to zoom in on a specific area for character shots. But I don't know how well that would actually work.
I'm torn between Gaea and World Creator. Any advice would be much appreciated as I can't afford both.
I worked with both and always found the results made in WC slightly less realistic and the software more difficult to learn…
I've used both and prefer Gaea. Gaea is easy to use, realistic, and is good for both large and small scale terrains. I thought that World Creator seemed focused on smaller-scale terrains and localised areas, rather than entire worlds, which is what I was going for.
also world creator license model is pretty predatory compared to gaea's permanent license. no comparison, gaea is the winner
But how big of terrain can you make with this? 100km x 100km? Bigger?
As big as you want to, especially in Pro versions.
Martin do you run any antivirus? I own Gaea 2.0 and I got virus/trojan warning when unzipping from zip file, and unzipped files got deleted. I wrote Dax about it, but no response on that. I guess you either do not run antivirus or if you do, you got no warnings? Greatfull if you let me know, I'm not sure what to do about it. I paid for Gaea 2.0
Hi, I got a warmimg too when trying to imstall, but no problem going around it by making an exception in antivirus. The software is safe, Id say ☺️
@@MartinKlekner Thank you Martin! :)
😃😃😃
I am having a problem where the water is texturing the land but not the river, Everything is in the right place
In the Mix node, try switching the connections, putting the Land satmap to the one where your Water currently is, and vice versa.
Otherwise great but revenue restrictions less than 100k as an indie
does the free version allow tiled builds?
It should, you just use the Seamelss node in your network.
@@MartinKlekner apparently its only availiblr for the proffesional tier
@@AhmadAli-kv2ho Aha! Sorry for the bad info, I dont have the free version 🙏
Daam i like 1 time purchase
An almost forgotten practice
Unfortunately, my antivirus software won't let me download this...
Give it a few days so that the antivirus updates its software database. Or make an expection for the installer / webpage in the AV settings
Wish Speedtree had similar perpetual pricing structure. Unity is ruining it by being greedy.
Garbage app won't work with nahamic or let you export.
Awesome! but wheres normal😂
Haha, I wanted to make everything as simple and straightforward as possible with minimum amount of nodes. However, you can of course simply output a Normal node and then set it for export :-)
bylo fajn i tutoriál jak exportovat do UE enginu
Bohuzel, s Unrealem nedelam, ale Gaea 2.0 by mela mit jednoduchy bridge tool.
this is so disapointing to see that in 2024 we're still waiting for months for a program that works on heightfiields, we still can't model really 3D geological features in no software, if you don't know nodes in houdini you're doomed and it still looks shitty even if u know how to do it...pointless to even try to approach realism, i'm so tired of these costy softwares that do nothing
Although I do agree a three axis displacement approach would be a great improvement the results gaea delivers can be really good. Whats shown in this video is merely a quick introduction imo. If you need concave rock formations you can still sculpt those in by hand or use other displacements on top
@@aurelwedding6041 yeah, it would be great at least a gaea plugin for zbrush where you could apply gaea type modifiers to meshes or any type of software that can erode custom shapes, displace them, fracture them etc. I am not a programmer but if I was I'd create a software Geology or something where I'd incorporate AI too and help people create custom megascan type of assets for alien landscapes, realistic landscapes etc.
workflow is still better just using displacement and weights inside blender....once you get used to it you would ask yourself why you would bother buying a 3rd party piece of software...I would never do that.
I have to say, this seems more like an infomercial.
I have done my fair share of displacement work in Blender and Gaea is infinitely faster and more convenient, with realistic Erosion and all. I have been waiting for version 2 for a long time and decided to this tutorial in excitement. I do not run any affiliate with Quadspinner and this video had no commercials. So… yeah 🤷🏻♂️
@@MartinKlekner fair enough. To each his own, my point is still the same.
as far as the "infomercial" that is just how it comes acrss to me. In a world where blender and FOSS in general is and was(should be) about freedom..all of a sudden I am seeing this tremendous push for asset stores across the board. It might just be my personal politics, but I feel free should be freedom for knowledge and expression. The blender market is a big push against this. If people want to create and sell, fine...but the blender market seems like the wrong direction. I refuse to pay for any addon. either I will make it myself or just use the tools available to me...but not everyone has this option.
@@nowherebrain thats just plain dumb. gaea is one of the most fair and accessible softwares in this money-focused industry. its a one time payment and you own it for life. on top of that, there's no way to replicate what gaea does in blender without significant more time and effort and potentially paid addons. you cant expect an foss general 3d package to compete with a specific software designed for a specific purpose.
@@aeonbreak4728 ok, just using regular old blender is still cheaper and easily as or more powerful. it's the artist not the brush..call me stupid all you want...you are just using a qualifier to discredit me, so...meh..in the end it's a meaningless argument.
Saying blender is unable to do all those things out of the box is what is actually ignorant....just because YOU cannot do it does not mean a person cannot do it.
Besides the foundation of blender has always been about making quality production software that is free so it could be for everyone....not to pay for stuff...ignorant.
I was just wondering does thing work with other 3D software like maya ?
Of course, the importing would work similar, though I myself am not a Maya user.