Quadspinner has announced the release of Gaea 1.3, a major update to its standalone landscape modelling and texturing tool. New features include:
- Improvements to stability and performance in some cases up to 30% faster compared to version 1.2
- A new Rivers node that is able to create large intricate river networks.
- Several new nodes including Canyon, Craterfield, Distance, Driftnoise, Gabo, Hill, Loop, Repeat, Rivers, Rocky, Rugged, Sea, Seamless, Slump, SoftClip, Sunlight and Wizard.
- Inset and Embed modes in the Combine node introduce new ways to merge two terrains.
- A new “Sophia Engine” for meshing terrains that creates highly optimised meshes. In some cases reducing poly counts by up to 60%.
- A new Wizard node that offers a new way to use Gaea’s erosion simulation through an easier interface with simple choices, and built-in recipes and passes.
- Sediment Removal added to the Erosion, Wizard, and Thermal nodes that can arbitrarily remove sediments generated from the erosive process to reveal deep crevices.
- ThermalShaper that produces shapes close to a thermal erosion simulation.
- A new Seamless node that can transform any terrain into a repeatable/tileable one.
- Over 110 new quickstart files.
- A new turntable animator.
- The ability to exceed the 8k build restriction by breaking the landscape into smaller tiles.
- A rewritten build swarm that’s more efficient and releases unused memory faster.
- Several altitude sensitive parameters now have a height picker for selecting a value directly from the mesh.
- Atmospheric perspective in the skybox.
- The ability to run loops with LoopBegin and LoopEnd utility nodes.
Read more about these features in the Gaea blog.
Wow. Some life signs with this software. I do very much love its erosion models, but I also have experienced so much issue’s with stability, speed and NodeUI/Viewport updating. Hopefully that will be something they will continue to work on to improve. For now the new tiling options are very much welcome.
Hopefully Gaea will be better – as you mentioned, the stability was really bad. Used it the whole evening now and I just got one crash. So far, so good.
But still, it feels still like “scam”. Scam here is a really hard word, because there are also awesome features in there, but the new tiling options were announced several years ago and this was one of the reasons to buy this software. Also, still in the days, there was also a mesh import option. Also a reason to buy this but well.. never seen again. I asked the developer why this feature is deprecated (per support mail and in the forum) and all I’ve got was silence and the thread was deleted.
Anyway – hopefully this changes now and I am looking forward 🙂
Nevermind. Gaea is still not deterministic. Don’t you dare to build your terrain a second time…
Unfortunately yes. Sad because the new nodes are really nice.