SOFTWARE: GAEA 1.2.8

Common user question across the boards

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills

Cirstyn Bech-Yagher replies

Speed up your look development in Gaea

Before we start exploring look development in Gaea 1.2.8 via the LookDev nodes, let’s take a quick peek at how you work with the application’s procedural workflow. Like Substance Designer, Gaea is node-based. You have the node menu (the Toolbox) on the bottom left, the node graph view in the middle, the node properties display on the right when you click a node, and the viewport shows your terrain and your tweaks, as well as a toolbar enabling you to adjust lighting and add water. Finally, the file menu lets you change resolution, save, open, undo as well as the usual file menu commands.

Creating a terrain is simple: a new project will always start with basic Mountain and Erosion nodes unless you’ve defined otherwise. Should you want to generate terrains from scratch, it’s worth remembering you always need a starting point. You will find those in the Toolbox by either grabbing a Primitive or GeoPrimitive node and dropping it in the node graph view. The Primitives are a mix of fractal noise, drawing, cracks, and constant nodes, while the GeoPrimitives are basic terrain types like mountains, hills, craters, dunes or islands. And you can, of course, mix these together in as many ways as you’d like, but the important thing to remember is that you can’t Erode, Filter, Adjust, LookDev or anything else if there’s nothing to do that on. You add nodes in the node view by right-clicking a connection point on a node or dragging and dropping one onto another node.