QUADSPINNER GAEA
We give our verdict on this terrain creation suite
| | Price $99 (Indie) / $199 (Professional) / $299 (Enterprise) DEVELOPER Quadspinner WEBSITE www.quadspinner.com
When you read the Quadspinner About page, they talk a big game about being dedicated to creating tools and technologies that provide artists and studios expediency and realism in environment design. In earlier incarnations, they did this successfully with the Helios plugin for Vue, and the Geoglyph plugin for World Machine. Standing on the shoulders of Geoglyph is their new offering: Gaea, a standalone CPU and Openclbased terrain generator aimed at studio, indie and hobbyist workflows.
The first impression after initial install is the ease of creation from scratch, regardless of how pretty the quick-start terrains are. So, for me, the first stand-out feature in Gaea is the speed at which you can generate beautiful and complex terrains, and the quality of them in sizes ranging from 1 to 8K – although you may need some hardware muscle if you decide to actually work in 8K.
The second standout for me is the straightforwardness of the multi-discipline workflow. Using a context-sensitive UI, Gaea sports layered and nodebased workflows as well as the ability to manually sculpt using the Directed Erosion workflow. This is currently available in the standalone Erosion Editor, which is specifically tailored for working with large terrains in need of a lot of detailing, like film or game environments. The Directed Erosion feature gives advanced as well as novice users an amount of creative control I have not seen in other similar applications, like World Machine or World Creator 2. Whereas these two applications still heavily rely on procedurals and endless tweaking to get where you want to with your terrain, Gaea saves you time and effort by making this easy. Simply create your terrain, save it out as a supported bitmap, send it to the Erosion Editor, define your Directed Erosion and its resolution, and dive into sculpting it.
The currently available options in Erosion Tools and their Properties enable you to pretty much hand-sculpt anything with your brush, ranging from soil and rocks to flowlines and erosive breakdowns. For me, Directed Erosion is a much more natural and effortless workflow in the real-time viewport – rather than spinning the spinners or sliders in the competing
“Gaea saves you time and effort. simply Create your terrain, save it out as a supported bitmap, send it to the erosion editor, define your directed erosion and its Resolution, and dive into sculpting it”
applications – and I also really enjoyed working with the graph workflow itself. Compared to Substance Designer or World Machine, it has a much broader set of nodes, and it’s also easier to keep them tidy thanks to the Valve-inspired Portal nodes, where an ‘In’ sequence is orange, and an ‘Out’ sequence is blue. Add to that wire customisation and Auto Connect functions, as well as a predictive value function to save you even more time, and you actually do have a node graph that’s easy and intuitive to really dig into.
The third and final stand-out feature for me has to be the fact that the Gaea team have taken the time to create a Post Process stack; their research showed that a lot of terraincreation nodes by right should be called filters instead. So instead of adding these to the node stack itself, they were added to a Post Process stack, which mostly uses the parallel processing power in your CPU to handle functionality like Slope/altitude Masking, Invert, Clamping, Clipping and more.
In addition, it sports all the usual terrain export tools for studio and game engine work, including tiling, HDR outputs, coloured/biome outputs, various map-specific options, and generally anything they could come up with in a visually pleasing package.
For me, as a user, this was one of the most inventive applications I have reviewed in a long, long time. I love how it invites me to create, and that they have thought about user workflows from A to Z, and then went outside of some of the usual boxes with these and came up with something unique. I think Gaea offers something for everyone, from game studios needing a robust and fast terrain generator, to VFX studios needing superdetailed high-res terrains, to Joe Average, who just wants to create a landscape render on his current hardware. It seems Quadspinner kept their homepage promise, and then some.