Gaia has the ability to apply masks to a texture spawner - you could do your base texture spawn and then enhance it with another masked texture based around say some perlin noise.
I did something similar to this to apply flow and deposition maps that were generated in WM to a pre textured terrain and was super happy with the results.
I will be rounding out the basic spawner videos this week, and do some more advanced videos next week, and will show some of these techniques off.
Hmmm, yes, something like one or more perlin noise maps perhaps?
Yeah this is the effect Iām after too. It can make a huge difference to the overall terrain, especially when the terrain is mostly flat. Textures based on height never seem to work well on a flat terrain, because you end up with āringsā. The only issue with this is about the heightmaps, which donāt look good being blended. There is this shader Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making not sure if it would be needed though if it could be done in Gaia.
The type of effect with the textures Iām after is this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cAmL0_gE6ac/maxresdefault.jpg
Would fantastic if there could be some type of tutorial for this if itās possible to do in Gaia.
Gaia already does it that way so those shaders really are not needed.
Not sure why you are not seeing the textures blending well. Mine have always blended with Gaia, better than anything else I have used. You need to use the curves though so you get blending at the edge where the two different textures meet. Based on the steepness of your curve, you should see different degrees of blending. I suggest playing around with it a bit.
I also suggest a noise brush, there is a free one on the asset store, rather than perfectly flat terrain. Then you can more easily adjust each texture placement slightly so you get blending and mixing of the different textures. Consider a real terrain area. You have some areas that are slightly lower, where some mud might collect, some areas a little higher that might have drier grass, while greener grass may grow in the lower areas. Sand might collect along slight slopes. So if you give your terrain a little noise, you will see a more realistic result.
Sediments on a terrain do not just land in random patches. There is a reason they are there. Maybe they were washed through a little gully or blew in on the wind. Or maybe a depression has revealed the soil layers beneath.
As for the picture you showed for the asset, the only way to get your terrain to look like that is to use a mask to create the path. Gaia can use masks. Make sure you use fall off at the edge of the masked area if you want blending. Should work that way.
I think it would be fun to try this - when i get a moment will see what I can do. I also have some ideas on how to dramatically reduce tiling issues but thatās a roadmap thing 
No time like the present
So with about 20 mins of playing here is what I created from scratch.
Steps to recreate:
5, And finally i added some grass, and some camera effects and took the shot you see above.
Simple and very effective. The key to making it work is to remember that every time you spawn a texture layer, it paints over the top of what was already there.
Yeah, the masking in Gaia is extremely powerful to break any unnatural areas. Perlin noise is good for it, but sometimes something with harder edges is good too ā¦ preferably a random combination of soft and hard.
As Telia pointed out patches in terrains arenāt normally random, although game making normally is as its an illusion. But masks from colormaps, and heightmaps are all useful to define some āreasonā why certain textures are in certain reasons. Often the best is being artistic in gimp (or PS) and combining resources you have across layers with things like perlin etc, then using that as a mask.
New feature coming to next release of Gaia - Clustered Detail Spawners - easily create natural clusters of flowers. You already have this - but have added a pre-configured helper to the advanced menu
Am I right in thinking I could use the procedural spawners on any old mesh collider?
I have something that is procedurally generated and would dearly love to sparsely populate the area via the spawners.
I realise it may be somewhat off-plan but I thought I would ask since it is clearly a very useful purposing of the tool.
Many thanks
Hmmm - nope. Gaia can only spawn into and onto Unity terrain.
One thing you might consider is making a stamp from your mesh. Then creating a terrain from it. Then spawning game objects, then deleting the terrain but keeping the spawned objects - that ought to get a lot of the work done for you.
twobob and AdamGoodrich, since there are other assets being noted for use with Gaia, a fantastic one for twobobās procedural placement on procedural object meshes and terrains might be MegaScatter. Iām not affiliated with them but, I wish someone had pointed me at the asset sooner. Huge help for low draw call procedurally placed assets.
Mega Scatter - Asset Store check out the video MegaScatter for Unity First Look - YouTube the docs are at MegaScatter Ā« MegaFiers the Asset description states:
MegaScatter can scatter objects in any kind of scene onto any kind of objects, so you can use it with Unity terrains or just normal mesh scenes so will work across all platforms and works with both Unity Free and Unity Pro.
Wish someone had turned me onto MegaScatter sooner,
For roads and paths, MegaShapes - Terrain Carve - YouTube Megashapes can make amazing roads and paths. Itās a huge time saver and the results are amazing.
Gaia has redefined terrains in Unity. Love seeing all these inspirational terrain selfies!
Itās the only selfie I ever take
Another cool technique - using flow, wear and deposition masks from World Machine to control where trees spawn i.e. Water based Spawning!
World machine setup:
Gaia setup - chose to mask based on flow:
And the end result is lovely
An extension to this technique - using flow and deposition maps and stamper Stencil Mode to shape the terrain.
Here is the flow and deposition map, with the area i am interested already masked and selected in white - this was done with Photoshop:
Here is the masked image with all the other stuff removed - so we essentially now have a greyscale height map:
Here is the terrain prior to applying the stencilled stamp:
Here is that masked stencil set to -34 meters. This means that a 34 meter trench will be dug at the whitest point on the mask - i have used normalise on the mask to ensure i get its full dynamic range:
Here is the same mask - but the stencil is this time set to +89 meters. Which means the terrain will be raised 89 meters at the highest point on the mask image:
And ground level:
Its a powerful technique to precisely control where a stencil will be applied. The stamp used was the For Masked Stencil stamp in the AdHoc directory.
Lovely results @AdamGoodrich
Thanks Adam, thatās perfect! Iāll give it a shot later today. Telia, it wasnāt so much the blending I was saying, it was the adding āpatchesā of different terrain, exactly what Adam has done in post #1587, in the pictures in the forth step. Although I havenāt noticed the problem with heightmap blending, I imagined it would be a problem because if two or more heightmaps were blended then essentially youāre going to lose the quality of the heightmap, the only way to fix this would be a shader like the one I linked to, which automatically uses the strongest textures heightmap and discards the other. But this was just an assumption, Iām not really sure how heightmaps work when blended. Regarding what you say about the texture based on patches vs height , Iām 99% sure that Adamās solutions will fix that, so Iāll post later to show what I meant.
Also Adam that effect youāve just posted looks fantastic too! Thatās also effect Iām after so Iāll give it a try after Iāve followed your texturing tutorial. I did a search for the flow and deposition heightmap and found only one in Google. Is there a better search term I could use, or did you create it in Photoshop?
I just bought the asset and I was trying to follow the tutorial, but I got some errors while I tried to run the game. Can somebody help me to correct the errors?
Yeap - i used a bunch of techniques to make the boring aspects of the original terrain more interesting i.e. I added detail - and the way i did this was with creative use of raise, lower, stencil and mask based stamping.
The flow, wear and deposition maps, along with that original heightmap were created using World Machine. I created it, then exported as a heightmap as a Windows r16 raw file, and a png based bitmap - as you can see in post 1594. Then I imported into Gaia as a stamp, stamped, and then followed the usual texturing process.
Because this scene is using RTP i chose to have 8 textures rendered in one pass - so i used the visualiser to tweak the rules for each texture and a texture spawner to texture it.
Then i was unhappy with the bland eroded valleys, so i used a hills stamp and miminised the height to add some more detail.
The i reset the texture spawner and re spawnerd - that took care of that and its looking very nice now.
Now am playing around with different spawners to get different resultsā¦ for example there is a lake detritus game object spawner that scatters stuff semi randomly around the lake.
This will be a 4km by 4km environment when we are done - and I will show of images as we go.
No i mean although i used the visualiser and checked all my setting to have rock texture only on a close to 90 degree slope there were placed where it was on a face that have a normal facing up. I any case i tweaked all the textures (checked and altered slightly with the visualiser a,d also realized i have accidentally changed a texture to be the same as another, how? i think i hit the + then deleted the wrong one) - been a bit sleep deprived i think!
The stretching is a normal side effect of the nature of Height maps i know (started with heightmaps back in Game Dev College over 10 years ago we made a heightmap āengineā) I have yet to re-visit RTP instructions on fixing that - one of the reasons RTP was purchased!
EDIT: I started to look into RTP (which i own) for Cliff facesā¦ found the video back about Stickied Meshesā¦ only i see it requires blender and some modelling effectivelyā¦ disappointed because that is beyond me, Blender is very user friendly i think.
Excellent Adam, thanks for that. Although I donāt have World Machine or RTP, Iām quite sure I can replicate to some extent what you did here, Iāll give it a shot later today.
