GeNa - Sophisticated procedural content spawner

What is GeNa?

GeNa is the swiss army knife of spawning systems, enabling the rapid creation of gorgeous looking environments.

GeNa gives you the flexibility to go fully procedural or fully manual or somewhere in between and cuts days and weeks out of level generation.

GeNa makes your environments look more natural and reduces ‘designer fatigue’ with its powerful nature based spawning algorithms.

GeNa reduces bake times in some cases to zero, and can improve frame rates and lighting quality through its automated prefab optimization system.

GeNa will spawn on mesh and terrain based environments, and is compatible with single or multi-tile terrains. GeNa is of course the perfect companion to Gaia!

How is GeNa different to Gaia?

Gaia and GeNa share the ability to spawn things into your terrain, however, GeNa takes the spawning system to a whole new level and adds in some killer new features like the optimization system that takes literally hours off your bake time while also improve lighting and frame rates.

One of the key differences between Gaia and GeNa is GeNa’s ability to sample the environment you click on, and then select similar area’s within the criteria you set in which to spawn your target objects. It’s an entirely new way to work and is incredibly intuitive.

Here is a more exhaustive list of the differences between Gaia and GeNa:

  • Sculpt terrain - Gaia yes, GeNa no
  • Texture terrain - Gaia yes, Gena no
  • Simple scene setup with water, player, wind and lighting - Gaia yes, GeNa no
  • Spawn grass, trees and prefabs on terrain - Gaia yes, GeNa yes
  • Spawn sophisticated collections of prefabs on terrain - Gaia yes, GeNa yes
  • Sophisticated image based masking - Gaia yes, GeNa yes
  • Sophisticated colour-map based masking - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Spawns on meshes - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Global and local spawning - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Click based spawn positioning - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Composable spawners - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Clickable spawn criteria configuration - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Real-time spawn criteria visualization - Gaia partial, GeNa yes
  • Automated prefab performance optimization - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Automated light probe placement and optimization - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Gravity based spawning system - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Fence and wall building system - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Fine grained spawn placement tuning - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Save and re-use spawners as prefabs - Gaia no, GeNa yes
  • Run-time spawning - Gaia - partial, GeNa yes

You can think of Gaia as a wide roller brush designed to do entire terrains whereas GeNa is the precision tool to add in the details and optimize them. Your typical workflow would be to use Gaia (or your tool of choice) to sculpt and texture your terrain and then hand over to GeNa to do the rest. Why ? GeNa’s spawning system is precise, faster and easier to setup and spawn, and is more intuitive to use.

Key Features:

  • Fast intuitive setup;
  • Optimization system - reduces bake time, improves frame rate and lighting;
  • Works with terrains or meshes (including walls and spheres);
  • Works with single or multiple terrain tiles;
  • Spawns grasses, trees or prefabs
  • Spawns individual items;
  • Spawns complex structures;
  • Spawns locally or across entire scenes;
  • Design time or runtime spawning;
  • Precision placement modification;
  • Save your spawners as prefabs for re-use;
  • Amazing gravity simulation;
  • Rock ledge and rock wall building;
  • Cool fence building system;
  • Multiple spawn algorithms.

Multiple Spawn Algorithms:

  • Organic;
  • Clustered;
  • Last location;
  • Every location;
  • Local spawns;
  • Global spawns;
  • Image and noise masking;
  • Gravity!

Documentation:

Here is the version by version documentation for Gena.

Tutorials:

Here are the tutorials for GeNa. Be sure to come back often as these tutorials are added to regularly.

Video Playlist:

Asset Store:

Check GeNa out : Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

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Here are some images of scenes created with Gaia and GeNa!

More coming soon!

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Intriguing. Procedural content spawner. Would be great if it somehow could address the issue that even though I use Gaia and the pre-made stuff from Cobus assets, setting up a working game environment still take quite some time. Both indoor and outdoor. Time will tell.

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Its just gone live - i am travelling for Unite so its hard to do video’s - but they will arrive in the next week.

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I bought Gaia at launch and I loved it. I can trust on the quality of Adam’s Assets, so I believe GeNa will be no different.

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Congrats on the release Adam, I’ll definitely pick this up this week!

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Thank you :slight_smile:

While GeNa in no way devalues Gaia, it brings a bunch to the table that Gaia doesn’t have, and from a configuration perspective is super light weight - pretty much drag and drop.

I really do love using Gena - and have had similar and consistent feedback from the beta group :slight_smile:

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It has finally arrived. I am looking forward to using it.

Since there aro no documentation and video, I’m not sure how is this system different from Gaia default spawn system.

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And next week discount is over :frowning: I hope you will extend the discount a few days so we can decide after seeing the docs and workflow videos about buying it.

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Released almost a year to the day that Gaia came out :slight_smile: Looking forward to what you release in October 2017 !

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any video shows how to use this asset

Sounds intriguing, but I’m with others about seeing a video. We need to see it in action to make a purchase decision.

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This really comes in handy as I still haven’t decided which terrain generator I will use. Already bought it :slight_smile:

can you make a video showing its features

Hey everyone,

Hey everyone, @AdamGoodrich has just released GeNa

Go grab GeNa, the latest package from @AdamGoodrich , the creator of Gaia

It is on a -50% , 7 day launch special
Even at $50, I would gladly buy it for the time alone it is going to save me.

Congrats @AdamGoodrich !!!

@AdamGoodrich flew of to Unite Aus and was tight for time that is what the vids are not up yet.

As with Gaia, you can expect to see just the best when it comes to ease of use and tutorial videos
It has a very comprehensive 63 page .pdf document included with the package.

It is very different in the range of functions that it has.
It is done to be used with whatever Terrain creation tools you are using to carve your game-world with.
It does work very well with Gaia, but will work as good with World Creator, TC2 and anything else that spits out Unity Terrain or even works perfect for mesh.
It is not just a terrain tool.
You can plant/paint grass onto the roofs of houses, add ivy to pillars or up the side of a castle wall
Very useful mask by colour spawning, like splat-maps
So have the pathways in your village drawn in one colour, then add varying thickness lines on the edges of the paths in another colour.

Then with GeNa to that last edge line add small rocks, one or two grass types and other small environmental placable prefabs and when you spawn that in the spot where you control and want you village with whatever brush-size, it will place all that with the randomness and settings that you chose and paint that one go with neat consistency

With the size by Alpha map, you can say where the river edge is edit the alpha so that the plants that spawn on the edge of the river because there is water, spawn large Cats Tails or whatever grass you added to that mask.

Or in the valleys of mountains spawn larger trees.
Your imagination is the limit when thinking or ways to leverage this tool-set

And this is spawning of ANY prefab, not just nature related, onto terrain or other mesh

Cheers
Cobus

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@S4G4N Thanks for pointing this out as I had all of this in mind when I bought this asset. The part with the pathways makes it even much better for me.

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One must just think out the box :slight_smile:

Will be so cool, nice small rocks, pebbles and dry grass all added to same colour, all can be spawned one go and will have a nice constancy.
Now procedural has it’s limits, so afterwards to can go add some here, remove some there and you have a very good looking result.

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saw - bought :slight_smile: Video is not enough …

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As with Gaia, you can expect to see just the best when it comes to ease of use and tutorial videos
It has a very comprehensive 63 page .pdf document included with the package.

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