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