Community Poll: If You Could Only Choose One

[TyXanders]

Gaea 3 is shaping up to be a substantial evolution, with improvements across terrain generation, workflows, rendering, and performance.

But here’s your challenge…

You can only pick ONE feature you’re most excited about.

Which one are you choosing?

If you could only choose one…

• GPU Acceleration & Faster Performance
• New Terrain Generation Tools
• Improved Material & Texture Workflow
• Better Ecosystem / Scatter Systems
• Water, Erosion & Geological Simulation
• Atmosphere, Clouds & Rendering Improvements
• Node Workflow & UX Improvements
• Better Export Pipeline ( Bridges etc.)
• Procedural Automation & Smart Workflows
• Easter Eggs
• Something Else (Tell us in the comments!)

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Tell us why!

After voting, feel free to leave a comment explaining why that feature tops your list.

• Is it something that will save you hours?

• Will it unlock projects you couldn’t make before?

• Is it simply the feature you’ve been waiting years to see and just can’t wait to get your mitts on?

It’ll be interesting to see where the community’s priorities are, and whether artists, game developers, and VFX creators vote differently.

[Kosvid]

Oh man. This is not fair!

Well, it depends on whether it’s “pick one for the next 5 months” or “pick one as the only development of Gaea 3”. Most of these come together, obviously. :) I want to see advanced simulation, but if it’s full CPU and one node would take 80 seconds to rebuild after each tweak, it wouldn’t be too fun. And then you have to export it, and subdivision texturing and exporting have been massive pain points to me personally. Unexported terrains don’t do much. :P

But what I’d genuinely be the most excited about, not *relieved*, would be new simulations. Stream erosion/exposure, land splitting simulation (breakage to chunks, landslides, cracking simulation based on the actual geometry), dunes, maybe something else. Actual water simulation that could go more along slopes instead of semi-shortest path towards the gravity centre. And I’d love to see “rock hardness” inputs as controls to feed into erosion (for the simulation, not just to mask it out). Definitely that kind of stuff. Primitives and shapes all can be built as long as there are required processes for them present. So those would bring the most options and freedom imaginable.

So, expansion of possibilities is the most exciting to me. Of course I’d love to see half of that list… But if I were to choose, I’d pick new features, and after those, hopefully, optimisation where possible (determinism for texturing/exporting and GPU usage in the first place).

[Malkosh_Art]

I was going to vote for GPU, but if we can make terrains like concave areas like inside crevasse and the rock formations we see on beaches where it has holes in the middle instead of height only, I would love to help in any way instead of demanding new tools and features. Thanks for your hard work.

[Hypoxic125]

Linux Release

[theotherpotato]

“New Terrain Generation Tools” seems to capture the basic reason why I am using Gaea. It’s a purpose built tool for making landscapes. But, things that simulate different processes (sand, snow, rivers, debris) add a bit of logic to the landscape so that it’s not just procedural or random. We already have things like debris, but I can’t wait for a proper sand/dune simulation.

I wouldn’t mind a Mac version, but Gaea runs well on a potato laptop CPU so maybe it’s all fine.

Proper overhangs, shear cliffs, even cave simulations would be interesting (although the latter sounds like completely different software). Better options for highly detailed micro-environments (i.e., for a playable area in a game) as Gaea is built best for large, sweeping landscapes.

[irdc]

Definitely breaking out of the square and being able create in World Space.

[KageBagua]

Why Dunes ofcoure. They need their own option.

[ChampionX1001]

This would be generational. It would directly compete with the capabilities of UE5’s MeshTerrain system (minus the fact that MeshTerrain isn’t a terrain generator). Gaea is based on a heightmap engine of course, so this feature would probably require a lot of engine rewriting and whole lot of work in general, but if Gaea could support such a thing, wow… the possibilities would be endless.

[ChampionX1001]

Gaea 3 is adding a Sand simulation node which can be used to create dunes on top of your existing terrains. It should be a lot more powerful than the existing DuneSea node. That will scratch an itch I’ve been having for months

[TyXanders]

It’s going to be so fun to play with I’ll probably end up doing less work

[Chronichiker]

As others have said: Dunes!
“My Desert. My Arakkis. My Dune.”

[Malkosh_Art]

I understand the idea of having to rewrite architecture of the software but the sooner the better, I used to work on Lightwave 3D in its heyday then changed to Modo and at the end what killed modo I think was the architecture that had to be changed too late while other apps like UE that you just mentioned already had stepped up in multiple areas vastly.. I’m not aware of all that magic that goes into it, but I get it.

What I find annoying is having to use 2-3 apps for one thing and thats why I use Gaea, Cascadeur and Blender I would say other apps if I could afford them.. you know what I’m saying. So why not have something from Quadspinner that focuses on these markets that are still lacking, you’d have to be a pro at Houdini to do a simple terrain creation like what you do here, with all my admiration for Houdini I could never get into it becuase of the complex node naming and coding I guess. As a visualizing designer, I am bad at coding and too lazy to learn it for creating a small part of my projects.

I have to say that I always would back the software I’m using since it innovates in many ways. My post is to encourage that.

[TyXanders]

For art, I’ve always found that I need a collection of software, and I’m okay with that.
It’s never really been any different for me because creative work has such varied needs and my general skills are as wide as they are deep ( why didn’t I just study to be a Dr
XD).

These days for me it’s mostly about workflows and production pipelines.
The mindset of,
“I need software that does X, Y, and Z, with enough extensibility to fit my workflow”,
tends to work well.

As someone who owns and operates businesses, I genuinely need tools that fit into a reliable production cycle. Ones I can learn, teach, maintain, and build workflows around.
These tends to scale really well like, viewing the whole thing or scoping into certain ops and looking for improvements ( Google maps ).

An underlying technology (like, heightfields) is what it is, and every approach comes with tradeoffs hence the stack continues to grow.

Developers deal with that every day too.
Data in > processing > data out.
The processing is where the features and value of the software genuinely are.

If you want to fundamentally change the type of data being processed,

for example HF > Voxel, moving from a heightfield 2.5D workflow to true 3D volumetric or voxel-based terrain that supports caves, overhangs, and enclosed spaces, isn’t just another feature even if it seems obvious.

It often requires a different processing pipeline and sometimes significant architectural changes.
That’s why we end up with new tools, entirely new software, new companies, or major new modules within existing software like Engines, DCCs, DAWs, IDEs, etc.

Personally, I prefer modular software. A focused core with solid fundamentals is more valuable to me, and as long as data moves in and out cleanly, I can use its modules or another tool when it makes sense.
In the sense of Gaea, it’s extremely data rich, which has so many outbound use cases, and I just really enjoy using it, you don’t often find
“the software is really fun to use”.

[Malkosh_Art]

Makes sense. Do you think a supporting plugin or companion tool for that could happen down the line, or would that be unwise at this stage? I get that this can’t happen overnight, and that Gaea’s core and architecture are built around heightfields. I do enjoy it a lot, like you said, the modular nature and rich data handling are a big part of that. Cheers.

btw, I wonder what you meant with your vote as Easter Eggs haha! Can’t wait to see the update.

[TyXanders]

I suppose anything is possible but it would totally depend on markets and viability. The tech industry is in a pretty weird place right now as well, usually that means lean into it instead of wait for it to pass ( for example look at what happened during COVID when tech leaned in)

As for Easter Eggs, the lead Architect put Easter eggs in both G1 and G2.
Like IDDQD and crocodile in the console.

The latter was a journey for me to become the first one to find it, a challenge set by Dax.

I kinda dig the idea. I used to do city wide events and ARGs in my first company. And will definitely do them again, this resonates with those ideas of just making things and thinking of doing something niche but fun for others.

[Lumen]

The new physics simulation system was the main reason I chose to upgrade to Gaea 3, and it’s also what makes Gaea software so captivating. An excellent development team delivers excellent software. I hope to see more and more professional simulation systems, even complete ecological simulations. I’m particularly looking forward to future versions of Gaea (or Gaea 4) for simulations like wind erosion, riverbeds, swamps, gravity collapse, freeze-thaw weathering, and even temperature differences.

[xyz]

Water, Erosion & Geological Simulation, no contest. That’s literally what makes Gaea different from every other terrain tool: it’s not just sculpting a shape that looks like a mountain, it’s simulating the actual process that carves it (water flow, sediment, rock hardness, weathering). That’s the core of the software.

Ecosystem/scatter systems would be my second pick because they build directly on that. Real vegetation follows slope, moisture, altitude, whatever the erosion sim already calculated. Even just grass coverage simulation is useful for texturing later, knowing where grass would actually grow versus bare rock or dirt gives a real basis for blending materials instead of guessing.

Right now we mostly rely on slope angle and altitude to estimate where rocks would be exposed, which is pretty indirect. It would be nice if the simulation could output that more directly. If the erosion sim already knows where sediment got stripped away and bedrock got exposed, it could give us a clean rock mask straight from that data instead of us rebuilding it with curvature and slope nodes. Same idea for scatter, having the simulation hand us usable masks would save a lot of guesswork.

Everything else feels like nice to have polish. GPU speed, export bridges, node UX, all fine, but not really the core of what Gaea is for.

[HuntingFluff]

It’s all about the Vector Tools for me! I hope they prove to be great for making roads which is one of the main things I feel is missing right now. Currently, we bring in a mask created elsewhere and then blend that with the terrain. It works fairly well but I hope that Vector Tools give us more flexibility and options on that front (especially in terms of how the splines are integrated with the surrounding terrain etc).