Rewritten Engine, New Terrain Tools & UE5 Bridge: Gaea 2.0 Unveiled

Software development team QuadSpinner has recently shared a comprehensive blog post providing a closer look at the upcoming major 2.0 update for Gaea, the company's terrain design tool for environment art, games, and virtual experiences.

Aiming to redefine 3D terrain creation, the massive 2.0 release will feature a completely overhauled engine, new terrain and erosion tools, an Unreal Engine 5 bridge, and more, all while retaining the beloved workflow and tools present in the existing version of Gaea.

The highlight of Gaea 2.0 is its overhauled engine, completely rewritten by the team to offer efficiency and performance improvements. According to the team, the new version of the engine allows them to quickly and easily add new tools to Gaea and enables the users to create their own using macros, scripting, and compiled nodes via Gaea Engine SDK.

Gaea 2.0's engine features:

• Faster algorithm processing.
• New physics and simulations.
• Redesigned nodes.
• New shapes and processes.
• Node modifiers.
• GPU-enabled processes with CPU fallbacks.
• And more!

Another amazing addition is Erosion 2.0, the latest erosion algorithm that offers new possibilities in
terrain design. As stated by QuadSpinner, Erosion 2.0 works in tandem with the existing Erosion, opening doors to previously unavailable shapes and better preservation of the original terrain character.

The new system offers advanced erosion capabilities, enhanced control for nuanced detailing, up to 10x performance boost compared to Gaea's previous Erosion algorithm, and fully deterministic operations without performance loss.

The software's terrain creation pipeline has also been upgraded with Workflow 2.0 which comes with such features as God Mode, Hybrid Builds, and Team Terrains. Workflow 2.0 includes novel visual tools for assembling large worlds, multi-user collaboration on expansive terrains, source control integration, infinite "base" terrains, and seamless terrain merging.

On top of that, Gaea 2.0 will introduce a fully-fledged Unreal Engine 5 bridge designed to make importing, re-importing, and terrain modification more easy and straightforward. The team revealed that the bridge can automatically import the terrain and set it up with the right materials and masks. Moreover, you can expose specific properties from your Gaea terrain and edit them without having to leave Unreal.

Gaea 2.0 is set to be released in Q1 2024, with the Early Access period set to commence two months prior to the release. Much like the current version of Gaea, the new version will be available via a perpetual license. You can read the full overview and learn more about Gaea 2.0 by clicking this link.

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