in this video we'll be using Gaia 2 to create these detailed desert inclines we'll start off with an empty scene and we're first going to create a linear gradient this is going to give us a slope or a slant that we can control by using this scale to start creating our terrain and usually the very first thing that I would do here is set the edge Behavior to something like clip that way if you were to make this a a more steep incline it flattens out the top and the bottom but in this case we probably won't even need to do that so we'll just start off right away with leaving at default values of one and we're going to also create a ridge node so I'm going to right click and create Ridge and this Ridge node is going to give us some interesting breakup and we're going to use this breakup to add details into our linear gradient so with this Ridge node what we're going to end up doing is combining these two things together so we'll use a combin node and we'll combine our linear gradient with our Ridge node and we're going to set it to add with a value of one and now you can see those details start to get infused into our slope or our linear gradient one last thing I'll do to kind of make this a little bit more uh interesting and a bit more detailed is I'm actually going to connect my Ridge node to the linear gradient so it adds those details uh with that linear gradient as a base and then what I'm also going to do is on the ridge node I will select it and do a auto level so it makes it much more intense and that way when I preview this combin node I'll press uh f for lock preview and G for uses underlay so I can view that node I can see that it now kind of chips away at that slope now we will have to go in here to our Ridge node and modify some of the settings to get it to look a little bit better the way that we want so I'm going to go in here and start to play around with this scale uh maybe also even the the height and then the definition is going to be kind of how many details we're fitting in there is it lesser or more and I'll just kind of Click around and an eyeball it or kind of estimate it into something that looks pretty good and once I have that I can then preview and see kind of how it cuts away so we can play around with this and just type in random numbers for a seed if we want to try something different um and just start to to play around with it to get some nice breakup and I think this looks pretty good so I'll probably stick with this the next thing that I'm going to do is add a stratify node and this will start to add a lot lot more Rocky details so I'll connect that next and if we preview and look at that stratify node it adds all these interesting details and I'll probably have to play with the spacing and these options as well uh I probably want the spacing very very small so it just more so adds a bunch of rock detail and then octaves I can go really low as well so it's not too rigid or sharp and then tensity I'll probably leave default shape we can play a bit with that and it kind of just changes the way it looks does it kind of push in more or kind of more protrude out and we'll try to just dial in something that kind of looks okay and then for our tilt amount we can leave this default but that will kind of tilt the whole pattern but I don't think I really need to adjust that and then seed we can just kind of Click around with this and get a a look that you kind of like just put in like a random number or something and maybe that that works next I'll add a rockscape nodee and this is going to add some more Rocky details and if we look at a rockscape node by itself it just adds a bunch of of Rocky details and we can dial in those details to look kind of more like individual Pebbles or rocks or things that that might be interesting to add to our terrain so maybe I'll change the size uh to a larg size and then we could maybe adjust the breakage if we wanted to uh but I think the default looked okay I kind of want to have bigger chunks to chip away from the details that I already have so a lot of these patterns that I see here right now uh already look pretty good so I probably won't change too much more it might be nice to have some clusters so I'll do large clusters so we get some areas of of no breakup which might be useful and then I'll set the release to soft so it's not too rigid uh and this doesn't look very very good on its own um and again we could play around with the seed to get like an interesting pattern so again we can just type in like some some random number in here and see what we get I'm looking for a lot of groups and I think this works pretty good because we get quite a quite a number of clusters here maybe let's see if we can dial in a bit more I think that's kind of okay always our landscape Landing so that's the top bottom and top bottom I think that that kind of works so then what I'm going to also do is apply to this rockscape node I'm going to add a auto level and that's going to make it go crazy and super strong but that's okay because I'm going to take the stratify I'm going to use a combine and I'm going to connect the second part of that combin node the second input to the rockscape node and I'm going to add these Rock details on top of our stratify with a very small ratio something like 0.03 and add and now it's just plus some of those additional Rocky details into our slope and now we have a surface that starts to look a lot more complex now one last thing that I'm going to do here to get this to look a little bit more normal in a way cuz right now if I if I look at this it's just too much detail it just becomes like a bunch of noise so I want some areas for the eye to rest I want some areas for sand to kind of flow over this Edge and sit into to Pockets or areas so right now it feels kind of overly constructed so what I'm going to end up doing is add another combine I'm going to connect the very first input of that combine to my original combine back here that produced this shape and the second input will be going into our our latest shapes that we have and I'll set this combine to something like Max and that doesn't seem to do anything right now but if I put the ratio up to 100 what it's going to do is bring back a lot of those Rocky details uh but keep some of these areas a little bit more empty and plain like our original shapes before we added all those Rocky details so by using that Max 1.0 ratio is just going to kind of eliminate these lower areas and use our original input here our very first input so that starts to give us some areas of of relief or smoothness so it doesn't feel like it's over noisy with rock details and just to reiterate the the reason why the max combin is doing this is because Max is just going to return the higher value so when I put this in as the first input and this as the second input at whatever space on this whole thing no matter whatever space it is looking at whatever value returns High higher or further pushed out is the one that becomes the result so the reason why it flattens these areas out is because this like if we look at this corner it's like a straight line here the silhouette or the edge of it and if we look at this it kind of dips in a bit so it returns a higher value this one because it pushes out further so when we look at that combine with Max that area stays more flat cuz any section that goes below this shape or below any of these shapes of these areas just gets pretty much erased and any area that goes higher it keeps that so it's whatever the highest value is is the highest value sticking out from this this map or this map or this input and it keeps whatever the highest value is uh but in this way we can kind of get nice areas of relief next I I want some details up here at the very top because it feels a bit odd just to have that perfectly uh flat so what I'm going to do next is create another node I'm going to create some sand so I'm going to use a Dun C you could use other nodes as well but I like the the waviness this node gives us so I'm going to take that winess and maybe adjust some of those settings so on this Dune C node uh I'll go in here take a look at the parameters here and just start playing around with them to to try to get something that looks a bit more interesting so maybe what I'll do is make the height a bit more to make it a bit more noticeable maybe reduce the softness sharpness I think is probably okay and then seed we can just you know type in some random number and sure that looks good and then on top of this sand uh it'd be nice to have some stone or rocks maybe a rockscape would be good for this but I'm just going to use a Stones node because we haven't taken a look at that one yet and if I use a Stones node let's see what that does adds a bunch of these little circular stones and we can control the scale and density of those stones so maybe I can go in here and just type in some values if I want them taller increase the height if want more or less of them maybe I'll go a bit less I'll change the density and again if we want some like random value for the seed that probably looks okay so now we have our Stones we have our wavy sand we want to add that back onto what we had here so to do that I will create another combine and combine our original result with our new stones and once we've combined that um we'll we'll preview this and we'll set them out to add and 1.0 or like 100% now the one thing that you might be wondering is where are details why why aren't they really being added here and the reason for that is with our slope here this this top is becoming flat because it's already reached the max maximum height and there's a couple ways we can deal with this but the way that I'm going to deal with it is I'm going to clamp our combine before so this combine here I'm going to click on it and I'm going to clamp it and set the maximum just to a little bit lower than one something like 0.9 so it has a bit of room like 10% more room to add those additional details that I'm adding on and now I get those details so now I have all those stonik or Rocky and Sandy wavy details added on top they also are adding all those details in other areas here uh which I don't want so the next thing I'll have to do is also make a mask like a height mask so that it only adds those details to the very top so I'll go and create a height node connect that to my previous combine we'll take a look at it so I'll press F to preview it or to lock its preview and we'll have to set our height node just to isolate the very top of this slope so I'll I'll shift over my range to one and the minimum range will be something like 0.95 and fall off I probably don't need much I'm just going to set it to zero so it just Clips out that top area and use that as a mask for where I want to add the details and now those details only get added to the top and not anywhere else this is probably also another good part to probably save your scene um or save your file because even though Gaia 2 is released people are using it it is new um I don't find it very stable at the moment I I personally would probably use Gaia one um for for most things but Gaia 2 has a lot of cool features it's currently being worked on add-on with so many new things so it is fun to test out but I don't find as stable as a Gaia 1.0 or 1 Point whatever version it's on at the moment so you just want to save frequently if you are using GA to next I want an area for the the ground we have the top of the slope here or the incline it goes down and then I want a area for Sandy ground so what I'm going to do just an easy way to do this I'll add another node it's going to be a clip node and I'm just going to clip the bottom so I'm just going to go in here and set my my minimum to 25 so anything pretty much below that just becomes flat and if I preview that there we go just Clips away anything kind of below that value and I have like a bit of an area to add some sand and maybe I'll change my lighting I'll go in here and just swing around the lighting a bit so I could see these shapes a bit better and then uh start to work on this and I'm still only using 1K preview resolution uh I don't think we need to that yet but eventually we will but the next thing that I'm going to do now is add some erosion to make this feel more natural so I'll add a erosion 2 and I'll place that here I'll preview it okay that's a bit too much on some of these areas but I like what it does at the the base here it kind of makes it feel more Sandy so I'll play around with some of these settings maybe I'll go to rosan scale and just crank it up since I'm working with a a smaller area it's not meant to be too large of a a landscape at this point and then see it again we can just kind of Click around or just type in a a random number or something and see what it gives us and then just play around with a bit more of these settings if you really want to kind of dive into it like we can play around with this and kind of see how that changes maybe if I Max it out see the bed angle try 11.45 I want a lot of flows coming down here of sand kind of going off the the top of this and kind of settling and working its way down to the bottom so maybe just go in here and just play around some these settings and try to get those large flows going from top to bottom but really you can eyeball it you can also get technical about it but I think here I just want it to feel Sandy especially at the bottom here and once I have something like that I like how this bottom is I don't like what it does to the top here so if I really want to control this I'll take this erosion um I'll also take a height node to do another mask on that height node maybe I only mask the base of this so I start from Zer and maybe go to 0.03 so we just get the B and fall off I can make it fairly gradual and then use a layer or a combined node so maybe I'll use a layers node and my input will be our well I guess input should be our original and then my layer one the thing that I'm adding will be our erosion output and The Mask will be our height and we look at that now we keep everything the same as it was before but just taper in that kind of Sandy fall off at the bottom next we'll try out one of the newer nodes so maybe we'll use the debris node which will simulate some rocks of debris kind of falling down the the terrain so I'm going to go in here and add a debris node this is pretty cool if we add this uh we can go in here and change the amount of debris uh the friction of those pieces the restitution um which is kind of how how much kind of I guess is how much energy or speed they kind of conserve so it it adjusts how far they slide down but really you can kind of play around these values I want my debris to be really small like small Pebbles and maybe get fairly large but not not too big in this situation so I'll Max it out at 15 and then the height of it I'll leave at one and then again seed can just be you know whatever random value you just try something out and then if it looks good you just keep it and then there's distribution so uniform will evenly distribute it and distribute amount uh I'm going to try this with like a thousand at first but if we preview this let's see what it does add some Pebbles here and you might have to upt your resolution at this point to see it better so maybe I'll go to 2K resolution and let that just regenerate these nodes and then we start to see a more detailed preview of our our landscape so I can see some of these Pebbles here maybe debris them out I'll up this I'll try something like 30,000 sounds like a lot but it doesn't actually take that long to calculate so now we have a lot of these Pebbles all over the place I think my sunlight value changed for some reason there we go so we can see a lot of those Pebbles and that's uniform if we do something like natural it distributes a bit more naturally but you'll see they're not as noticeable and there's not as many of them so you can kind of change that as you go along or if you need it and if you do render still rocks it will also add the rocks that don't move or slide down or or don't fall or tumble in any way now other thing I did notice is if we do go to Natural you don't see as many of them uh but in that case if you do up your debris amount so I'm going to do something a little bit larger here something like 150,000 which will take a little bit longer but that'll actually make a lot more of them noticeable and they aren't noticeable here cuz my debris size for the minimum it's only one so it makes it fairly low but now that I have 150,000 of them if you zoom into here you see a lot of these Pebbles that might only show up once they go to 4K resolution or something higher so I'm going to stick with that I want to make sure this regenerates just force pinning and uh Force lock previewing so f and g uh just to make sure it generates that and I'll stick with that for now and then the next thing that we're going to do is I think this still feels not too natural it feels a little bit forced at the base here and have some these shapes kind of transition together so one other thing that I am going to do uh as well is for our layers node here we layer that erosion and the height I'm going to make a bit of room and I'm going to add another erosion another erosion to and I will connect this erosion to that and then connect that to my layers something like that and this secondary erosion is just going to add some more interesting details and hopefully blend things together a little bit better so on the secondary erosion I'm just going to preview it I'm going to go in here put the duration maybe fairly High uh down cutting I don't want any cuz I don't want to form all these kind of craters and that starts to look a bit better more Sandy flows like I wanted erosion scale put super high and then seed again just choose or or type some random value and then some of these other settings we can start to play around with maybe something like this looks kind of interesting and same with these just kind of play around the setting see what they give you some of them won't make much of a difference but usually I always move these sliders up and down to see they do something that that I do find interesting or helpful and course sediments maybe just add some values in here of course angle I don't know let's think maybe 40 45 degrees or something but I think this feels a lot more natural so from here you know shape maybe I'll just reduce this sharpness I'll keep it fair Fairly blurry and I think that is just going to help make these areas feel a little bit more detailed and maybe I'll have to adjust the height a bit more because this actually looked pretty good at the base here but I can see it's getting cut off so I'm going to go back to my height and maybe what I'll do is I'll up the range I'll make the maximum .17 or something and the fall off I'll I'll Let It Fade up nicely a lot more and I think that starts to feel a lot more natural for how these areas blend together and how you know rocks and sand might tumble off the top and sit in these areas and then roll down and then I can add my debris on top of all this and that's going to affect how the debris gets placed as well there is more areas for it to Tumble down and to move so my de debris creation Now uh might be a bit more interesting I'm noticing a lot more of these little specs and shapes in these areas now I do think I went a bit too small in this debris so I want to change the maximum size to 50 and the minimum size to five and let's see if that makes them appear a bit better I think I just went a bit too small on them so let's see we'll give that a little little bit of time to regenerate but that should make a lot of this debris much more visible and start to add a lot more detail so now we we start to see kind of the debris we expect and it's really nice how a lot of it kind of piles up in these areas at this point probably want to save again but we're going to start colorizing it as well so when I think about adding color or Texture to things I first just want to get a good set of of masks or areas to to colorize so after this debris node I'm GNA make sure I I use this debris node as underlay so it keeps the shape of whatever shaping this node is doing so we lock it to that and then I'm going to create a flow maybe a flow map or maybe I'll just do a yeah I'll do a flow map and if we use a flow map let's take a look at what that does I'm going to press F to lock the preview on that flow map and let's see what kind of detailing that gives me it should give me all these flows of of water sand or things that would flow down the surface and I think that'll be really useful uh as a mask yeah that looks pretty pretty cool now it's a little bit dark so I'm just going to go in here and crank up the flow length and flow volume I want maximum volume and length and make sure this regenerates and that's starts to give me a lot more interesting areas uh but it's it's fairly dark so to make it a bit brighter I'll take this flow I'll go in here to the modifiers and just equalize it so it brings up the overall brightness of it I think that'll that'll work a little bit better and now that I have that flow map I'm also going to produce a height map or height mask not map height mask and we're just going to mask the very top of this kind of slope so again I just want an area to isolate the top more flat part so I'll take this I'll set the maximum range to one minimum range to like 99.99 and then I get that and I can set the fall off really low just so we can extract that top section because that'll be useful and I could take these two things the flow and the height I can add a combine and the point of this is if I add a combine of of both of the these together it doesn't look like much um but if I set it to add and 100% now we get the top area being totally white and then we just get these flows and that could resemble sand on my Surface like a mask for all the sand that trickles off the top and flows down these kind of Rocky faces so maybe now we'll start to colorize this so we'll add a sap map connect that mask that we just have and on this sat map I want to go to the Rock section you can kind of scroll through here and look for ones that you you might find interesting um or just click around and and preview it and see what they they do and I'm just looking for details I don't really care about the colors in this situation because I'm going to tint it or recolor it anyways so I'll just go through here uh clicking around seeing what kind of looks interesting and this kind of looks interesting and then I'll start adjusting the bias to offset those values maybe set my roughness here maybe we'll do medium add some nice detail in there maybe I'll reverse that gradient okay now I get some more natural kind of spotted areas so maybe maybe I'm happy with that and what I'm going to use this for is not so much for the the color that I have here because I want these Rocky areas to be dark or really kind of like volcanic rock almost so what I'm going to do instead is instead of finding a perfect color gradient I'm just going to be lazy I'm going to tint it and I'll tint it from uh white to black and now I got like a bunch of rock details from that that I can use in another combine or something thing now one last thing before we go a bit further The Tint node is super useful so don't underestimate it if I were to take a tint node and I have something like this flow map or flow mask here I could take that flow mask connect it to a tint node and if that tint node is doing the same thing we we just did we start from White and go to Black it can actually be really good to extract details cuz look look what that will do it's a great way to get a lot of interesting details uh from your Maps so don't be afraid to use it cuz it can pull out a lot of interesting shapes and and crevices and details that might be a lot harder to get with other nodes but anyways I'm going to delete that continue with what we have here we have our our kind of colorized dark Rock now and then from here what I'm going to end up doing is adding another sa map to what we had before and I'm just going to do a sa map that resembles the the sand so maybe I'll go to the sand tab I'll look for something that kind of looks like the sand that I want I'll click around and and kind of see what what the values look like and hopefully find something that I like so I'll just keep clicking through here some of these aren't too bad probably any of these would have worked but I'll I'll go with this one this one looks pretty good it's pretty Sandy and then again if we need to adjust some of the values you know we can play with the the bias try to offset it to get a bit more variation in there um do we do we want to enhance it maybe I won't do I want to reverse it let's see oh that looks good I get some interesting visible flowing areas there so maybe I'll stick with that and then what we'll do is we'll take this sat map and our tint node and usually I'd use a combine but let's try using the layers node and again I can just do my input could be the tint The Rock on top of it I'll place the sand and my mask will be this mask that masks out the top area for the sand and all the the flows so I'll do that and now I have my rocks and my sand now what about all these Pebbles that we have at the top here and at the base I need to have a way of controlling them as well so I want to go look back at that Stones node that we created I'm going to take the stones output connect to a adjust on that adjust node I'll preview it and I'm going to change some settings in here I'm going to drop it auto LEL and strong so it's a super strong masks of the those Pebbles I'll take that effects node and what I'll do is I'll combine it with our height so it's only at the top because we don't have these details anywhere else so I'll create another combined node take our height as the first input adjustment layer of the Pebbles as second input and what I will do I try to reorganize this here I'll add them together with actually you know what not add multiply so we just get the stones for the top area and then we just have a mask of our stones but now we also want our debris so I'll do another combine node I'll take our debris debris take our Stones isolated to the top here and then I will preview that I'll set it to add 100% now we have a mask with just our stones and our debris so next thing I'm going to do now is finish it up I'm going to add these Stones coloring on top of what we had before so to finalize it I'll add one final combine I'll take my previous result to this I will use the mask of all the stones and I will set this to maybe blend 50% I don't want the stones to be too dark but I'll make the stones just use my tint color because this is fairly dark and stonik so I'll just apply that color anywhere where these stones are and now I get the colorization on those stones and these stones that or the debris and this gives us a pretty good output or result and at this point I haven't even switch this to 4K yet but we could do that next and take a look at what it looks like in in its full detail now this is what we end up with with 4K uh resolution maybe there's a few more things I could do uh to touch up these areas or make them look a little bit more detailed we take a look at the map here it's fairly detailed looks pretty good I could probably do a bit more colorization especially at the top here I think those stones I wouldn't use the Pebbles they look too round I think using the rockscape might give us more natural looking details up there and this Gaia file is available for download if you are part of the patreon which you can find a link to down in the description below and if you enjoyed this video or you learned something new make sure you like subscribe and comment down in the comments below and if you are part of the patreon you will also get access to the PDF for this video which goes over all these steps we went over in this video in a little bit more detail