I spent a significant part of the last few years by figuring out how to render CG landscapes in blender in that time one of the third-party tools that I gradually found myself using more and more was Gaia a wonderful terrain generator powered by nodes have no fear though node base doesn't mean difficult and in this short introduction I will show you the exact steps on how to generate your first terrain and then take it to blender and if you're a first time GA user now is a great time to start your journey because there is now version two available with lots of improvements from the first one and what's awesome there's no subscription just a onetime fee for a Perpetual license and you can also download the software for free to try it out now I don't know about you but I don't like being overwhelmed with new software instead of Starting by learning every single nuke and cranny of the tool I like to learn simpler workflows first so that I know my way around but not necessarily what every single setting does right off the bat that I usually learn gradually by using the software well that's exactly what I'll try to do in this tutorial so the first time you start Gaia you'll be greeted with this welcome screen where you can choose a new project and now very quickly down here is where you will put your notes and up here you'll be able to see the results of what you're doing while on the right here there's your properties window so everything very similar to blender actually the very notes you have at your disposal are here on the left and usually you'll be going through them from the top first adding some terrain Primitives or landscape pieces then you'll variously modify them and erode them and after that get some extra data from them colorize and finally export so let's get to it let me start first by adding a landscape Canyon and by the way anytime you know the name of the note you're looking for you can simply right click here and type it in also if you like me hate these nested menus you can just quickly hop into the settings and change the parameters here to be able to see all of the options in one popup menu the way Gaia works is a bit different from blender and you knowde that you select will be automatically previewed up here so if I click this Canyon I will see the result and if I click away it will disappear now this by itself already looks very nice and of course on the right here you can add edit the settings of the canyon let me expand this properties windows and now you can choose from several styles from classic to eroded Strada or even both for our result let's go with the eroded down here you will always have quite self-explanatory settings to choose from and it's very easy to just experiment especially if you set the 512 resolution up here which will make the Computing much faster I usually start with the the 512 and then I go gradually higher with the resolution when I get into the finer details of the landscape creation and if you realize that you liked your previous settings more you can of course go back to the previous States in this undo section all right we can have something like this for the scale uh about 0.37 the valy to something like 0.4 and the surrounding 0.6 and of course to search for Unique variations you can always change the seed now even though this is already very nice let me show you how easy it is to for example erode the terrain something that's a pure nightmare to do in blender and here you just drag this output socket and type in erosion there are several options to choose from but let's go with erosion 2 and that's that it beautifully created these crevices and protrusions and made the canyon erode realistically and if you decide you want to go for another effect from this erosion family you can simply switch it up here but let's return to erosion 2 and play with some parameters we can in fact already upscale here to 1K to see more details uh the duration is the time over which the simulation happens which in real time values is something like millions of years next down cutting is How deep the erosion cuts to the ground anyways as I mentioned let's not go into every single setting I'll leave that for future tutorials and for you to explore so with the erosion note setup I actually recommend two things a go to tools options and activate the Cuda option here if you can for me anytime I try to do more advanced computations on just CPU Gaia started crashing and then B save your project up here now with that out of the way another note we can add is the river note and Gaia automatically simulates how the terrain would change if there were rivers in the crevices and of course you can control how many streams there should be how wide the rivers and how deep they cut into the terrain one slightly more advanced thing I want to show you is masking every single note can be masked to only appear on certain areas there is all sorts of options here that I can explore in some future tutorials but for now let's just click this icon here and choose the height I only want the rivers to appear down here at the bottom of the canyon for that we can lower this lowest value to go to zero and then lower the height to about 0.3 to cut it off at the top here now sometimes the cut off can get a little sharp but that we can sort out by using the falloff which blends these areas together next up let's add final layer of simulation and this time let's let's use some crumbling to create these little caved in areas but not as deep so let's lower the duration and strength so it's not as intense and that's it now we have a simple terrain that we can go ahead and texture save it and if you want to see it in more detail you can go higher like 2K at this point now let's say I wanted to change the seed of the original Canyon Noe but I want to see how it looks when it's already eroded if I click the Canon note to edit it all the erosion effects disappear however to lock this eroded result I simply right click and choose this lock preview or even faster I hit the F keyboard shortcut now there is this green circle here indicating that the node is locked and the viewport will keep previewing this node no matter the changes we do elsewhere if later you'll want to return to the default mode just hit F again on this note okay now texturing the fastest way to to add colors to your terrain is by using this set map you just slap it at the end of the graph and here you have all these interesting gradients to choose from sampled directly from satellite data let's go for example with this brownish Rock gradient number 114 now at this point the set map colors the terrain but it doesn't really behave realistically it's basically just a color gradient going from the top to the bottom it doesn't know where the Peaks are which would be different color color than let's say the crevices the slopes etc for that we need to add this texture base map which does exactly that it allows us to Source data from the terrain to make the set map realize where the various parts of it are you can play with some settings here but it will make much more sense when we actually plug it into the set map so do it and look the set map and now we can play with the scale the slope and soil which changes the mapping of the colors of our terrain and how it appears on slopes and other parts of the mesh though this 114 texture might actually not be the best or the richest in color so we can for example switch to this 119 that one seems a little bit better and with the set map still locked you can keep playing with the settings of the texture base until you arrive at something you like now at this point you can happily proceed to the sport part of this video if you're okay with this terrain as it is however we can also do more and learn a bit about masking in the process you see the rivers here weren't really taken into consideration and I kind of want them to I want to actually use these Rivers here in the river note as a mask to color them differently for that we will combine two set Maps one is our terrain color and now let's add another one which will be blue for example this 0031 and of course this might be too blue but don't worry we can always adjust the color later this is just for preview purposes to combine the two set Maps just drag this out Dot from one to another and automatically this combine mask is created just like in blender where we would use the mix color node raise the ratio to one and now have a look for our Rivers note and let me show you something uh right click on it and show this locked preview mode and in here we can actually see what different outputs this node contains one is this out Channel containing the combined node information there is also this direction pass the surface pass and the very much usable depth pass here anything that is red I want to use to mask out the blue set map node so let's close this and use this depth output dragging it all the way here to the combined note of the two set Maps and here into the mask socket nothing's happened but that's just because the depth is not intense enough at this point so we can drag out a new connection and add this adjust note in front of the Mask socket at this point it looks like this masking out where the rivers are but let me actually connect it to the mask here and lock the combined note and now play with the adjust node increasing ing the multiply value and also hitting this equalize this Checker does the job bringing out enough data for the rivers to be masked out what I would also like to do is to remove the blue of the rivers from the top portions here and only leave it in the valley for that we can use a height mask and output it from the river's out socket it's just pure white now but we can limit it to only this region here and now combine it with the adjust note plugging it into the combine mask and then using this minimum Factor it does exactly what we want it to you can increase the ratio to one but let me actually lower it a little bit because uh I don't want the rivers to be as intensely blue all right at this point a little bit of recap we started with a canyon note and eroded it with erosion 2 then we added some rivers and crumpled those from this terrain we generated a texture base for the mapping of the textures and we plugged it into our first set map then we used the depth of the rivers note and combined it with a second set map to make those Rivers blue to cut them off from the top portions of the terrain we use this height mask note and combined it with the depth output of the rivers to get rid of those top portions and now let's export the result to blender for that we need to set up several export options first we set the actual terrain to export so find the last note with only the terrain information not the color information uh and that would be this orange crumble note and drag out a connection from the outs soet and add a export note here and just leave the settings to exr you can also drag out a measure note if instead of displacement map you want to be importing an obj or fbx I like to change this to quads but otherwise I leave it as is and finally let's click this last color note rename it with F2 to base color and hit F3 on it this little floppy disc icon appears and that means once we build the terrain it will save this color information on the disk up here you can see the project menu and in it these build settings here you can just specify what sort of resolution you want your final terrain to be we can try to 4K but you can also choose higher and then you set up the destination for your export finally in this exports tab you just specify the format of the texture you marked with F3 for export in our case it was the base color and let's make it PNG close it hit save and then hit build and export on once the process is done can now go ahead and fire up blender here in the scene we can go ahead and import the terrain uh the way I like to do it is either import the mesh that's easy or you can simply add a plane scale it up like 100 times and then apply the scale with control a then subdivide it enough so something like 100 times to give us some resolution to this place and also add subd modifier with control 2 to add even more geometry that we can control with these two options after that add a displace modifier and create a new texture to it which you can then open up here and load in our exported exr map now two things one set the coordinates from local to UV here to map the texture onto the plane properly and two since we scaled our plane significantly let's increase the strength here so something like 100 or 90 will do voila now just add a bsdf material drag in the base color into the Shader editor and plug it into the color socket here I'm quickly switching to the render preview mode cycles and GPU Computing and also I'm adding this nishas sky to the scenes World set and yeah this is very bright while the texture we want is there we just want to make it a little darker for example using this RGB curve there and while we're at it we can take the roughness to one and lower the specular to something like 0.05 terrain from large distance is usually pretty rough and non-reflective okay this doesn't look like the terrain we created in the GAA at least not when it comes to the little details simple fix we increase the levels here to give blender more geometry to work with let's say set it to four or even five you can try adding even more but I think that already at these levels the terrain looks great and that's it my friends you can then add some clouds and Atmospheric fog and play with the Shader in blender even more if you want to learn how to create environments in blender from the ground up you can always have a look at my extensive CG boost course where I put all of my knowledge so did you like this Gaia tutorial do you want me to do more definitely let me know in the comments below but with that stay creative my friends and until next time Martin out