You've shaped the land. Now it's time to bring it to life. Welcome to the world of surface nodes in Gaia. Hello friends. In this lesson, we're going to focus on the surface category where you'll get familiar with the nodes and we'll go through real examples for them. The contours node. The contours node generates stylized contour lines based on terrain elevation. It's often used to create layered map-like visuals or to drive masks and texturing based on elevation steps. As always, we create a mountain for testing and by adding an adjust node, we increase its strength. Now, we add the contours node. As you can see, it generates a layered mask for us. We can increase the count, subdivide it, raise the accuracy, adjust the number of main layers, and also control the secondary layers. To get better layers, we can add some blur to it. And after combining it with our mountain, we subtract it from the mountain to achieve the result you see. [Music] [Music] With this method, we can achieve a realistic example like the image you see. And it's better to create our first example. So we can also review the previous nodes. In this example, we make a copy of our mountain and by changing its position, combine it with the first mountain. Then we apply adjust to both. Now by adding the soft clip node which we learned in the third tutorial, we smooth the surface and afterward we apply a new node to reach a result close to the image we saw. [Music] The grid node. The grid node generates a regular grid pattern across your terrain. It's mainly used for debugging, alignment, or creating stylized/ artificial terrain features. [Music] Let's move on to the rocky subgroup, the craggy node. The craggy node adds rough, jagged, fractured details to your terrain surface, simulating sharp rock formations, cracks, or crumbling cliffs. It's designed to enhance natural realism, especially in rocky or eroded areas. So even if your surface is blurry, this node can add sharp details to the scene. Now let's make a real example of it and create this surface where we want the effect to be absent in some areas. So we had a pla node and with some adjustments combine and subtract it. [Music] [Music] The outcrops node. The outcrops node creates rocky surface protrusions that resemble natural stone formations jutting out from terrain like cliffs, ledges, or broken rock layers. It's perfect for adding geological complexity and breaking up smooth surfaces. As you can see, it can easily create excellent rocky details for us with controls for size, volume, and rotation. The rock noise. The rock noise node generates sharp rocky surface patterns using specialized highfrequency noise. It's designed to simulate natural rock textures, cracks, and fragmented geological details across your terrain. As you can see, it can on its own recreate the previous example or even simulate eroded terrain. The rockscape node. The rockscape node generates large scale rocky formations and layers that resemble natural rock fields, boulder zones, or stratified rock beds. It gives your terrain a chunky layered rocky structure. Ideal for creating dramatic and cinematic environments. [Music] The bomber node. The bomber node is a scattering and stamping system that lets you bomb or scatter patterns called stamps across your terrain. It's used to add repeated features like rocks, craters, dunes, vegetation patches, and more based on any input shape. Imagine you've created a small mountain and want to scatter taller mountains around it. With this node, you can do that. [Music] the Pockmarks node. The Pockmarks node creates scattered tiny impact-like holes or eroded pits across your terrain surface. These formations resemble weathered surfaces, cratered ground, or biological erosion. Perfect for adding fine detail and realism. The next node is stones, which scatters rocks across the ground. [Music] [Music] The next node is bulbous, which I tested on two nodes. It softens the details and makes the bumps a bit more stretched. The shatter node. The shatter node breaks up your terrain into fractured platelike segments, simulating the look of shattered stone, tectonic breakage, or dry, cracked earth. It's ideal for creating dramatic broken surfaces with a strong stylized or natural feel. For example, you can apply this node to a hillside and by adding a lake, you'll get a hillside next to the water. The shear node. The shear node distorts your terrain by sliding parts of it horizontally or vertically. Similar to a tectonic shear shift or tilting effect, it stretches and offsets elevation data in a specific direction, creating dynamic slanted formations. The next node is ground texture, which adds a texture to the surface and can be useful in some cases. The roughen node. The roughen node introduces subtle to intense surface irregularities, simulating natural surface wear, erosion, or uneven textures. It's perfect for breaking up overly smooth terrains and giving them a more believable, gritty appearance. The next node is sand, which creates wavelike patterns similar to sand dunes. If the scale is too low, you can increase it with the transform node and then combine it with a hill. [Music] The fractal terraces. The fractal terraces node creates naturally broken irregular terrace formations by applying fractal logic to elevation steps. Now I want to create this same image with the same generated mountain range. I need to make another mountain and move it to the corner. Now it's enough to simply combine these two and set them to ad mode. The sandstone node. The sandstone node is like a fractal that generates surface layers, but it differs in some features. By default, it seems to affect finer details more. And another distinctive option is that it can be rotated. [Music] [Music] The other nodes in this category work in a similar way. So to save time, we'll just take a quick look at them. If you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new, don't forget to like the video and leave a comment to share your thoughts. Your support really helps the channel grow and keeps me motivated to create more tutorials for