World and levels › Terrain
Erosion in Gaea: water, talus and deposits
Know first: Gaea: first steps, What real land looks like
This lesson explains what Gaea’s erosion nodes compute and why their settings work the way they do. Water carries rock away and drops it lower down. Slopes slide back to a stable angle. Soft rock wears faster than hard rock. And all of it is measured in meters, so the size of the world changes the result. At the end you’ll see why several passes of different strength look more natural than one long pass.
Why this matters
Erosion is where a Gaea graph turns from geometry into land. The manual calls it “the primary process through which we turn abstract and geometric shapes into believable terrains.” But the erosion nodes have many settings: the node reference lists 19 for Erosion_2 alone. Move them at random, and you usually get one of three results. Almost nothing changes, and the land still looks like smooth clay. Or the mountain you shaped melts, and every slope gets the same comb of gullies. Or the erosion changes by itself when you change the size of the world.
Each setting stands for one part of what water and gravity do to land. Once you know which part, you can predict what a slider will do and fix what went wrong. What real land looks like and why is the topic of the lesson on landforms; how to build a first graph is the step-by-step guide Gaea: first steps. This lesson connects the two.
Gaea 2 has several erosion nodes, and the settings in this lesson belong to different ones:
- Erosion_2: the newer node for rain, the one the guide uses;
- Erosion, which the manual also calls Erosion_1 or classic Erosion: the older node for rain, with more settings, some of which exist only there;
- Wizard: the same rain as in Erosion, with ready-made recipes instead of separate settings;
- Thermal and Thermal_2: slopes that slide.