- $128 standard / $1200 for commercial use, from iLuaC software (France)
- generates and does realtime rendering of strange alien terrain, with sophisticated shading
- unlike most of the other programs of its type, the rendering is full quality in realtime
- apparently 'Terraformer" was a powerful module, for creating terrain with water and vegetation, once bundled with Alias Power Animator, not currently mentioned on the Alias site
- currently Maya contains a module 'Artisan' which allows you to "paint"
and "sculpt" terrain surfaces, even non-heightfields like caves
- open-source project which focuses on simulating artificial life, but does so in an environment with terrain simulation features: flowing rivers, water currents, cloud formation and rain, and reproducing plants that grow in real time
- built with Delphi and GLScene
- apparently was active from 2002 to 2003, now dormant at version 1.0.1
- $100 from DAZ Productions
-
primarily
meant for creating abstract, arty landscapes - a somewhat mothballed product, but still very popular with a very large user base of hobbyists
- Bryce 4 does import DEMs, though their plant support hasn't improved from previous versions
- see Bryce mentioned also under clouds
- Surprisingly for a landscape generator, there is very little plant functionality. Built-in objects include 14 trees, a cactus, and 5 other small plants, not very detailed. Their better trees use their proprietary volumetric textures, which aren't exportable. It is difficult to distribute and "plant" trees on the terrain.
- as of mid-2005, DAZ has taken this old software (previously Corel, etc.) and has given it a fresh release
-
$29,000
from PixelActive Inc., for Windows, requires a graphics card with shader
model 3.0 - An interactive tool to draw heightfields and water, place roads and buildings and trees.
- Very smooth and easy to use, with spline roads that deform the landscape in realtime, pretty water and shadow rendering, 3d tree models, and even traffic flow models on the roads.
- Apparently meant for game developers to quickly create large scenes, with Collada export as the art path.
- Claims "support for importing GIS data, allowing geospecific modeling of real world locations", however this functionality does not appear in their demo version, nor are the capabilities described in the documentation.
- generates "a variety of heightmaps and texturemaps"
- free for small output; $100 or more for large output
- also generates lightmaps and normalmaps, and can produce spherical output geometry
- formats are .raw and .bmp, and .3ds for model otput
- $50 for Windows
- Realtime 3D heightmap editor and painter, makes 'maps' up to 4k*4k, with freehand tools for raise/lower/smoothing, freehand painting of terrain color and up to four detail textures. User interface is very fast and smooth.
- Outputs to its own ascii map format, 16-bit PNG, or .OBJ. Imports from image formats.
- $40 from ProFantasy Software, or $145 if bundled with their main product, Campaign Cartographer (CC2 Pro)
- the application's main purpose is creating maps for games
- "Starting from a random world, real-Earth data, or a flat plain, you can 'paint' altitude or climate adjustments"
- includes river networks, a scripting language, and (surprisingly for a artificial game-oriented software) 25 map projections
- exports to "an image, animation, icosahedral, or VRML"
FreeWorld3D- $20 for Windows
- create and edit heightfields up to 2048*2048, paint with textures, cast shadows, place 3D models
- import and export of heightfields is via "BMP, 8bit RAW, 16bit RAW and 32bit RAW", or export to a number of 3D model formats (3DS, OBJ, X, etc.)
- $65 for Windows
- a simple heightfield editor
- can import from DEM, SDTS DEM, and BT, although it largely ignores projection and extents, which is reasonable as the emphasis of the product is on imaginary, not real places
- €90 standard, €300 pro version
- Procedural creation of geometry using fractal algorithms and natural erosion, procedural textures, creates shadowmaps, distribute objects including vegetation
- UI looks quite powerful and complex; oriented towards game developers
-
Gscape
Real-time Procedural World Editor (2002-2004)- includes a GUI editing environment and a DLL which can be used by other applications
- both are free for non-commercial use
- features include blending of surface textures, attractive water, procedural and billboard vegetation that casts shadows, and sky colors by time of day
- does not import or export any kind of data, so it is not meant for use with actual terrain
- the DLL does not provide direct access to the heightfield, so it is not possible to work around the lack of an import feature
- website at www.gscape.com vanished by 2004
L3DT
by Aaron Torpy- generates artificial heightfields
- high-level control: Sea vs. Land, Flat vs. Mountains, Rolling vs. Jagged, Wet vs. Dry
- freeware for windows, no source
- Imports and exports BT, TER (TerraGen), HFF (L3DT), bitmap, and JPEG, with export-only support for .X (DirectX mesh), HTF (GLScene), and a few others.
- includes a realtime viewer
- A tool aimed between polygon-based 3D modeling and final preprocessing tools for simulation environments
- Imports models from 3DSMAX, Maya, Softimage etc. for rapid scene assembly
- fast procedural generation of infrastructure including road networks
-
consists
of two Windows applications:
Generator
($200/$100 academic) and
Viewer
(free), from Pandromeda, Inc. - 'Pro' version is $480 / $200 academic
- generates beautiful artificial landscapes, at any level of detail from whole planets to tiny details
- interactively fly freely around a subsample of the landscape, then render a full-detail image on demand
- extra modules like MojoTree ($70) and MojoMove ($100) add features, e.g. trees and animation
-
Volumetrics is a a free experimental volumetric rendering engine,
interfaced as a plugin for MojoWorld
- produces photorealistic, painted-like, and completely abstract images of clouds and isosurfaces
- tool for creation of terrain, manually as well as automated/randomized terrain generation including heightmaps, texturing, vegetation, seas and rivers, static objects and environmental sounds
- Windows-only; free version available with limitations; €30 for standard edition
- a popular non-commercial raytracing package, which some people use for terrain rendering
- GT is a GUI for using The Genesis Toolkit, which works with heightfields and vegetation for POV-Ray scenes
TechNature- a collection of rendering, math, and texturing functions that "grow" 3-D planets, and vegetation
- claims "true reflections, realistic trees, zero distortion terrain texture mapping"
- $215 license for the source code
- D3D-only
- fractal landscape generator,
currently
free, with beautiful clouds
(2D layers) and excellent sunsets - apparently the work of a single person in the UK
- can import heightfields, now up to 4097x4097 for registered users
- has it's own TER file format
- has a large community of enthusiastic users, producing beautiful images, and sharing elevation files
- the great-grandfather of non-realtime terrain rendering programs, from the mid-1980s, which has gone through many different hands, although the UI looks the same as 14 year ago
- currently only $40 from a company called VendorNation
- similar to Bryce, WCS etc. but less sophisticated and now very cheap
- reads only single DEMs and image formats, capable of decent water surfaces
- apparently still has a user base!
- a small freeware terrain and volumetric atmosphere/cloud rendering program by Dmytry Lavrov
- does 3D light and 3D fog in near-realtime (software rendering)
- the author explains: despite the name, "actually voxelworld doesn't do any caves, only fog is voxel and landscape is just heightfield."
- interface and docs are very minimal
- A line of software from E-on software, from $100 to $600 depending on product
- Attractive non-realtime landscape renderer, similar to Bryce
- Volumetric clouds, nice height-map editor with sophisticated erosion tools, simple interface
- Plants are very realistic, up to 50 of them are included depending on product
- One drawback: i was unable to get it to import any USGS DEM in 2000, although it is probably fixed by now (2006). The product literature doesn't distinguish between "DEM" and "2D import", which implies that they don't handle geographic coordinates at all.
- $180 standard / $700 pro version, from Digital Element
- Can read DEM, handle terrain grids up to 4000x4000
- Very beautiful output rendering, supports multiprocessor NT
- "Geomorphic smoothing of landscape surface, simulation of water erosion"
- Automatic and manual road generation
- Plants ("over 100 L-System generated 3D vegetation specimens") look very good, placement of grass well done. The L-System language is built-in and specific to WorldBuilder, so the set of possible plants is not easily extended. Individual species are sold for $40 each (!)
- Water system includes options for ripples, varying color dependent upon water depth and refraction
- $500 from 3D Nature
- landscape creation and rendering with rock, trees, vegetation, moving water and evolving clouds (volumetric clouds, cloud shadows animated on a landscape)
- Terraffector™ technology lets you change the terrain by drawing vectors directly onto the landscape
- sun and moon, moon phases, tides
- always renders true spherical terrain
- can drape satellite imagery, import DLG for major roads, streams, railroads, etc.
- LightWave and 3D Studio MAX scene import/export
- for working with real places or serious GIS data, 3D Nature offers a more professional product, Visual Nature Studio, listed on Commercial Packages
World
Machine
- a terrain heightfield generator, shareware for Windows ($40)
- uses an interesting graph-based visual design approach, connecting a series of operations (noise, erosion etc.) in a easy-to-use visual manner
- imports/exports to Raw, TGA, BMP, Leveller, and Terragen
- 2D & OpenGL views, many Perlin Noise generator styles, weathering and fluvial erosion, real-time previews of all adjustments
WorldForge
- a non-commercial project to produce a number of fantasy worlds, with open-source servers and clients
- 3D clients include XClient (Linux, Win32) and Geosil (Linux, Win32, BeOS, Mac)
- doesn't yet have much world creation software