Gaea, a new procedural+layers terrain generation software made by the creator of GeoGlyph
polycounter lvl 6
I was looking for a terrain software to buy and i had almost made up my mind between World Machine and World Creator when i discovered that Dax Phandi, the founder of QuadSpinner and creator of GeoGlyph ( plugin for World Machine that add a lot of cool stuff ), made it's own stand alone terrain generation software ( well with his team ), Gaea: http://quadspinner.com/gaea/
From what i read it combines proceduralism and layers to give the user the possiblity to choose between this 2 workflows and has a lot of cool features like "Directed Erosion", "Non uniform stratification with plate-breakage" and use both the cpu and gpu to visualize terrains in real time even at 2048x2048 ( 8 milion polys ) resolution.
I think that the price is very good compared to World Creator or World Machine, for 99 $ ( 84 $ currently ) you can buy the indie version that has all the features except for the scripting support, tiled build support and resolution cap at 4k or for 199 $ ( 169 $ currently ) you can buy the professional version that doesn't have any limit: http://quadspinner.com/Gaea/Order
Also it's perpetual only so that's a plus for me.
It is in early access and should be published around the end of june i think.
Some other images with the node based workflow here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nnErO
There are also a bunch of videos on youtube of the early access build that show the process of creating various type of terrains.
From what i read it combines proceduralism and layers to give the user the possiblity to choose between this 2 workflows and has a lot of cool features like "Directed Erosion", "Non uniform stratification with plate-breakage" and use both the cpu and gpu to visualize terrains in real time even at 2048x2048 ( 8 milion polys ) resolution.
I think that the price is very good compared to World Creator or World Machine, for 99 $ ( 84 $ currently ) you can buy the indie version that has all the features except for the scripting support, tiled build support and resolution cap at 4k or for 199 $ ( 169 $ currently ) you can buy the professional version that doesn't have any limit: http://quadspinner.com/Gaea/Order
Also it's perpetual only so that's a plus for me.
It is in early access and should be published around the end of june i think.
Some other images with the node based workflow here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nnErO
There are also a bunch of videos on youtube of the early access build that show the process of creating various type of terrains.
Replies
So in my opinion is worth it but it's not fast as World Creator because Gaea is mostly CPU based + GPU for some nodes where instead World Creator is fully GPU based and it's way faster if you have a good GPU.
I didn't try World Creator a lot so i can't say much about it but if you are looking for speed than World Creator is better.
There is also Houdini that is good.
If you encounter some bugs i advise you to send an email to their support on the official site, they usually listen to customers problem.
I don't use Erosion Studio but when you create a terrain in Gaea you can choose the elevation of the terrain and scale it as you want, maybe there is a similar option in Erosion Studio.
The official documentation should be completed for this month I believe.
Although Gaea is quiete intuitive coming from world machine so in my case I didn't feel the need to follow tutorials to learn it but the documentation is a must.