the wide horizon of landscape generation

from time to time i’m looking into various landscape generation packages to find an ideal solution for the creation of impressive backgrounds for image compositions. the market is covered with a lot of tools which all have their specific feature set. to generate nice procedural height maps i like world machine a lot – it’s cheap and it can be used for a lot of situations. world machine even offers the export of 16bit heightmaps which gives you incredibly detailed results when using the heightmap in your 3d software (if it supports it!). if you want to take a further step, you can take a look at terragen, which also includes an integrated renderer and several import formats. well know for its ease of use is vue d’esprit which is very cool and fast – but is also expensive and may be overfeatured for your use – like word builder, too. there’s also a plugin solution for 3dsmax: dreamscape, which proved to be not as flexible as other stand alone tools. if you’re evaluation a solution, try the cheap one’s first – sometimes you don’t just need ‘everything in one package’ – just a userful heightmap!

from time to time i'm looking into various landscape generation packages to find an ideal solution for the creation of impressive backgrounds for image compositions. the market is covered with a lot of tools which all have their specific feature set. to generate nice procedural height maps i like world machine a lot - ...