Arcadium 3D vs Picogen

Arcadium 3D is a browser-based tool for designing landscapes, houses, floor plans, and interiors. Its landscape tools cover property boundaries, terrain, patios, paths, retaining walls, fencing, planting, and outdoor features. The landscape planner includes hundreds of trees, shrubs, flowers, garden furniture, pergolas, fences, and outdoor structures. Users can create 3D designs, generate photorealistic landscape renders with AI, take first-person walkthroughs, and export printable 2D plans as PDFs. Projects can be shared by URL, and viewers can open shared designs in a browser without an account. The service runs without software installation and lists Mac, PC, iPad, and mobile device support, with web, iOS, and Android platforms. The free plan allows two projects, up to 30 objects per project, and one floor plan generation. Pro is $18 a month billed yearly; Power is $60 a month billed yearly. Paid plans raise limits and include custom model import, AI images, storage, and additional floor plan generations.

Picogen is a free outdoor ray-tracing system for generating large terrain scenes with realistic illumination across day and night and detailed plant populations. It supports procedural scene work through SSDF userspace scripting and heightfield objects. Implemented rendering choices include Whitted-style rendering and path tracing. Materials include fully diffuse Lambertian and perfect mirror specular types, while Height-Slang programmable materials and shaders support terrain. A sun-sky global setting controls scene lighting, and cameras provide yaw, pitch, and roll controls. Picogen is licensed under GPL version 3 or later and runs on Linux and Windows. Linux downloads include 32-bit and 64-bit packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and similar distributions, plus tarballs. Windows offers an installer and portable zip or 7zip archives. Source code, a no-signup forum, and wiki documentation are available. The roadmap lists several features as unimplemented, including a graphical interface.