Atlas Studio vs Gaea

Atlas Studio is a free, open-source Roblox Studio plugin for procedural 3D terrain generation through a visual node graph. Its documented library contains 56 nodes for generators, shaping, erosion, materials, and output. The workspace previews height, material, and slope, with an optional 3D mesh view. Paint Mask nodes provide a dockable canvas for local edits. Built-in recipes include Temperate Forest, Rolling Grassland, Rocky Highlands, and Island / Coast. Projects save the graph, bounds, seed, preview resolution, masks, environment settings, and build history with the Roblox place, allowing reuse. Final builds write native terrain in chunks on Roblox’s 4-stud voxel grid and fill empty voxels below the water plane with water. Preview resolution affects interactive previews only. Installation comes from the Roblox Creator Store and opens under Plugins → Atlas → Atlas Studio. Roads, structures, landmarks, models, and vegetation are outside scope, and materials use Roblox’s built-in terrain materials rather than custom textures.

Gaea is a Windows terrain design application for VFX, games, and virtual production. It builds terrain from procedural forms, imported data, or hand-drawn elements, then applies simulations for erosion, debris, glaciers, rivers, snow, and vegetation. It can produce terrain-aware color, textures, masks, material zones, vegetation data, and flow maps. Exports include heightfields, meshes, point clouds, textures, masks, and other terrain data. Bridges connect Gaea with Unreal Engine and Houdini; the Gaea2Houdini plugin requires a Professional or Enterprise license. Gaea also offers node-based compositing and a hybrid render engine.

The Community Edition is free for non-commercial use. The listed perpetual-license prices are $99 a month for Indie, $199 a month for Professional, and $299 a month for Enterprise; each is described as a one-time price. Gaea requires Windows, an AVX2-capable CPU, and at least 16 GB of RAM. CPU-only operation is supported; GPU compute needs CUDA 12.5 or higher or HIP 6.0 or higher.