Gaea vs Heightmap Level Generator

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.

Heightmap Level Generator creates procedural terrain and heightmaps in a browser for Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot. Its GPU-based generation uses WebGPU compute shaders and WGSL. Outputs include 16-bit heightmaps with features such as cliffs, hills, mountains, erosion, rivers, lakes and a raised border ring. It can also generate connected roads, towns, map exits, road grades and embankments around water, with temperate, steppe, desert and snow world biomes. Users can adjust settings live, compare 12 seeds, preview a 2D map and 3D mesh, and walk through terrain in first person. Exports include engine-specific terrain formats, Web or three.js formats, heightmaps, splatmaps, masks, water levels, color maps, layout JSON, glTF meshes and metadata JSON. Road, town and water masks and layout data can support PCG, Houdini and custom placement scripts. The free project supports share links, presets, JSON save and load, and undo and redo. Online use requires a WebGPU-capable browser; local use requires Node.js and such a browser.