Gaea vs L3DT
Gaea
quadspinner.comL3DT
bundysoft.comSide by side
| Figure | Gaea | L3DT |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 4 |
| Spec score · Game Map Generators | 8.3 (#4) | 8.1 (#5) |
| Integrations | Gaea provides bridges for Unreal Engine and Houdini; the Gaea2Houdini plugin requires a Professional or Enterprise license. | The product supports Terragen, VTP Enviro, and other renderers, and Professional includes Torque TER, Torque Atlas, and Spring SD7 exporters. |
| Purpose | Gaea is a terrain design platform for VFX, games, and virtual production. | L3DT is a Windows application for generating terrain maps and textures for game developers and digital artists creating large 3D worlds. |
| Security | QuadSpinner says its Gaea binaries are signed with a code-signing certificate and provides an installer VirusTotal report. | The maker warns that plugins contain executable code and says to install them only when the developer is trusted because malicious or flawed plugins may allow unauthorized computer control. |
| Support | Support, maintenance, and minor updates are included at no additional cost, and the company says it does not offer a guaranteed support SLA. | The maker points users to an online user guide and community forum for support and advice. |
Plans
Gaea
- Indie$99, paid once
- Professional$199, paid once
- Enterprise$299, paid once
- Community EditionFree
- Indie$99, paid once
- Professional$199, paid once
- Enterprise$299, paid once
L3DT
- L3DT Professional trialFree
- L3DT Standard EditionFree
- L3DT Professional Indie$34.95, paid once
- L3DT Professional Commercial$149.95, paid once
In their own words
Gaea
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.
L3DT
L3DT is a terrain-generation and editing application for game developers and digital artists creating large 3D worlds. Its design map lets users define terrain characteristics and effects such as altitude, roughness, lakes, climate, erosion, terraces, cliffs, and volcanoes. A 3D heightfield editor provides mouse-driven brush tools. L3DT generates ground textures, alpha maps, and light maps, including shadow casting and bump mapping. The free Standard Edition supports heightfields and texture maps up to 2049 × 2049 pixels. Professional editions support larger maps through disk paging: heightfields up to 131,072 × 131,072 pixels and textures up to 4M × 4M pixels. Professional Indie costs $34.95, paid once; Professional Commercial costs $149.95, paid once. Both include two years of free upgrades. Formats include BMP, JPG, PNG, TGA, DDS, OBJ, COLLADA, Terragen TER, and Virtual Terrain Project BT, with GeoTIFF import. L3DT supports plugins, custom filters, and Python and ZeoScript scripting through plugins. It is a Windows application; Linux use through Wine is recommended for testing because bugs may occur.