Gaea vs MapMagic 2
Gaea
quadspinner.comMapMagic 2
gitlab.comSide by side
| Figure | Gaea | MapMagic 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 3 |
| Spec score · Game Map Generators | 8.3 (#4) | 8.0 (#6) |
| Integrations | Gaea provides bridges for Unreal Engine and Houdini; the Gaea2Houdini plugin requires a Professional or Enterprise license. | The bundle listing names special nodes for CTS, MegaSplat, MicroSplat, and Vegetation Studio Pro, while noting that full compatibility is not guaranteed. |
| Purpose | Gaea is a terrain design platform for VFX, games, and virtual production. | MapMagic 2 is a node-based procedural map generator for creating terrain and automatically placing game objects. |
| 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 Asset Store listing links support to the publisher's website. |
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
MapMagic 2
- MapMagic 2Free
- MapMagic 2 Biomes and Functions$45, paid once
- MapMagic 2 Bundle$157.50, 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.
MapMagic 2
MapMagic 2 is a node-based procedural generator for Unity terrain and game objects. Users build graphs from generator nodes such as noise, Voronoi, blending, curves, and erosion. Listed outputs include height, holes, textures, grass, custom outputs, objects, splines, and biomes. During play mode, it can generate new terrain tiles for endless maps. The Biomes and Functions module blends graphs using masks and moves complex generation into sub-graphs. MapMagic 2 is listed as compatible with Unity 2022.3.62f1 across Built-in, URP, and HDRP render pipelines; installation requires the.NET 4.x API Compatibility Level in the Unity Editor. The core asset costs nothing. Biomes and Functions costs $45, paid once and requires an existing MapMagic 2 installation. The bundle costs $157.50, paid once and includes MapMagic 2 with Objects, Splines, Biomes, and Brush modules. The bundle listing says full source code is included. Special nodes are named for CTS, MegaSplat, MicroSplat, and Vegetation Studio Pro, though full compatibility is not guaranteed.