Gaea vs worldGen

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.

worldGen is a free, open-source procedural generator for two-dimensional maps built from an integer seed. It creates continents, oceans, rivers, forests, swamps, beaches, cliffs, settlements, and roads. Terrain begins with multifractal noise and simulated raindrop erosion, while rain-shadow modeling affects climate across mountain ranges. Elevation, moisture, and temperature produce thirteen biomes. Reusing a seed generates the same world, making results repeatable. The interactive viewer supports panning, zooming, tile details, step-by-step generation visualization, and screenshot export. World state can be saved in TOML, and a world blob can be exported as a .bin file. Display and generation parameters are adjustable in config.toml, with additional settings in world/config.go. worldGen is a Go desktop application using Ebiten and requires Go 1.21 or later plus desktop OpenGL support. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows under the MIT license. The roadmap lists urban layouts, more plant and biome variety, waterfalls, cliffs, and artificial life.