Gaea vs Ymir

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.

Ymir is a node-based procedural terrain generator for Linux and Windows, with a graph workflow for constructing and exporting terrain. Nodes cover noise and shape generation, sculpting, filters, and thermal, hydraulic, and stream erosion. Erosion can use a mask and produce flow, wear, and deposition layers for later terrain work. Projects are stored as readable JSON in .ymir files, and node networks can be saved for reuse as .ymirsub subgraphs. Heightmaps export as 16-bit grayscale PNG, raw 16-bit R16, or 32-bit float EXR. The headless ymir-cli can build saved projects and export results; erosion runs on a GPU when available and otherwise falls back to the CPU. The editor requires a GPU with working Vulkan drivers on Linux, or Vulkan or DX12 drivers on Windows. Ymir is free software under GPL-3.0. Windows binaries are unsigned and prompt a first-run SmartScreen warning.