L3DT vs SimpleXTerrain

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.

SimpleXTerrain is a free, MIT-licensed addon for procedural terrain generation in Godot 4 .NET using C#. Its node graph editor defines heightmaps, biomes, splatmaps, and scattered instances. Heightmap sources include Perlin, fractal, and Voronoi noise, radial shapes, splines, and images. Modifiers include levels, curves, slope masks, hydraulic and thermal erosion, terraces, beaches, ledges, and blur.

At runtime, the addon evaluates terrain chunks asynchronously on .NET background tasks around a moving camera, then streams heightmaps and control maps into Terrain3D regions. The documented workflow uses a Terrain3D node with a camera or character attached to a terrain streamer to build Godot scenes. Requirements are Godot Engine 4.6 or later in its .NET or Mono edition, .NET SDK 8.0 or later, and the Terrain3D plugin. Setup involves copying the addon into the project’s addons directory, rebuilding the C# solution, and enabling the plugin in Project Settings. Foliage and object scattering can generate placement data, but the feature is experimental. Some GPU-capable work has RenderingDevice compute helpers; the documentation identifies CPU evaluation as the reliable path.