L3DT vs WaveFunctionCollapse

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.

WaveFunctionCollapse is a free tool for generating bitmaps from local patterns in an input image. It limits output to NxN pixel patterns found in that input, with optional rotations and reflections to expand the pattern data. During generation, it selects an unresolved region with the lowest Shannon entropy, assigns a state, and propagates the resulting constraints. The simple tiled model instead starts from tiles and adjacency data, and a symmetry system can shorten adjacency lists for symmetrical tilesets. Constraints let the method be combined with other generative algorithms or manual creation. The README describes it as suited to game level generation and pixel art, but less suited to large full-color textures. Models can work in higher dimensions, including voxel examples. The project links to an interactive browser version and lists adaptations for Unity, Unreal Engine 5, Godot 4, and Houdini. It supports Linux, macOS, web, and Windows; listed export formats are PNG and TXT. Generation can stop at a contradiction without producing output, and the project describes determining whether a valid bitmap exists as NP-hard. The software is MIT-licensed; the image samples and tiles are not included in that license.