L3DT vs Worldsmith

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.

Worldsmith is a free, open-source browser application for generating fantasy world maps from a numeric seed, with a mode for rendering real Earth. Procedural terrain uses domain-warped fractal noise, including ridged mountain ranges, while biomes derive from elevation, moisture, and temperature. Rivers use D8 flow accumulation to form tributary drainage networks. Exports include PNG maps up to 5120 pixels, editable SVG maps up to 3840 pixels, JSON world data, and 8-bit or 16-bit heightmaps. The maker says heightmaps can be imported into Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, and World Machine. Earth mode uses NOAA ETOPO1 elevation and bathymetry, averaged to about five kilometers per sample; synthesized detail is disclosed and can be disabled with Detail set to 0. The app runs entirely client-side without an account, server, or dependencies, and is offered under the MIT license.