Pigmi vs World Machine

Pigmi is a desktop editor for texture palettes, gradient atlases, and PBR material maps. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with a Free plan priced at free. Gradient tools include linear, radial, and conic forms, stepped rows and columns, RGB or HSL interpolation, editable color stops, and opacity. Palette elements can sit in nested folders and support multi-selection, ordering, visibility, isolation, copy and paste, plus name search. Material controls cover albedo, roughness, metallic, emission, clearcoat, and clearcoat roughness. Enabled maps export as PNG or WebP, and Pigmi can create a packed MRC map while synchronizing document edits with exports. Palette generation uses Huemint and preserves locked stops. Optional Blender add-ons handle palette UV mapping, vertex-color painting, and mesh attachments. A local STDIO MCP adapter supports compatible AI clients and requires Node.js. Editing and exporting are local; generation sends constraints to Huemint.

World Machine is procedural 3D terrain-generation software for artists creating realistic or stylized landscapes, including game, film, and visualization work. Its node graph offers more than 100 devices for terrain, erosion, rivers, masks, materials, and outputs. Simulations cover flow-based and thermal erosion, snow accumulation, river channels, lakes, and coastal erosion; Dragontail Peak adds terrain with overhangs, cliff faces, and caves. Exports include heightfields, meshes, masks, and PBR textures in standard formats, with listed file types including RAW, EXR, TIFF, PNG, TER, OBJ, glTF, and GLB. Compatible tools named by the maker include Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, Blender, Maya, and Cinema 4D. Professional and higher editions support tiled builds for worlds larger than memory and can resume builds after interruption. The free Basic edition has the Indie toolset but caps each output asset at 1025×1025 pixels and is limited to non-commercial use. Paid plans are Indie at $119 a month, Professional at $299 a month, and Studio Site at $1,999 a month. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.