World Machine vs WorldEngine

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.

WorldEngine is free, MIT-licensed software for procedural world generation. It models processes such as plate simulation, rain shadows, erosion, humidity, and terrain permeability to generate world data and images. Outputs include elevation, precipitation, temperature, biome, and ocean maps, as well as heightmaps and biome maps. Users can set a seed, and the command line can create an ancient-looking map from a world file. Worlds can be saved in protobuf or HDF5 formats; HDF5 support requires the optional h5py dependency. Python applications can load world files using WorldEngine as a library, while Java applications can use WorldEngine-Java. Installation instructions cover Docker, source, and uv, but the package is not currently released on PyPI. WorldEngine requires Python 3.9 or later and supports versions through 3.14. A separate graphical interface is available as an experimental, limited project. The project invites questions, suggestions, and contributions through its Google group or by opening an issue.