World Machine vs worldGen

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.

worldGen is a free, open-source procedural generator for two-dimensional maps built from an integer seed. It creates continents, oceans, rivers, forests, swamps, beaches, cliffs, settlements, and roads. Terrain begins with multifractal noise and simulated raindrop erosion, while rain-shadow modeling affects climate across mountain ranges. Elevation, moisture, and temperature produce thirteen biomes. Reusing a seed generates the same world, making results repeatable. The interactive viewer supports panning, zooming, tile details, step-by-step generation visualization, and screenshot export. World state can be saved in TOML, and a world blob can be exported as a .bin file. Display and generation parameters are adjustable in config.toml, with additional settings in world/config.go. worldGen is a Go desktop application using Ebiten and requires Go 1.21 or later plus desktop OpenGL support. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows under the MIT license. The roadmap lists urban layouts, more plant and biome variety, waterfalls, cliffs, and artificial life.