After several years of development and almost a full year of early access, QuadSpinner has finally officially released Gaea 1.0. This is a promising new stand-alone tool for landscape modeling, which combines the methods of procedural height map creation with erosion, fully controlled by an artist, akin to sculpting using natural elements.

Key Features

• A hybrid layer or node-based approach combined with sculpting to provide several options for artists to choose their preferable way to work.
• Several primitives that act as starting points, including mountains, dunes, plates, faults, lakes, crater noise, line noise, slope noise and more.
• It is possible to import a 3D object and have Gaea convert it to a height map.
• Advanced Hydraulic Erosion algorithms.
• Debris nodes to add rocks and other objects using physics assisted scattering.
• Physically accurate snow, which can stick to the local mass of a snowdrift, flow down slopes during thawing, fall at certain angles, etc.
• Data maps, including wetness, velocity, and flow, as well as biome maps, which use rainfall, moisture, and altitude to create different ecosystems. They can be used as masks for complex landscaping or by using third-party scattering tools (such as the Forest Pack) to fill the landscape with scattered objects.
• Ability to create non-uniform stratification with plate-breakage, terrain folding and rifts.
• Realistic sediment accumulation.
• Several prefabricated primitives that can be used as starting points for custom designs.
• Multiple export options including 16bit EXR, RAW, meshes or point clouds. Multiple LODs can also be exported.
• Real-time viewports with support for lighting, atmosphere, and water, including material presets for rapid visualization.

The Gaea license also includes a separate Directed Erosion Studio application that allows users to easily create environmental objects and customize them, which is often much more efficient than using purely procedural methods.

Price and availability

Gaea 1.0 is now available and offers 4 different licenses: Community, Indie, Professional and Enterprise. The cost of Gaea perpetual licenses is $99 for an Indie one with a 4K rendering limit, $199 for a Professional license with no rendering limit, and $299 for the Enterprise version that’s also without a rendering limit, script access, automation, distributed builds, etc. The Community version, which comes with 1K rendering and limited Erosion Studio tools, is absolutely free to download.