Simulate, Don’t Sculpt
Realistic procedural terrain, built for technical artists.
Shape fractals, simulate erosion and rivers, then export production-ready heightmaps, masks, and PBR textures to Unity, Unreal, Blender, and more.
Windows · macOS · Linux
New in Dragontail Peak 3D VDM terrain (overhangs and cliffs), a rebuilt interface, native Mac and Linux support. See what’s newSimulate real erosion
Start with a raw fractal terrain and let erosion do the rest. World Machine
carves gullies, cuts ridges, and deposits sediment where it naturally collects.
In Dragontail Peak,
erosion isn't limited to heightfields anymore. It can carve cliff faces, underhangs, and caves.
After erosion
Fractal input
Wire it up
World Machine builds worlds from a node graph, not a brush. Wire together generators, filters, simulations, and outputs. Change one parameter upstream and World Machine recomputes everything after it, automatically.
- 100+ devices: fractals, erosion, rivers, masks, and outputs.
- Non-destructive: tweak any node and re-resolve. Full edit history kept.
- Reusable: turn any network into a macro and drop it into the next project.
What artists say
World Machine gives us the power to create very realistic terrains in a short amount of time. Its erosion filters are the best I have seen, but also give a lot of control over the final look.
World Machine was instrumental in creating the terrain for our Supersonic Sled demo — a very large, natural-looking landscape with enough control to place canyons and hills exactly where we needed. It handled all of that beautifully.
World Machine has allowed me to quickly and efficiently create massive game areas. The feature set and workflow get better with each release — a must-have tool for any environment artist.
I have used World Machine on a number of film projects and find it an invaluable asset for environment creation.
We can not only create height maps, but alphas for our terrain paint layers as well. This saves a bundle of time, with results that look more detailed and professional.
I have been using World Machine since version 1.25 and haven’t found anything else that can compete for ease of use, versatility and stunning results.
A few finished examples
Terrain authored in World Machine, created by the named artist.
Deeper in the toolbox
Erosion is World Machine's best known feature, but there's a lot more in the toolbox: rivers and lakes, tiled builds larger than memory, a high performance 3D viewport, and over a hundred devices for building complex terrains.
Carve rivers that flow
Draw the course with the River Tool, or let Create Water find it. World Machine cuts the riverbed, forms lakes where geology calls for them, and gives the channel the riffle-pool sequence a river of that size should have.
The river tools →Build at world scale
Tiled builds generate terrains far larger than memory: entire continents at full resolution, which World Machine writes out as engine-ready tiles instead of one capped heightfield.
Tiled builds →Keep the good graphs
Wrap any device network into a macro, version it, and drop it into the next project. The redesigned macro system ships with the Dragontail Peak release.
Macros & versioning →Your engine does the rendering.
World Machine supplies what sits underneath: geometry, heightfields, flow and wear masks, material coverage, and PBR textures. Build at the resolution you need. If the world is larger than memory, write it as tiles.
The source data
.r16
.png
splat
pbr
Release History
What's new, what's next
World Machine has generated landscapes you’ve already explored in games and film since 2005. Each release is named after a mountain. Here’s the line, from the beginning to what’s in active development now.
8 featured series, 45 releases added water systems, PBR material texturing, and most of the device library people use now.
World Machine 2
The breakthrough success that powered AAA terrain generation for a decade+.
World Machine
Where it began: a good idea and some enthusiasm.
Easier to try than to read about.
The Basic Edition is free for personal, noncommercial work, including the erosion and water tools above.
Buy a license when you need commercial export, higher resolution, tiled builds, or every CPU core.