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 raw fractal shapes. World Machine carves valleys,
cleaves ridges, and settles the debris in the flats below.
In the new Dragontail Peak, erosion can even carve cliff faces, underhangs, and caves.
After erosion
Fractal input
Guide the process
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 below it, live.
- 100+ devices: fractals, erosion, rivers, masks, and outputs.
- Non-destructive: tweak any node and re-resolve. Full edit history kept.
- Reusable: package any network into a macro and reuse it.
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 where most people start, but it is a fraction of what is here: water systems, tiled terrains larger than memory, a 3D viewport built for judging changes, and over a hundred devices in all.
Carve rivers that flow
The Create Water and River devices route hydrodynamic flow through your terrain: lakes, riverbeds, and riffle-pool sequences that sit believably in the land.
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 →Reuse everything you build
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 →Data for every engine.
The beautiful renders come from your engine. World Machine generates the source data underneath: mesh geometry, heightfields, texturing masks, material coverage maps, the usual PBR outputs. Build the world once, and the same data drops in native wherever you create, at any resolution, tiled for worlds larger than memory.
The source data
.r16
.png
splat
pbr
Release History
What’s new and roadmap
For two decades, World Machine has quietly generated landscapes you’ve already explored in games and film. Each release is named after a mountain. Here’s the line, from the beginning to what’s in active development now.
Dragontail Peak
Terrain with overhangs and cliffs, a rebuilt interface on a new design system, and native macOS and Linux support. One of the largest updates in World Machine’s history.
Release notesHurricane Ridge
A new erosion model, and a rewritten simulation core that made erosion up to 100× faster at high resolution.
Release notes8 featured series, 45 releases adding new tools like water systems, PBR material texturing, a huge base of primitive nodes and more.
World Machine 2
The breakthrough success that defined AAA terrain generation for a decade+.
World Machine
Where it began: a good idea and some enthusiasm.
Better terrain awaits. Get started for free.
The Basic Edition of World Machine is
free for personal, noncommercial use.
Upgrade to a full license to access all of World Machine’s advanced features.