Everything in Gaea

Gaea All Features | Coming in Gaea 3

Terrains

Geological primitives

Start with geologically-inspired base shapes from Gaea's extensive Primitive library. From mountains and canyons to abstract and stylized forms, each shape is parametric, letting you mold and refine the terrain's scale, profile, and deformation with artistic precision.

Here is a great example of how 13 nodes can be replaced with just 2 nodes in Gaea by combining Primitives and Surfaces.

These high-powered nodes are made to help you approach common tasks with minimal effort and keep your graphs clean so you can focus on what truly matters.

Note: Each Primitive and Surface contains additional unique algorithms and code that cannot be duplicated by simple nodes.

The Transpose node can take the surface shapes of one terrain and transpose them onto another, while preserving the volume of the target terrain.

You can create a terrain surface that you like, regardless of the shape it is built upon. Then create or bring in a terrain shape you like - an Unreal Engine drawn terrain, a ZBrush sculpted landscape, or even a full 3D model. Then simply Tranpose the surface.

Gaea takes terrain design to new horizons by introducing key tools for sandstone, limestone, and generic rock layers that promote mechanical breakage as opposed to softer, sedimentary flow.

Go beyond soil using a large array of rock tools that can carve complex detail into your terrain or add huge protruding outcrops.

Surface nodes let you sculpt complexity without altering the terrain’s primary shape. Add strata, sediment, fractures, and visual noise while retaining your landscape’s structure. Designed to work hand-in-hand with Gaea’s geological core.

The Modifier Stack provides quick access to common adjustments, masks, and modifications that you may wish to apply to a node. Traditionally, node-based software would require you to create an additional node for each adjustment - often resulting in complicated graphs that are difficult to manage.

The Object node can be used to import 3D models and rasterize them into heightfields. You can fully control the Scale, Rotation, and Movement of the imported mesh. The mesh remains in 3D space so you can modify it as needed, but Gaea adapts it as a 2.5D Heightfield so it can work as a terrain no matter how complex your topology!

The versatile Draw node can be connected to one or more other nodes such as Erosion_2™. Then if you Lock Preview to your last node, you can draw freehand strokes and have them immediately turn into a complex landscape.

Similar to painting terrain shapes, you can use Draw with the Mask node to "paint" any effect with full control over how it is applied over your terrain.

The Transform node lets you move, rotate, and scale your terrain. By itself, it is a simple tool. When combined with multiple elements, it gives you full freedom to modify your landscape visually and have the procedural graph react accordingly.

Simulations

Advanced erosion workflows

Gaea's simulations of natural processes are the cornerstone of creating rich, believable digital terrains.

Creating simple erosion can give you great terrains, especially when powered by Erosion_2. However, you can take it several levels further. Creating multiple erosion passes and infusing different processes in between, lets you create very complex visuals.

In this example, we use Scree and Stones to create granular detail into the surface. Then we use Anastomosis to fuse these "debris" into the soil by simulating light water flow. Each of these segments is bookended by Erosion nodes. Finally, we top it off with Crumble to deepen our downcuts. The result: a magnificently complex landscape with character, localized details, and a distinct terrain that is very memorable.

Erosion_2 is the pinnacle of natural simulation in Gaea. It mimics real-world erosion processes with deterministic precision while granting full creative control. Shape mountains with hydraulic, thermal, and gravitational forces. Control talus, anisotropy, sediment displacement, and more—all while keeping your shape intact through volume preservation.

Simulate convincing snow accumulation across slopes, crevices, and terrain curvature. Customize melt dynamics, powder softness, and seasonal transitions. Integrated into erosion and texture workflows for biome realism.

Simulate water bodies such lakes, rivers, and entire coasts. Export water bodies as separate heightfield or meshes, use Depth information to help guide colorizations or influence other elements in your graph. Hydrology is built into Gaea's engine and uses advanced physics to ensure realistic simulation.

The WaterColor node provides fast, easy colorization for your all your water bodies in a single pass.

Gaea’s Debris simulation generates millions of physical rock fragments using a physics-based engine. Debris can be embedded in the heightfield or exported as a point cloud. Customize rock type, distribution, and coloration for realistic aftermaths of mechanical erosion.

Driven by terrain shape, hydrology, and climate data, the Vegetation node procedurally defines plant distribution. Finetune density, biomes, and species with precision, ensuring natural-looking vegetation that is rooted in geological logic.

Different Tree nodes can be chained and have each react to previous populations, allowing you to create complex interactions.

Multiple simulations of the same type require you to combine the same type of data/masks from all the simulations - which can get messy. The Accumulator node lets you access global masks for simulations such as Snow, Water, Debris, Trees - including various secondary masks such as Depth and FreshWater - in a single node.

Even when you add new Simulations or remove existing ones, the Accumulator updates itself automatically.

Color

ColorErosion

ColorErosion™ does to color maps what erosion does to soil. It moves it with the physics of sedimentation, turning a color map - whether a SatMap or an actual bitmap - into a color simulation encompassing terrain and accentuating the nuanced mineral flows of the underlying terrain.

To combat "Combine fatigue", we created the Mixer node, a layer-based approach to blending multiple color maps.

Layer masking and reordering completely take away the complexities of a colorization node graph. You can setup individual color maps separately and pipe them into Mixer for compositing. Use convenience tools such as visual layer identification and built-in masking to simplify your workflow even further.

SatMaps™ is a library of over 1400 color maps derived from real satellite data, helping you colorize terrains quickly without sacrificing realism.

This tech was originally pioneered by QuadSpinner for GeoGlyph in 2014. Gaea's latest iteration provides an extensive library covering all natural locations, giving you a vast playground for colorizing your terrains.

Data Maps expose crucial details about your terrain that can be used to drive other processes or used for texturing. Height, Slope, Soil Occlusion, sun shadows across time, and many more.

Simulations emit extra data such as sedimentation, soil flow, fluvial details, wear and tear, snow depth, river flow direction, and many more. Each of these maps can be used for texturing or masking, and even driving other elements in external software.

Synth can take bitmaps – photographs, concept sketches, snippets from maps, anything! – and turn that into a lookup map or color gradient. You can use this high-fidelity color data to texturize your terrains and make sure your color matches exactly what you need.

Weathering is a special node that uses geological equivalents of highlights and shadows to accentuate your terrains and endow them with character.

It mimics efflorescence in stones where salt (calcium or lime) leaches out from the stone through moisture, as well as discoloration caused by general weathering.

The world's most accurate heightfield renderer LightX lets you use high-precision rendering to create a fully realized render that you can use for direct application on your object. This specialized heightfield renderer is optimized to showcase details in ways that polygon-based renderers may not be able to.

Featuring raytraced AO, soft-shadows for even sub-pixel features, and a built-in atmospheric system, LightX is a very powerful tool. You can access all render passes such as light diffusion, ambient occlusion, shadows, and more.

You can bake the entire rendered look to bitmap and load it on an unlit shader in your target application. In this image you can see such a texture loaded on a large terrain.

Gaea’s unique Cartography tools let you create simple or elaborate maps from your terrain with a single node. Control contours, influence of water features, colorization, and more within a single space.

Workflow

Purpose-built interface

We take pride in creating a streamlined, aesthetically pleasing, and highly functional user interface. UI and workflow conveniences are considered high level aspects of the software. We give them as much love as possible in every new build.

The 2D viewport provides an orthographic view of your terrain, along with any extra data maps a node might provide. It also supplies measuring tools, data map preview enhancements, and the ability to quickly save a preview to disk.

Visualize your terrain in various render modes: realistic lighting with an optional skybox, a no-nonsense AO-based “day” render mode, and raw data views – including masks – with different gradients maps.

Create a sequence of nodes quickly by specifying an entire chain. You can even use node shortcodes such as m for Mountain and e2 for Erosion_2.

Hold ctrl + shift and drag the graph to push all nodes beyond that point. This is a great way to organize portions of your graph, or make space in a neat chain when you interject a node.

Like a "wormhole", Portals let you connect nodes across vast gaps (even across different graphs) without visible connections.

Pioneered in Gaea 1.0, Portals are a unique concept in graph-based applications. They have now become a mainstay in other graph-based applications too.

When using the Organizing with Tabs, Portals can be used to connect nodes across different graphs.

MultiMixing instaneously combines all selected nodes into a Combine, Mixer, or Layers node. This quick but helpful shortcut saves you dozens of clicks.
Group your node networks to easily separate concerns or confine specific functionality. You can color code groups and even collapse them to reduce visual clutter.

Add Notes to your graph to jot down quick comments, instructions for other teammates, educational information, and more.

Notes support the popular Markdown format so you can quickly organize your notes, and even create links, tables, and host images from external sources.

The Data View shows the graph as a tree, with nest tabs and groups, to provide a quick overview of the world.

The Filters let you identify specific node types, slow or problematic nodes, or obsolete remnants. These are invaluable tools when working with very large graphs.

Gaea ensures your work is always safe! It takes an autosave snapshot whenever you run any destructive or large action that may alter your file. Additionaly, it saves multiple autosaves on a timer. A recovery file is kept whenever you open an older file.

No matter how complex or heavy your scenes get, Gaea ensures your data remains safe.

You can bake nodes to offload them from active memory resulting in a fixed high-res bake and faster loading times. You can unbake a node instantly if you need to modify it.

Passive Caching lets Gaea save its entire memory cache to disk and reuse it next time you work with the file. This results in an instant load and zero additional processing to show previews.

Build

256K terrain builds

Create and manage terrains at a scale once reserved for satellites and military-grade simulations. With support for up to 65 billion pixels, you can model entire countries in ultra-high resolution. Whether you're building vast wildernesses at 1 meter per pixel or dense cityscapes at drone-level 10 cm detail, you're commanding enough raw data to shape over 6,500 square kilometers — larger than Los Angeles County — with stunning precision.

Regions allow you to take a portion of your terrain and upscale it to a higher resolution. For example, you can take 1/6th of a 8192 x 8192 terrain and upscale the Region to 8192 x 8192 - making it almost 6X times larger in proportional pixel density.

This workflow is very helpful in isolating specific areas that may be of higher significance. As both the overall landscape and the isolated Region are both developed through a procedural graph, changing one automatically changes the other keeping both versions in sync.

Hybrid Builds provide a bucket build system that works within your RAM limits to break down the terrain into smaller chunks and process them faster.

It is like a tiled build but does not suffer from the same "small tile issues" such as Erosion not being well formed. For most terrains, it can provide a great way to generate up to 16K terrains while using resources required for just 2K or 4K terrains.

Coming Soon in Gaea 2.4

Network Builds enable you to distribute a Hybrid or Tiled build across multiple machines on your network. By dividing the workload across multiple machines, you can signficantly increase the build speed.

If a 16 × 16 tile build takes 40 minutes on a single machine, then on a 4‑machine network you could see that time drop to around 10–12 minutes, as the workload is divided and processed in parallel across all nodes.

The Baking feature in Gaea is a powerful tool designed to enhance workflow efficiency by locking nodes at a high resolution, enabling high-quality previews without compromising performance on the rest of the graph.

Baking gives you reduced memory load, faster reload times, and the ability to lock a shape perfectly across all builds.

Mutations in Gaea don't just randomize the shape, they give you a coherent variety without altering the character of the terrain.

This is especially useful for concept art, game level design, or VFX production, where you need many plausible terrain options without manually tweaking each one. With Mutations, you can maintain a consistent overall structure or style while introducing natural variations, making your workflow faster, more flexible, and creatively rich.

Adaptive Tris uses our advanced "Sophia" algorithm to generate highly optimized terrain meshes. It analyzes the underlying terrain and intelligently subdivides only where needed, creating clean, efficient triangles that preserve detail while eliminating waste.

This results in higher quality meshes with significantly fewer polygons than traditional grid-based methods. Typical scenes see a 20–40% reduction in polygon count, while terrains with large flat regions can achieve savings of up to 80%, making your exports leaner, faster to render, and easier to work with in any pipeline.

Adaptive Tris LODs are less likely to show major "popping" as the topology is very faithful to the silhouette across all levels of details.

The TextureBaker node can create tangent-space normals maps that provide superior quality normals that can be used with lower-resolution Meshes/LODs.

Additionally, it can reprocess other bitmaps to adjust to the tangent-space of the Mesh and compensate for the difference between heightfield displacement and Mesh output. This ensures your maps fit your mesh perfectly.

Gaea makes exporting assets effortless for any major CG application or game engine. You can output your work in all common formats with ease: 32‑bit, 16‑bit, and 8‑bit bitmaps including OpenEXR, TIFF, PNG, and RAW; 3D mesh formats like OBJ, FBX, DAE, and GLTF; and point clouds in PLY or XYZ.

Whether you're creating cinematic environments or real-time game worlds, Gaea ensures your assets are ready for any pipeline.

The new Tree and Debris simulation features introduce the need to export complex data cleanly. Gaea now supports point cloud exports in PLY and XYZ formats, letting you capture detailed placement information with precision.

Use these point clouds to drive ecosystem generation, debris scattering, and other advanced workflows in tools like Houdini or Unreal’s PCG system—making your worlds richer, more believable, and easier to art-direct.

Gaea Data and Geology Maps make it simple to extract or generate PBR-analogous information critical for realistic materials. In just a few steps, you can produce maps for shininess, roughness, bump, micro-displacement, detail normals, and more—ready to drop into any modern renderer or game engine.

These maps let you control surface qualities with precision, adding convincing wear, weathering, and fine-grained detail that elevate your terrains from flat and artificial to truly lifelike. Whether you're crafting cinematic landscapes or real-time environments, Gaea gives you the nuanced control you need to make them believable.

Gaea offers powerful command-line automation with support for arguments, variables, and direct file manipulation. This makes it easy to integrate Gaea’s build engine into any production pipeline with minimal setup.

You can automate batch builds, customize parameters on the fly, and even create your own bridge to other CG applications and proprietary tools—giving you full control to streamline your workflow exactly the way you want.

Advanced

TOR Engine 2.0

The TOR 2.0 Engine in Gaea is a next-generation hybrid computing powerhouse that harnesses both CPU and GPU in perfect concert. It exploits modern AVX instruction sets and a highly optimized SPMD processing architecture to deliver blisteringly fast terrain generation with precision and scalability.

Under the hood, TOR 2.0 features custom deep-level memory management that sidesteps typical garbage collection slowdowns while maintaining safety and stability. This ensures maximum RAM efficiency even with colossal datasets, empowering artists to build ever more complex worlds without compromise.

Gaea's 2.7D™ engine provides new internal processing that can keep and transform data in 3D space but retain maximum possible data in 2.5D so you can keep utilizing them as efficient, cost-effective heightfields.

Define a variable such as Float, Integer, Choice, Bool, Color, or String. These variables can be bound to different node properties. Variables can be controlled through the UI or CLI.

Expressions are modifiers applied to either a property, such as a slider, or to the variable bound to the property. It allows you to make modifications to the incoming value.

The LoopBegin and LoopEnd nodes provide a simple and safe context to run loops. Nodes within the bounds of these nodes are processed multiple times. This lets you create new, complex effects or processes that may not be directly possible.

Loop comes with design-time safety locks so you never overwhelm your build during tests or design.

Any nodes marked for output within a Loop are automatically saved in incrementally named files. You can craft custom animation modules using this mechanism.

The Math node is a robust computational node that lets you write your own shapes using scripting. It is deceptively powerful with a very simple interface. It is essentially a blank canvas for you to create any kind of mathematical function and even complex algorithms.

Math can consume Variables you declare in the Gaea UI so you can actually control your script through external controls. It supports a majority of common mathematical functions such as abs, avg, pow, trigonometric functions like cos, sin, rad2deg, control flow statements such as if-then-else, and even loops!

Flow Logic nodes such as Switch and Route let you configure multiple routes and failsafes within your graph. The flow can then be bound to Variables and controlled via external mechanisms.

Gaea stores its world in a .terrain file using JSON. It uses a common-sense naming system to describe all world properties and expose the entire node graph.

Advanced users can tap into such JSON entities and edit a Gaea terrain externally, or implement complex automation. The plain-text JSON format also makes it compatible with Source Control tools as well as File Diff viewers.

Gaea's procedural heart makes it possible to go beyond terrains and create a variety of objects and textures - cliff faces, planets, and even man-made material textures!

Creative prototypes and workflow by Adam Garland.

Unreal

Unreal terrain import and synchronization

Assign weightmaps directly in Gaea and ensure they are automatically applied to your terrain when you import it using Gaea2Unreal.

Given the way Unreal Engine plugins are structured, we wanted to ensure maximum flexibility for all users. We understand that direct access to the source code is essential, so we have open-sourced the plugin under a very permissive modified MIT License.

Source code for the Gaea2Unreal plugin can be found on the official GitHub Repository.

Find installation instructions and a basic Getting Started guide on Gaea2Unreal Documentation..

Houdini

Gaea processing for Houdini terrains

Bring the power of Gaea's simulations and surfaces to your Houdini terrains. Gaea2Houdini provides deep integration between the two software, essentially allowing Houdini to run Gaea as a backend to provide Gaea processes in Houdini heightfields. The best of both worlds!

We've taken the original Gaea TOR Processor SOP and upgraded it to be even more flexible, efficient, and powerful! You can create a single node, a sequence of nodes, or a complex network run through various chained variables and constructs, and have it available directly in Gaea as a single SOP! Every variable you create in Gaea and bind to a property becomes accessible in the Houdini interface.

Gaea and Houdini understand each other deeply, letting you maintain accurate data throughout the workflow. In addition to heightfields, we are pleased to announce that Gaea 2.0 now supports color maps in Gaea2Houdini - allowing you to take advantage of Gaea's new ColorErosion and extensive colorization capabilities.

Gaea2Houdini ships with SideFX Labs.

We've open-sourced the Gaea2Houdini plugin so that you can adapt it to custom workflows and include it in any sophisticated pipeline.

Source code for the plugin can be found on the GitHub Repository.

Find installation instructions and a basic Getting Started guide on Gaea2Houdini Documentation..