QuadSpinner’s new landscape sculpting software has been released. You may remember their name if you’ve been a Vue user in recent years. QuadSpinner’s Gaea is not for Vue, though. It’s a standalone Windows software. It’s also rather affordable, with a very sensible scaling price.
Of course there are already a variety of well-polished terrain makers out there, from trusty old Bryce 7 at $20 on the DAZ Store, up to the latest Terragen at $$$s. There are also newer game-engine based tools such as World Creator 2, which I reviewed in depth a while back, and the new FlowScape which I recently reviewed here on this blog.
How is Gaea different? Well, I have to say I haven’t tried it yet, only researched it a bit to work out what it is and isn’t. It’s made by very experienced landscape folks who know what the industry needs in a workflow. Simplicity, for instance. Gaea appears to be focussed on presenting an obvious-even-to-interns workflow and super-quick creation of quality terrain meshes. So it sounds like it can be likened to ‘a KeyShot for terrain makers’. Which would be very welcome, if that’s a correct characterisation of the software.
That said, I see that Gaea does have power under the hood, and also has… nodes. The mere mention of which is enough to have some 3D artists running for the exit. You’re also likely to need a very hefty PC if you’re going to be working at 8K with complex erosion and a filter stack on top. That said, it seems you can ignore the nodes and just work with manageable mesh sizes.
So it’s another welcome entry in the landscape sculpting field, and the $99 Indie price is right. It’s driven by your CPU, so doesn’t require a £500 graphics card (GPU). Even better, if you can tolerate a 1k limit then the price is free! And even generously allows commercial use…
Currently the site’s download slots appear to be saturated, though. It just gives timeout after timeout, for me. But I guess I just keep trying for the download. I can’t find any download mirrors they might have set up to take up the slack.