Actual browser capture015 / Procedural landscape editor
Raise a ridge. Flood a valley. Find your light.
A landscape toy with useful outputs. Start on a quiet coast, in alpine mountains, on a tropical atoll or beside a volcano. Change the seed, shape the land, and see what the weather does to it.
Open the studio↗WebGL 2 · desktop recommended · choose Performance on lighter GPUs
How the landscape works ↓Under the surface
Terrain changes the swell. Wind shapes the snow. The sky appears twice: overhead and in the water.
Paint land, carve bays and smooth the coast on a top-down map. Each stroke becomes an editable height layer on a fixed grid, so the shape survives changes in render quality. Shore depth and wave shelter rebuild around it; undo restores the previous stroke, and world files keep the painted shape.
Seeded, domain-warped terrain supplies the broad shape. Alpine controls add summit horns, sharper ridges and glacial carving; talus relaxation softens the slopes. Snow responds to altitude, slope, shelter and hollows, so exposed rock and sheltered snow do not wear the same coat.
A travel-time field routes swell around land and slows it over shoals. A separate upwind shelter field reduces exposure behind islands. Twenty seeded wave bands supply the open sea; the coastline changes how those waves arrive. This is an artistic approximation, not a fluid solver.
← Back to NotesBreaking waves feed a pair of GPU history textures. Foam moves with the flow, spreads along the shore and decays at different rates. That gives the surface a little memory instead of painting a bright stripe onto every crest.
Raymarched cumulus and stratus, plus stretched cirrus, form a cached sky shared with the water reflections. Two history buffers reduce sampling grain. Camera movement and changed settings invalidate that history, while quality settings control resolution, step count and refresh rate.
GPU-driven flakes wrap around the camera in near and far volumes. The terrain height texture fades them at the surface; depth testing hides them behind mountains. Snowy ridges emit wind-carried spindrift, while whiteout changes fog and light. The storm does not simulate accumulating snow.
GLB export contains real terrain, vertex-coloured snow, forest, a camera and a still wave surface calculated from the same spectrum and coastal field as the viewport. Browser shaders, animated weather and reflections stay in Terra. A world file preserves the editable settings and camera instead.
Keep what you make
PNG saves the view without the controls. GLB takes the geometry into Blender or another glTF tool. World JSON keeps your settings and camera ready to reopen in Terra.
The latest world is saved in this browser. Export a world file to keep a portable copy—clearing browser storage removes the local save.
Weather and erosion are visual approximations. Clouds use a sky-dome approach, not a volume you can fly through; GLB does not carry the editor’s live shaders or weather effects.
At the controls
Drag to orbit, right-drag to pan, scroll to zoom. H hides the studio; Space pauses the environment; Command/Ctrl Z undoes a change. Raise the sea level, change the wind, and watch the coast respond.