I recently noticed two free 3D landscape generators and thought to myself: "I bet there are dozens of never-finish terrain generators for games and vr apps!" I was wrong. In this article, I will introduce the handful of floss scenery generators and editors that I was able to find.
InnerWorld
InnerWorld is a Blender-based landscape generator that shines through a nice online documentation. Landscapes are generated from Blender noise functions or external sources. The tool's specialty appears to be object placement. The project is four years old and the last release (0.0.5) is two months young.
Terraform
Terraform is an open source interactive height field generation and manipulation program, giving you the ability to generate random terrain and transform it.
The project seems to be non-living - last CVS activity: August 2003.
Hme
Height Map Editor is a 2D GUI for generating and precise-editing height maps. It is cross-platform and has a KISS philosophy. However, the last release is seven years old.
Wing
Wing, a GPLed, DirectX-based and thus Windows-only landscape editor, is aimed to
proceduraly generate four key ingredients of nature: plants, terrain, water and weather, with simple but powerful user controls
The project was found three years ago but appears to be in early development stages. It is looking for programmer help, so I assume that the project became active only recently.
Real Landscape Project (supposedly)
RLP is a one week-old, pre-anything landscape 'thing' project looking for programming aid. I'm afraid the language barrier will prevent it from thriving.
3D Landscape Generator (Processing)
One more, just for fun: 3D Landscape Generator for Processing is a GPLed, minimal, 120 LOC-long landscape generator and renderer that runs in your browser.
That's it folks! I hope these projects will prove useful for content creation in games. Be welcome to comment if you know of additional landscape generators or of open source games that feature their own!