Visual Terrain Maker Review

Visual Terrain Maker is a terrain modeling and landscape creation application designed for game developers, cartographers, and anyone else who needs a 3D-modeling tool for creating games, interactive maps, landscape views, digital artworks, and other projects. The software is free and doesn't require special hardware or software. Its "what you see is what you get"-style interface makes it easy to use, and the program can export to Direct X file format (*.x).

Its simple real-time workflow allows you to set terrain colours, assign skydome environments, and generate heightmaps and splatmaps in resolutions up 65,536 x 65,536. The resulting files can then be easily exported to other DCC tools or game engines.

The application can also export DEMs, which are useful when building hillshade layers to portray more detailed landscapes or generalized areas. You can even create a terrain with different versions of the same raster - one for finer detail, and another for larger scales.

Aside from sculpting, painting, and texture layers, Terrain Editor also allows you to change the tint of a terrain's Diffuse, Normal, and Mask Maps. In addition, you can adjust how much water surfaces reflect the sky and surrounding objects from a value of 1 (high reflection) to 0 (no reflection).

You can manipulate terrain regions to a new position, size, or orientation using the Move, Resize, and Rotate tools in the Region tab. You can also copy or duplicate a region to a different location, or fill a terrain region with a new material or at a specified sea-level.