Terrain3D was just released, a free and open source terrain engine for the Godot game engine. With the recent release of Godot 4 (and Godot 4.1) on of the most requested missing features is a system for creating and editing terrain. There is a proposed terrain system but that is for the future. Thankfully if you need a terrain engine for Godot there is now an excellent option in the form of the just released Terrain3D from Tokisan games.
Terrain3D is written in C++ as a GDExtension, meaning it should be easy to integrate into your game and should give much better performance than many of the GDScript based terrain solutions that currently exist. Key features of Terrain3D include:
- Written in C++ as a Godot gdextension plugin, which works with official engine builds
- Geometric Clipmap mesh terrain (as used in The Witcher 3)
- Up to 16k x 16k, sliced up in non-contiguous 1k regions (think multiple islands without paying for 16k^2 vram)
- Up to 10 levels of detail (LODs)
- Up to 32 textures
- Sculpting, texture painting, texture detiling, paint colors or wetness
- Supports importing heightmaps from HTerrain, WorldMachine, Unity, Unreal and any tool that can export a heightmap (raw/r16/exr/+)
Key Links
Out of the Ashes (Game Terrain3D was created for)
HTerrain Tutorial (Godot based Height map generator)
You can learn more about the new Terrain3D GDExtension for the Godot 4.x game engine and see it in action in the video below.