Large scale procedural terrain generator with 3D cities and vegetation

Last crawled date: 1 year, 6 months ago

Originally this is developed for Blender 3.0, If Blender 3.1 or higher gives any errors with changing seeds, just ungroup the big node on the right inside the shader.
This is not a plugin, it is a .Blend save file with a terrain shader, lighting, camera setup and atmosphere in it
This is a large scale procedural terrain generator with 3D nature and cities for Blender Cycles.
The terrain is made with procedural noise and the 3D structures and trees are generated by saved displacement images. This doesn’t need any mods or plugins to use.
This download contains a procedural terrain setup with atmosphere. everything is textured and features city lights for night time renders. This model can be used for commercial purposes and is originally developed for Blender Cycles only.
There is a text file included with a link to a short instructional YouTube video to give some guidance to using this project
Due to the scale and complexity of the setup, there can be some errors visible in the water when near it. There is a ‘’closeup water’’ object that might need slight height adjustment right above the original water to block these errors.
In the shader of the terrain there is a set of parameters where you can generate a seed of your liking
There is a general seed parameter that randomizes everything every time you change it.
There is also more parameters for more precise tweaking like: Mountain, desert and city location seeds.
There is also parameters to increase or decrease biomes. For example you can have a 100% snow or desert map, or 100% skyscrapers.
There is a second wide angle camera behind the main camera that’s responsible for the adaptive displacement. This camera will give priority to closer details compared to far details (for optimization reasons)
The scene is optimized to get as much details with as little memory usage as possible. I would still recommend a system with at least 8gb RAM (and 6gb GPU memory if you decide to render on your GPU).
If your GPU doesn’t have enough memory, you can always choose to render on your CPU.
I have included some example settings and how much memory usage there is in the images above.
All renders on this page are rendered with 32gb of ram.
Continents
Islands (any sizes: from 100 meters to country sized)
Peninsulas
Land bridges
Mountains
Rocky/collapsed mountainsides
Rivers
Rolling Hills
Flat plains
Canyons
Cliffs
Oceans
Lakes/bays
Spruce forest
Grassy fields in spruce forest
Jungles
Desert
Snow
Red desert and rocks
(Light blue) oceans
Beaches
Farm fields/countryside
Highways
Cities (from mini villages to 200km metro areas)
Suburbs (with single houses at the edge of cities)
Commercial district
Industrial district
Historic city center
Skyscraper downtown
Supertall skyscraper with park
Large scale procedural terrain setup (approx. 750km)
(adaptive) Displacement based
No addons needed
Detailed 3D cities and nature
Detailed and diverse from low and high altitude renders
Stylized map to easily find biomes and cities
Atmosphere for scale effect
Slight curvature for high altitude renders.
Orange atmosphere for sunset (increase atmosphere density for more vibrant colors)
Night sky with stars and milky way
Night city lights
Optimized memory usage
Easy to customize seeds
Possible to animate seeds
Natural and complex looking terrain and biome blending.
Possible to import custom objects (but keep in mind it’s a 1:1000 scale, so I advise only use large scale objects, like a space elevator or custom island)
Advanced users can replace the cities and forests by their own diffuse and heightmaps.
Advanced users can bake the setup for exports.
This is developed for renders in Blender Cycles only.
But with intermediate experience in Blender, it is possible to bake the diffuse and greyscale of this terrain shader for export purposes. The quality will be lower than the native terrain setup in Blender since images only have a certain amount of greyscale levels (256 for jpeg and png)
(commercial/monetized) Examples for this scene can be used for: Game / Environment design ideas, concept art, 3D backgrounds, VR, AR, Research, high altitude renders, Greenscreen, Animation, advertisement, Education, presentations, city design study, landscape study, NFT, Film scene, HDRI
Feel free to edit and modify as much as you like.
Textures are custom made. But the grass color, rock and sand are CC0 textures from Polyhaven.