GeoGen is a terrain generator from JangaFX, the scrappy team that brought us EmberGen. Like EmberGen, GeoGen is focused on real-time, GPU-accelerated performance. So to understand this tool, you just need to imagine Gaea, Terragen or World Builder — but a lot faster.

The workflow for terrain generation in GeoGen is similar to those other packages: Procedural nodes or images drive heightmaps to give you the overall structure of your terrain. Then you begin to add detail in both geometry and color based on user-controlled gradients, elevations and slopes. You also have additional atmospheric effects, such as fog, clouds and water.

Those who are familiar with EmberGen will find the interface almost identical, so moving from Ember to Geo would feel nearly seamless. It then becomes a matter of learning what the GeoGen-specific nodes are. You can set up your base node with an input to form the initial terrain, compounded with a profile curve that dictates the slope and structure of the terrain. It can be a custom curve, or you can choose types of terrain, including cliff, crevasse, island, mountain ridge — and then customize those to taste. After that it’s all about making the scene more complex with masks, filters, height modifiers, erosion and colors. Again, this is very similar to other terrain workflows — the difference is that the results in GeoGen are real time.

One feature in particular that I was wowed by is a gradient color picker. Normally, for a gradient you place a marker on the gradient color swatch and then choose a color for that marker. But GeoGen’s gradient picker allows you to have a reference image, such as a mountain range you are trying to emulate. Then you can click and drag across the range of colors — and the variations in the image will get transposed into the gradient swatch.

Like JangaFX, the package includes a bunch of presets to get you well on your way. You can either use them as a starting point or as a great learning tool to deconstruct how the node tree is built. Clicking on the output icon of a node will show you the state of the terrain at that point in the node tree, so you can easily tell how that node is contributing.

The renderer is proprietary to GeoGen and includes a raymarcher, a lightmap and a path tracer, so you have options for your output quality. However, I would be more inclined to export the terrain, color and utility maps to geo (currently OBJ or FBX) and textures (you can export up to 16K) and then bring them into my favorite DCC or Unreal. Or even export to heightmaps to repurpose in other software. But when you are devving the terrain out, nothing beats real-time — and that’s what GeoGen is all about.

GeoGen is currently in alpha mode, but it has been rigorously tested by the JangaFX user base for at least six months. And frankly, I haven’t had any problems with it crashing — although I haven’t been pushing it at production-level tasks either. You can currently download a trial of the alpha or purchase it for $150 (and a $75/year maintenance fee after that). Or you can go whole hog and get the JangaFX Suite, which will also get you EmberGen and access to the LiquiGen pre-alpha (see the other review here) for $400 (and $190/year after). Frankly, with all that these tools do — this is a steal.