Sneak peek: Instant Terra 2.0
Originally posted on 9 February 2020. Instant Terra 2.0 is now shipping: find full details here.
Wysilab has posted a teaser for Instant Terra 2.0, the next major version of its 3D landscape generation tool, showing what looks to be a new toolset for animating terrain. The release is due to ship later this month.
A fast, lightweight procedural tool for generating terrains for real-time work
First released in 2018, Instant Terra is designed as a fast, lightweight tool for creating terrain complete with surface water features, particularly for games and real-time projects.
Workflow is primarily graph-based – the software includes nodes for generating terrain and mimicking the effects of different types of erosion – with the option to paint masks to control the effect of nodes.
The software imports DEM data or source images, and exports terrain as an FBX mesh or heightmap, supporting a range of common 2D image formats including OpenEXR.
Users work directly at the final resolution of a terrain, with changes displayed in a 3D preview in real time.
New terrain animation tools due in Instant Terra 2.0?
To that, Instant Terra 2.0 looks set to add the option to animate terrain over time and render out the results: the teaser video embedded above shows a new Animation tab with playback controls and a timeline.
In the video, the toolset is shown in use to animate snow and surface water in a valley, mimicking the effect of snowmelt from the slopes above filling the valley floor.
As well as terrain properties like water level and the angle of the slopes on which snow is retained, it looks to be possible to animate material properties like water colour and transparency.
Pricing and system requirements
Instant Terra 2.0 is due to ship this month. Wysilab hasn’t announced any changes to pricing or system requirements for the software.
The current stable release, Wysilab 1.15, is available for Windows 7+ only. A perpetual licence costs $149 for 8K export; $199 for unlimited resolution.
There is also a Pro edition aimed at larger studios, which includes features geared towards generating very large terrains, multi-file export, and a Python API. It is priced on enquiry.