Procedural terrain for Three.js & React Three Fiber

3DRise terrain is a procedural landscape that runs to the horizon in every direction: mountain ranges, rolling hills, seas of dunes or canyon country, generated as you watch rather than modelled or loaded. The ground follows the camera, with fine detail close by and broader shapes further away, so you can stand on a ridge or fly over a range kilometres wide.

Four landforms

One landscape model is shaped four ways:

• Mountains: sharp, eroded ridges with rock on the steep faces and snow above a peak line.
• Hills: soft, rolling downland under grass.
• Dunes: wind-driven ridges with a long gentle side and a short steep slip face, lined up across the wind.
• Canyon: banded mesas cut by a branching network of channels.

Each comes with shapes to start from, such as Alpine range, Dolomite towers, Volcanic, Downland, Moorland, Tundra, Erg, Barchan field, Salt flat, Red canyon, Slot canyon, Mesa country, Badlands and Grand gorge, and a choice of ground: Green hills, Alpine meadow, Snowfields, Desert sand, Red rock, Volcanic, Forest floor, Dry grassland and more. Changing the shape keeps the ground, and changing the ground keeps the shape.

Why it looks real

The surface is painted by height and by slope. Low ground and mid slopes take their own colours or real photographed textures; rock appears wherever the ground is too steep to hold anything, at any altitude, so cliffs read as cliffs; and snow, salt or pale stone sits on the tops but not on sheer faces. Erosion flattens valley floors and sharpens flanks, and a warp bends ridge lines into the curved, branching shapes real drainage carves.

The terrain is lit by the scene's sun and sky, and mountains cast their shadows into their own valleys at any scale. Distant ground fades into the sky behind it, the main cue for how large a landscape feels. It sits in the scene like any other object, so models standing on it cast shadows onto it and fog applies to it.

Settings

The Basic tab has the two pickers and five sliders: Size, Height, Sea level, Ruggedness, and Rock & snow. Ruggedness makes the land smoother or more jagged than its shape was designed; Rock & snow moves the snow line and how much rock shows. The Advanced tab opens every number: Ridge Sharpness, Erosion, Warp Strength, Terraces and Plateau for canyon country, Dune Wavelength for dunes, the colour and texture of each ground layer, the lighting and the quality.

Water and placed land

Add the ocean and the shoreline is found automatically wherever the ground meets the water. For a bounded piece of land you can place, scale and repeat, use the land objects instead, such as Mountains, Hills, Dunes and Canyon: the same landscape cut to a footprint.