Create vast expanses of terrains, add trees, select the best point of view and render hyper-realistic images of your landscapes in moody atmospheres... in a few mouse clicks.




Picogen is described as 'A free Terrain Synthesizer and RendererPicogen is an outdoor ray tracing system, a free Terrain Synthesizer and Renderer targeting large-scale terrain with realistic day/night-illumination and detailed plant populations' and is an app. There are more than 25 alternatives to Picogen for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, LightWave and Autodesk 3ds Max apps. The best Picogen alternative is Vue, which is free. Other great apps like Picogen are LuxCoreRender, Adobe Dimension, MoonRay and Infinigen.
Create vast expanses of terrains, add trees, select the best point of view and render hyper-realistic images of your landscapes in moody atmospheres... in a few mouse clicks.




LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxCoreRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality.


Versatile 3D design tool combining asset compositing and photorealistic rendering with real-time previews. Access Adobe Stock seamlessly and enhance with Photoshop for practical workflows.




MoonRay is DreamWorks Animation’s in-house 3D renderer, used to render all DreamWorks movies since How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

Infinigen is a procedural generator that creates everything entirely from randomized mathematical rules, including all shapes and materials, from macro structures to micro details. Infinigen can create unlimited variations.




Terragen is a scenery generator, created with the goal of generating photorealistic landscape images and animations.



The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.



PhotoRealistic RenderMan, or PRMan for short, is a proprietary photorealistic RenderMan-compliant renderer.



World Machine is a powerful terrain generation software used by game developers, visual effects artists, and independent creators to create realistic 3D landscapes and terrains.



Malt is a fully customizable real-time rendering framework for animation and illustration. Designed as a community effort to expand the possibility space of 3d rendering, it provides graphics programmers and technical artist an enjoyable “shadertoy-like” workflow inside Blender...




OctaneBench® allows you to benchmark your GPU using OctaneRender. This provides a level playing field by making sure that everybody uses the same version and the same scenes and settings. Without these constraints, benchmark results can vary a lot.