Your first terrain

This walkthrough takes you from an empty project to an exported heightmap. It takes about ten minutes.

1. Start with a landform

1. Open the Nodes panel on the left and find Mountain under Terrain.
2. Drag it onto the graph (or double-click it).
3. Click the node. The viewport shows the mountain and the settings panel shows its settings: its radius, height, style (Alpine or Rounded), ridges, roughness and position.

Try dragging the Radius field sideways. Only this node recomputes, and the status bar says how long it took.

2. Add some detail

1. Add an fBm node from Noise.
2. Add a Combine node, and connect both the Mountain and the fBm to it.
3. Set Combine's mode to add and view it.

The mountain now sits in rolling, noisy ground. Combine can also subtract, multiply, take the max or min, or blend, and it takes an optional mask.

3. Erode it

1. Add Hydraulic Erosion from Simulate and connect Combine's output to it.
2. View it. Water has carved channels down the slopes and deposited sediment in the valleys.
3. Add Thermal Erosion after it for scree slopes.

Work at low resolution

Simulations are the slowest nodes. Keep the preview resolution low while you experiment. Because everything is measured in metres, the full-resolution build gives the same result, just with more detail.

4. Look at a mask

Add a Slope node (under Data) after the erosion. The viewport shows it as a colour overlay on the terrain. Masks like this drive colour, vegetation and blending later on.

5. Export it

1. Select the Thermal Erosion node and, under Export in its settings, tick EXR and/or PNG. Or press Ctrl+Shift+E.
2. Open the Build tab. It lists every marked output.
3. Press Build (Ctrl+B). LibreTerrain writes each output at the build resolution, with a build.json alongside.

To bring the result into a game engine or Blender at the right scale, see Import helpers.

Next steps

• Explore the Highlands example to see a complete world.
• Read about masks, erosion and water and vegetation.