HEIGHT
Absolute metres
Set, raise or lower to exact elevations. Build a level palette and deterrace melts the risers into ramps.
A survey of
somewhere that isn't.
Author a whole planet, cut it into low-distortion sections, and render each one as if a mapping satellite had flown it: coastlines, rivers, snow line and biome colour at true physical scale. Finished sections mosaic back onto the globe, and the globe exports.
- private beta
- windows · nvidia
- 90 m / px continental
- 32K exports
- runs offline
Six plates, no retouching.
Everything here came out of the app as you see it: a heightfield, a climate map, and a render pass. Nobody painted over anything.
Painted blocking on the left. Rendered ground on the right.
Drag to compare. Colour comes from slope, elevation, drainage and the Köppen climate you painted, so it stays coherent from 4000 km out to a single valley. There's no texture wrapped over a mesh.
Globe, section, plate. Then back to globe.
The whole planet stays the source of truth. You only ever render the parts you care about, at the resolution they deserve.
STEP 1 · AUTHOR THE PLANET
Start from the whole world.
Import an equirectangular heightmap, or grow one. Plate motion, rainfall and climate are planet-wide, so a mountain range casts the right rain shadow a thousand kilometres downwind. Mark the regions you want to survey and the globe keeps track of which are current.
STEP 2 · DRAW THE GROUND
Paint in kilometres, not pixels.
Every brush is scaled to the real world: a 33 km coast brush is 33 km wherever you use it. Stamp fold belts, rifts and volcanic fields from a library of measured landforms, set absolute plateau heights in metres, then trace a coastline and let it grow rias, bays and islets from your line.
STEP 3 · SYNTHESISE & EXPORT
Detail at the scale you asked for.
Terrain synthesis re-cuts your section at true physical scale, conditioned on your rainfall and your authored coastline. 90 m per pixel covers a continent; 30 m is close enough to walk on. Colour follows, and every finished section mosaics back onto the globe.
Exports come out as 16-bit heightmaps, colour plates and globe tiles up to 32K, ready for Blender, Unreal or a plotter.
Controls that read in real units.
Four stacks do most of the work: height, landform, climate, render. Each one tells you what it will change before you commit.
LANDFORM
55 measured stamps
Folds, rifts, plateaus, canyons, dunes. Real relief at real widths, jittered and mirrored per click.
CLIMATE
Köppen, by hand
Paint Af through EF directly. Authored climate always wins over the latitude estimate.
RENDER
Rivers, sea, snow line
Snow line in °C with a lapse rate, deep-water colour in hex, river density and width. All of it live.
COASTLINE LIBRARY
1,018 real outlines, resized honestly.
Stamp a 21 km island at 7.6× and it becomes a 157 km continent whose silhouette still behaves like a coast. Coastlines repeat at every scale; the detail is re-injected at the size you actually placed.
Plays well with the rest of your desk.
Dayrise owns the world layer and hands the file back whenever another tool does a job better. Three stages, and you can enter or leave at any of them.
STAGE 1 · GET A WORLD
Gleba · Rock 3
Simulate a planet elsewhere and import the heightmap and climate layers. The quickest start if you're beginning a new world.
Or start empty, with a blank globe or a flat map and your own sketch loaded as a guide overlay to trace.
STAGE 2 · ENHANCE SECTIONS
Dayrise
Cut low-distortion sections, synthesise them at true physical scale, paint climate and colour them.
Any section can round-trip: export a 16-bit heightfield to Gaea or Wilbur for erosion work you'd rather do there, then bring it straight back in. The metre range and extents survive the trip.
STAGE 3 · REASSEMBLE
Globe, map, plate
Mosaic every finished section back onto the sphere and export the whole world: globe tiles to 32K, colour plates, 16-bit heightmaps.
A Blender add-on brings tiles in as a displaced sphere with matched colour, ready to light.
BLENDER · CYCLES · 32K TILES
Exported globe tiles displaced onto a sphere and lit as a single sun. No retopo, no texture painting.
Bought once. Yours.
No subscription, no cloud credits, no phoning home to render. Founder prices hold until v1.0 ships, and v1.0 is included in every early-access purchase. Waiting just costs more.
FREE
$0NON-COMMERCIAL
The whole app and the whole workflow. Learn it, build worlds, share them.
- Every tool, including the one-click globe pass
- Sections to 1K · globe to 4096 × 2048
- Gaea and Wilbur round-trips, within the cap
- Ships when early access opens
INDIE
$59rising to $99FOUNDER · ONE TIME
For individuals and anything you make yourself, commercial or not, up to $100K a year.
- Full app, offline, no seat check-in
- Sections to 8K, Gaea round-trips at native size
- Globe exports to 8192 × 4096
- Blender add-on · free minor updates · v1.0 included
PROFESSIONAL
$129rising to $199FOUNDER · ONE TIME
The full-fidelity deliverable, for individuals and teams up to $1M a year.
- Everything in Indie · sections uncapped
- 32K × 16K globe re-compose, the full resolution the engine computes
- AI Enhance Colour finish pass
- Headless / CLI runs, batch export, scripted re-bakes
STUDIO
$399ONE TIME
For studios and anything with a legal department.
- Everything in Professional, multi-seat
- Invoice, VAT-ID reverse charge, purchase orders
- Written asset-ownership terms
- Direct line for pipeline work
REVENUE BANDS SELF-ATTESTED AT CHECKOUT · FOUNDER PRICES END WHEN V1.0 SHIPS · STUDIO SELLS AT LIST
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- OS
- Windows 10 / 11 · 64-bit
- GPU
- NVIDIA, 8 GB VRAM minimum · 12 GB+ for 30 m sections
- MEMORY
- 16 GB RAM · 32 GB for 32K exports
- DISK
- 20 GB, plus room for your worlds
EARLY ACCESS
Get a build before anyone else.
The private beta goes out in small batches. Tell me what you build and I'll try to put you in an early one.
One more step: a confirmation mail is on its way. Click the link in it and you're on the list.
NO NEWSLETTER SPAM · BUILD ANNOUNCEMENTS ONLY · PRIVACY
Questions
What exactly is doing the terrain synthesis?
A diffusion model trained only on public elevation data: SRTM, Copernicus and similar government DEM archives. It has never seen an artist's heightmap, and no other person's work goes into it. It runs locally on your GPU; nothing is uploaded. Think of it as an erosion solver with a much better memory of what real ground looks like.
Do I own what comes out?
Yes, outright, on every paid licence, including commercial use, printing and resale of the images and heightmaps. The free tier is for non-commercial work. Studio gets the ownership terms in writing, on paper you can hand to a lawyer.
Where does this fit with Gaea, Wilbur, Gleba or Rock 3?
Alongside all of them. Gleba and Rock 3 are lovely ways to simulate a planet to start from. Gaea and Wilbur are superb at working a single terrain. Dayrise imports from the first pair, round-trips 16-bit heightfields to the second, and adds the world layer in between: projection into low-distortion sections, climate, coastlines, synthesis at true physical scale, and the mosaic back onto a globe.
I have a hand-drawn fantasy map. Can I use it?
That's the common case. Drop it in as a guide overlay, trace the coastlines, block in the ranges with landform stamps, paint the climate, and let the render pass do the rest. Your shapes are kept; the coastline tool refines your line rather than replacing it.
How long does a section take?
A continental section at 90 m/px is a couple of minutes on a mid-range card; colour re-renders are seconds and preview live. A whole-globe re-compose from finished sections is about fifteen seconds.
Mac or AMD?
Not at launch. The synthesis path is CUDA-only today. Both are on the list; joining the waitlist and saying which you're on is the most useful vote you can cast.
Built in the open, one world at a time.
Dayrise started as a worldbuilding side project filmed for a small channel. The question was why fictional maps never look like the real thing from orbit, and the answer kept coming back to scale. So everything in the app is measured. Get the metres right and plausibility mostly takes care of itself.
Every build gets a video breaking down what changed and why.