LANDFORM
55 measured stamps
Fold belts, rifts, plateaus, canyons, dunes, cut from real elevation data at their true widths. Turn on jitter and each click drops a different one, resized and mirrored.
A survey of
somewhere that isn't.
Dayside is a desktop app for rendering an invented planet the way a mapping satellite would see it. You rough the world in, cut out the regions you care about, and render those with proper relief, drainage, snow and biome colour, all at measured scale. Finished regions go back onto the globe, and the globe exports.
- private beta
- windows · nvidia
- 90 m / px continental
- 32K exports
- runs offline
Enhance your world.
This planet was generated in Gleba, with its climate simulated in World Climate Lab. Dayside enhanced it, synthesising the fine terrain detail and rendering the colour section by section before composing it back onto the sphere. The globe shows the planet in January, at up to 32768 × 16384 when zoomed in. Drag to turn it, and move the sun round to the night side to see the lights come on.
Drag to turn the globe. Pinch, or hold Ctrl and scroll, to zoom. The slider swings the sun round the planet.
NIGHT-LIGHT PATTERNS DERIVED FROM NASA BLACK MARBLE 2016 (CREDIT: NASA). NOT ENDORSED BY NASA. · CREDITS
WHAT WENT IN · 4096 × 2048 MAPS FROM GLEBA AND WORLD CLIMATE LAB
Mountain ranges that hold together.
THE GLOBE ABOVE WAS ENHANCED WITH BOTH PASSES
At 10 km a pixel a mountain range is a few pixels wide, too coarse to hold its ridges and valleys. Dayside's terrain models were trained on Earth's own relief. They read the shape on your map and build connected ridges, basins and valleys from it, in place of scattered peaks. Rivers are routed from your heightmap first and the valleys form along them, so the drainage stays organised from the continent down to a single valley.
Drag to compare. The left half is the planet's heightmap as it came into Dayside, resampled to the model's grid. The right is the Ranges and drainage pass over the same window, about 4,000 km across at 39° S. Both halves are plain hillshade with no colour. On test regions held out from training, valleys formed under the large rivers about as often as they do on real terrain.
The work runs in two passes. The Ranges and drainage pass, at about 4.7 km per pixel, decides where the ranges and main valleys go, and follows your map for every feature larger than a scale you set, 120 km by default. The local detail pass, at about 1.2 km per pixel, adds spurs, gullies and side valleys along the same drainage. Keep your coastline exactly as drawn, or let the model redraw it from the sea floor within a distance you choose.
Planet generated in Gleba, climate from World Climate Lab. Steps 2 and 3, and the right half of the slider, come from the two passes described here.
One section, from the whole down to a valley.
Every plate below comes from one section of a planet generated in Gleba, with its climate from World Climate Lab. Dayside synthesised the terrain with the 30 m terrain-diffusion model, rendered the colour and exported the section at 32768 pixels square, 41 m a pixel. Nothing was touched up afterwards. The section was cut from a globe already enhanced with the Ranges and drainage and local detail passes above. The captions give the ground each crop covers, so you can judge the scale for yourself.
Planet generated in Gleba, climate from World Climate Lab. Dayside synthesised the fine terrain detail and rendered the colour.
The same ground, before and after synthesis.
Drag to compare. The left half is the section as it was cut from the globe, 660 m per pixel, drawn as plain hillshade. The right is the same window after the 30 m synthesis pass and the colour render. The section was cut from a globe already enhanced with the Ranges and drainage and local detail passes, so the left half carries that structure before the section pass adds its own. The colour is computed from slope, elevation, drainage, rock type and the climate maps, which is why it still makes sense when you zoom from the whole section down into one valley.
CLIMATE MONTH
A year on one section.
Load a World Climate Lab simulation with monthly data and the render follows the planet's year in twelve equal orbital months. Each month's temperature and rainfall set the snow cover, how wet the ground is and how green the low vegetation gets, with the vegetation lagging about six weeks behind the weather. Sea ice forms and breaks up along the coasts as the months turn.
Play the months in the section editor, then export the whole year as twelve plates with a looping preview alongside. The climate fields themselves can be played as maps and exported as 16-bit masks.
Planet generated in Gleba, climate from World Climate Lab.
The globe is the project. Sections are where the work happens.
You never render the whole planet at full detail, because you don't need to. Pick a region, cut it out as a low-distortion section, work on that, and put it back. The globe keeps track of which sections are current and which have gone stale.
STEP 1 · AUTHOR THE PLANET
Start from the whole world.
Import an equirectangular heightmap or a World Climate Lab folder, or start with an empty globe and draw the continents straight onto it. A whole planet is sized by its radius. Latitude gives every part of the planet a first-guess climate, and you paint over that wherever you know better, along with rock types, land cover and sea ice. Then mark the regions you want to survey.
STEP 2 · DRAW THE GROUND
Paint in kilometres, not pixels.
Every brush is scaled to the ground, so a 33 km coast brush is 33 km on any section. There's a library of 55 landforms measured off real ground to stamp down, fold belts and rifts and volcanic fields at the widths they really have. Plateau heights are typed in as metres. Draw a river from its source and it cuts a channel down to the sea or into the river it meets, and the banks green along its course. Trace a coastline and the coast tool grows rias, bays and islets out of your line without losing the line.
STEP 3 · SYNTHESISE & EXPORT
Detail at the scale you asked for.
Synthesis re-cuts the section at whatever pixel size you ask for, using your painted heights, your rainfall and your coastline as the guide. 90 m per pixel covers a continent. 30 m is close enough to walk on. Colour is rendered on top, and the finished section goes back onto the globe.
Sections and the whole globe export at up to 32768 pixels, as 16-bit heightmaps, colour plates and data layers, in formats Blender and Unreal read without conversion.
Interface shots show a planet generated in Gleba, climate from World Climate Lab.
Controls that read in real units.
Most of the work happens in four panels. Every slider reads in a real unit, metres or kilometres or degrees, and each panel says what it's about to change before you commit.
RIVERS
Rivers and lakes you place
Click from a source downstream and the river cuts its own channel to an outlet, joining any river it meets. Suggest lakes finds the largest closed basins and fills them one at a time, at a level you can type in metres.
WORLD BRUSH
Paint the whole planet
Landmass, coarse height, temperature, rainfall, rock type, land cover and sea ice, painted straight onto the globe. Rock type picks from 38 rock types with their true colours, so a granite shield and a red sandstone basin read differently from orbit.
COLOUR
A Look for the whole world
Choose a Look, set river density in square kilometres and width in metres, and pick a snow palette. Bake a settlement scenario on the globe and sections can colour its farmland and towns. Vegetation, rock and sea can be re-tinted for a world under another star.
COASTLINE LIBRARY
5,090 real coastlines, at whatever size you need.
Every outline is a real island, from skerries under 3 km to landmasses over 50 km across. Stamp a 21 km island at 7.6× and you get a 157 km landmass that still reads as a coast, because the fine coastal detail is put back in at the size you placed it rather than stretched along with the outline.
Interface shots show a planet generated in Gleba, climate from World Climate Lab.
It sits between the tools you already use.
Dayside does the planet-scale part. Where another tool does a job better, it hands the file over and takes it back afterwards. You can come in at any of these three stages and leave at any of them.
STAGE 1 · GET A WORLD
Gleba · Rock 3 · World Climate Lab
Generate a planet in Gleba or Rock 3, simulate its climate in World Climate Lab, and import the World Climate Lab folder directly. Elevation, coastline, temperature, rainfall, climate zones and the monthly series all come in with it, and a Gleba rock-type map sets the rock colours.
Or start with an empty globe or a flat map, load your own sketch as a guide overlay, and trace it.
STAGE 2 · ENHANCE SECTIONS
Dayside
Cut sections out of the globe, synthesise them at the pixel size you need, paint the climate and render the colour.
If you'd rather do the erosion in Gaea or Wilbur, export the section as a 16-bit heightfield, work on it there and bring it back. The metre range and the extents survive the trip.
STAGE 3 · REASSEMBLE
Globe, map, plate
Put every finished section back on the sphere and export the whole world as one image up to 32768 × 16384, in any of eleven projections from equirectangular to period atlas maps, with 16-bit heightmaps and data layers alongside.
Sections export as satellite plates, as parchment or paper-atlas maps, or as transparent contour, hillshade and river overlays. The Dayside Bridge add-on for Blender builds a globe rig with atmosphere, cloud decks, sun and camera, and places section exports on it in their own frame.
You buy it once.
There's no subscription and nothing renders in the cloud. It runs on your own machine, offline if you want, and it keeps working after you've paid for it. These are the tiers. Prices are announced when early access opens, and the waitlist hears them first.
Free
NON-COMMERCIAL
The complete app, for personal work. Learn it on real projects and share what you make.
- Every tool, including the one-click globe colour pass
- Sections to 1K · globe to 4096 × 2048
- Gaea and Wilbur round-trips, within the cap
- Ships when early access opens
Indie
ONE-TIME LICENCE
For one person and anything you make yourself, commercial or not, up to $100K a year in revenue.
- 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
ONE-TIME LICENCE
Everything the engine can produce, 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
- Headless / CLI runs, batch export, scripted re-bakes
Studio
ONE-TIME LICENCE
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 · PRICES ANNOUNCED WHEN EARLY ACCESS OPENS
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
PROVISIONAL FIGURES · CONFIRMED BEFORE EARLY ACCESS
EARLY ACCESS
Get a build before anyone else.
The private beta goes out in small batches, and the earliest go to the people who say what they're working on.
One more step: a confirmation mail is on its way. Click the link in it and you're on the list.
NO OPEN TRACKING · UNSUBSCRIBE ANY TIME · PRIVACY
BACKDROP · A PLANET GENERATED IN GLEBA, CLIMATE FROM WORLD CLIMATE LAB · CREDITS
Questions
What exactly is doing the terrain synthesis?
Diffusion models trained on public elevation data. They run on your own GPU and nothing leaves your machine. The nearest comparison is an erosion solver, except these models have seen a great deal more real ground than any erosion solver has.
Do I own what comes out?
Yes. On every paid licence the images and heightmaps are yours to use commercially, print and sell. The free tier is for non-commercial work only. If you're on Studio you get the ownership terms as a signed document, because that is what a legal department will ask you for.
Where does this fit with Gaea, Wilbur, Gleba or Rock 3?
Alongside them. Gleba and Rock 3 simulate a planet, which is a good place to start from, and Dayside imports what they produce. Gaea and Wilbur are better than Dayside at working a single terrain, so Dayside round-trips 16-bit heightfields to them. What neither pair does is the bit in between: cutting a globe into sections you can work on without projection distortion, painting climate and coastlines, synthesising at real scale, and putting the pieces back on the sphere. That's what this is for.
I have a hand-drawn fantasy map. Can I use it?
That's the usual starting point. Load it as a guide overlay, trace the coast, block in the ranges with stamps, paint the climate and render. The coastline tool adds detail to your line but it keeps your line, so the shapes you drew are the shapes you get.
How long does a section take?
On a mid-range card, a continental section at 90 m per pixel takes a couple of minutes. Colour re-renders in seconds and previews as you drag. Putting finished sections back on the globe and rebuilding an 8192-pixel preview takes a few minutes.
Mac or AMD?
Not at launch. Synthesis runs on CUDA only for now, so it's Windows and an NVIDIA card. Mac and AMD are both on the list. If you're on one of them, join the waitlist and say so. That's what decides which comes first.
Made on a worldbuilding channel.
Dayside started as a side project on a worldbuilding channel, out of one recurring question: why fictional maps never look like the real thing from orbit. The answer, every time, was scale. A mountain range drawn at twice its real width looks fake even when you can't say why. So every brush, stamp and slider in the app is in real units. Get the metres right and most of the rest follows.
Every build gets a video going through what changed and why.
PLATE · A PLANET GENERATED IN GLEBA, CLIMATE FROM WORLD CLIMATE LAB