Enhancing terrain

Enhancing is the terrain diffusion pass. It takes the rough heightmap you painted or imported and re-synthesises it at true physical scale, so a blocked-in ridge comes back with spurs, gullies and a drainage network that a satellite render can read. In the section editor the button is Generate and the dialog is Generate terrain. On the globe the same idea runs planet-wide as Enhance world terrain inside the Whole-world passes dialog; see Whole globe terrain below.

What the pass does#

Dayside reads your authored heightmap and sea floor at a coarse grid whose cell size is fixed by the model, and the terrain model draws realistic relief inside each cell, following your shapes at the large scale and inventing the fine detail.

By default the dialog writes the model's own output. Raw model output is on, so nothing after the model reshapes the coast, the sea floor or the peaks. Turn it off under Advanced post-processing and those steps run, pulling the coast and the sea floor back toward what you authored. See Advanced post-processing.

Three behaviours are worth fixing in your head before you touch a control.

Every run starts from your authored heightmap and sea floor. It never reads back the last generation's output, so a second Generate is another pass over your authored terrain, not a pass over the previous result. That is also why repeated runs do not creep the sea level upward.

Sea level is fixed at 0 m for the land and sea split. With raw output on and Model authors coastline on, the shoreline is the model's. With raw output off and Hold authored coast on, your land and sea split holds away from a narrow band along the coast.

Climate is carried over untouched. The Köppen layer you imported or painted goes straight through, so a re-generate never re-rolls your biomes.

The result is saved as the section's heightmap, in metres above and below sea level, together with the ground scale the run worked at.

What it changes for colour#

The colour render is physical. Every land tone is read off the terrain itself: slope, hollows, ridges, how much ground drains through each point, and the climate layer. A hand-blocked heightmap carries almost none of that structure at kilometre scale, so a render of it has very little to work with.

There is also a hard dependency. The satellite style needs the ground scale that a Generate run records. When a section lacks it, the render adds a warning and falls back to the hypsometric style: elevation banding, with no palettes, rivers, snow, lakes or water colour. With no generated heightmap at all the render refuses and tells you to generate the section first.

The globe workspace names the order explicitly. Every region and tile moves through three stages: Rough terrain, Terrain detail and Section colour. Terrain detail is this pass; Section colour is the colour render that follows it.

Before you run it#

Click Apply changes first. Generate works from the heightmap saved to disk, so brush strokes you have not applied are not included.

Set your sea level before generating, not after. The Sea level slider in the Height brush group warns about this directly: moving it after a Generate reclassifies land and ocean the model authored.

Only one heavy job runs at a time. Generate is disabled while a render or a paint commit is in flight, and Dayside asks you to wait for the active job if one clashes.

The models#

Coarse cell size is the scale. Get the model wrong and you get convincing terrain at the wrong feature scale.

The default is 90 m unless your installation sets another. Models this machine is not set up to run are not shown.

90 m and 30 m#

90 m is the continental recipe and the product default. 30 m is close enough to walk on and suits smaller, playable extents.

The dialog warns when 30 m is picked for a section wider than about 1,000 km (128 coarse cells). At that size the 30 m model's native output no longer fits the 32,768 px output limit, so continental extents want 90 m.

Base-lite#

Base-lite is Dayside's own continental model. It runs its own fixed recipe, so the Detail presets, Precision, Elevation SNR, Feature scale, Rainfall conditioning, the Coastline toggles, Advanced post-processing and Output resolution all disappear from the dialog and are ignored. Only Seed applies. Below a 3,000 km long edge the dialog says plainly that the 90 m and 30 m models will give you far more detail.

Base-lite needs its own runtime set up on the machine. When it is missing the tile is still shown, and the dialog reports that base-lite is not configured on this machine and names the environment variables to set.

Choosing by extent#

Divide the section's long edge by the model's native ground resolution to get its native size in pixels. A 4,000 km section at 90 m comes to about 44,500 px native, which the 32,768 px output limit then caps.

Precision and output resolution#

Precision offers Half · bf16 (the default, faster) or Full · fp32 (slightly more exact). Changing it reloads the model, so the next run takes longer to start.

Output resolution has one toggle, Native output (uncapped), off by default. Left off, the terrain follows the Output selection in the workspace header (Native, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K), up to 32,768 px. Turned on, it is assembled at the model's full native resolution with no limit.

Uncapped native is expensive in system memory. When the estimate crosses 4 GB the dialog states roughly how much RAM assembling the result will need, and warns that the heightmap PNG will be similarly large.

The estimate line#

Under the toggle, the dialog states the output long edge, whether it was reduced from native, the pixels per coarse cell and the resulting metres per pixel. Read the m/px figure rather than the pixel count: it is the honest statement of how fine the ground actually is.

Adherence and seed#

Detail presets#

The Detail section leads with three preset cards. One click sets the model, the SNR and the feature scale together.

Sketch is the default: the 90 m model at SNR 0.20, feature scale x1. It is the right card for a rough, hand-drawn map, because the model invents plausible detail below the cell scale where your sketch has nothing to say.

Faithful is for real or precise maps: the 30 m model at SNR 0.05, feature scale x1. It sticks closest to your terrain, and it is the slowest, at roughly five times the runtime.

Faithful, faster keeps the 90 m model at SNR 0.05 and raises the feature scale to x2. Measured against real ground it lands within a hair of Faithful at a fraction of the runtime.

The active card follows the dials. Move the model, the SNR or the feature scale off a preset's exact values and no card shows active; that is your custom setting, and nothing is lost.

Elevation SNR#

Elevation SNR is the adherence control, and its direction catches people out.

A lower value means stronger adherence. At 0.05 the model stays close to the terrain you drew. At 1.00 it departs freely and invents its own landform layout inside your coarse shape. Do not read the number as a detail dial, and do not read a higher value as "more detail": it sets how much freedom the model takes from your input.

Adherence also has a hard floor set by the model's coarse cell, and no SNR setting moves it. The model follows your map above about 6 cells (roughly 140 km at 90 m, 46 km at 30 m), sketches loosely between 1.5 and 6 cells, and below about 1.5 cells (roughly 35 km at 90 m, 12 km at 30 m) it invents everything, with realistic texture that does not follow your input. The feature scale divides all of these figures. SNR tunes adherence only above that limit; the slider's own tip states the km figures for the model and feature scale you have dialed, and the feature scale control shows the effective cell size.

The slider covers 0.05 to 1.00 in steps of 0.05. The default is 0.20, the value the terrain model's author recommends for imported heightmaps.

The sea floor follows the same control, and the model's own sense of ocean is weak, so shallows are the first thing it re-imagines. If a model-authored run must keep your authored shelves, straits and island layouts recognisable, set the slider to 0.05, which is what both Faithful presets do. On a real continental section, 0.05 roughly doubles how closely the shelf follows yours and visibly preserves authored water-body shapes, without drowning land. The trade is tighter land too, so the model invents less landform variety everywhere.

Feature scale#

Feature scale runs from ×0.5 to ×4 in steps of 0.25, default ×1. It sets the grain of everything the model invents: above ×1 landforms come finer and denser, below ×1 broader and more massive. The world's real size is unchanged. The slider shows the resulting effective cell size in km, and generation time grows with the square of the value. On a large section the slider's top end is limited to what Dayside can assemble, and the dialog says so.

Seed#

Seed is a whole number, default 0. The same seed over the same input gives you identical terrain, so it is the control to move when you like the settings but not this particular arrangement of ranges.

Rainfall conditioning#

Rainfall conditioning is a two-way segment, Off or Use rainfall, default Use rainfall. On, the section's rainfall layer is given to the model alongside the elevation. With no rainfall layer present the run uses elevation alone.

The physical scale comes from the rainfall layer's own recorded mm/year at white, set when you imported it. Only a layer with no recorded scale is read as 3,000 mm/yr at white, and that failure is silent: nothing looks broken, but the model is guided by the wrong climate.

Hidden entirely for Base-lite.

Coastline options#

Model authors coastline is on by default. Your sea floor guides the model-drawn shore, and generated ocean fades back to your authored sea floor by 600 m depth. Turn it off and the current land and sea boundary is kept exactly.

Enhance coastline before generation refines the coastline before the model sees the section, adding islands, bays and coastal detail. It is off by default and disabled while Model authors coastline is on; turning that on clears this one. The two cannot be combined. Use it for terrain with no meaningful sea floor, and leave it off when your sea floor is already authored.

Preserve land area appears only when Enhance coastline before generation is on and Model authors coastline is off. The refiner then tidies the shoreline without adding islands or bays, so the land area stays the same.

The refiner's other settings stay at their defaults here. You adjust them where you draw coastlines; see Painting terrain.

Control reference#

Advanced post-processing#

A collapsed band at the foot of the dialog. Its header reads raw output while Raw model output is on, and reconciled, or reconciled · N changed, once you turn it off. The controls below appear only with raw output off.

With raw output off, land heights are matched to your map area by area, and the summits above that are the model's own.

Relief body match lifts each area's land so its spread of heights matches your input's, while the coastline and each area's highest point stay where they are, so it cannot move a shoreline or invent offshore land. It exists for the case where the model draws sharp peaks over flat ground. It only applies on sections large enough to be generated in pieces; a smaller section ignores it.

Single shot and chunked assembly#

A section up to 64 coarse cells on its long edge (about 1,500 km at 90 m or 490 km at 30 m, at feature scale ×1) generates in one pass. Anything larger is generated in overlapping pieces that are blended back together without seams. The run's own warning calls this mode seamless, and it takes noticeably longer than a single pass.

The two routes finish slightly differently, so a small section and a large one are not exact like-for-like comparisons. Only the piecewise route runs the optional Relief body match.

Progress, time and cancelling#

The Generate button in the top bar becomes Generating N% and the modal closes as soon as the job is accepted. The bar moves quickly to about 15 % while the coastline and the model's input are prepared, creeps while the model works, and jumps to 90 % once the result is being saved.

The model reports no progress of its own while it works, so the bar creeps slowly toward 85 % and waits there until the job actually finishes. A bar sitting near 80 % is not stuck, it is waiting. If the generator has not started within about three minutes, the job fails with the error it reported.

While a section generates, a Cancel button sits beside the Generating N% button in the top bar. Cancelling leaves the section on its current terrain, and the button reads Cancelling… until the job stops.

The whole-globe pass appears as a card in the Job Dock with its own Cancel, and it can be resumed later from its checkpoint.

When the job finishes the editor reloads the section and renders the new terrain automatically.

Runtime and model readiness#

The dialog footer states the backend: Native NVIDIA CUDA ready, or a line saying there is no validated generation backend and that import remains available. Generate stays disabled until the runtime and the selected model are both ready.

When something is missing the dialog shows one message with one action. On a retail install the fix is to repair or reinstall Dayside, which restores the packaged runtime and model. On a development install you get Install and Download buttons and a staged progress line. Base-lite is judged on its own runtime alone.

Revert to authored heightmap#

The first time you Generate a section, Dayside keeps a copy of the authored heightmap before the generation overwrites it. Revert to authored heightmap in the dialog footer puts that copy back.

Three things follow from how the snapshot works.

It is a single snapshot. Later generates do not take a new one, so revert always returns you to the terrain as it was before the first Generate on this section, not to the previous generation.

The button appears only when a snapshot exists and something has since overwritten the terrain. A section that has never been generated has none, and the dialog says so.

Deterrace has its own separate Revert to previous heightmap, which is a different snapshot.

Whole globe terrain#

The globe workspace has two buttons for the whole-planet passes, Enhance world terrain and Colour globe. Both open the same Whole-world passes dialog. It arrives armed for the pass you clicked; the other stays on offer, unticked, so you can chain them.

The Terrain half of the dialog holds:

• Enhance world terrain, the checkbox that turns the pass on.
• A choice of model: Continental detail, about 1.2 km per pixel, which textures the terrain you drew below about 20 km; or Ranges and drainage, about 4.7 km per pixel, which invents connected mountain ranges and drainage from your map, with the rivers routed from the heightmap. Ranges and drainage covers what each model does, its dials and its limits.
• Skip deep ocean, on by default, which leaves deep ocean on its authored sea floor instead of regenerating it. That is most of an ocean world, for a fraction of the runtime.

The pass makes the enhanced heightmap the world's active height layer. You can cancel at any time from the Job Dock and resume later from the checkpoint.

The Colour half holds the world's Look, the Colour globe checkbox (its label adds (starts when terrain finishes) when both passes are ticked), Terrain and export detail (2048 to 32768 px wide or Native, default 4096), Globe preview (2048, 4096 or 8192 px wide, default 4096; 8192 needs about 13 GB of free memory), Repaint regions with the globe palette, a collapsed Palette block and the sea controls. When tiles carry edits it also offers Rebuild all tiles, discarding N per-tile edits. The confirm button names what it will start: Enhance world terrain, Colour globe, or Enhance terrain, then colour globe.

The dialog carries a standing warning that this processes the entire world and can take many hours, and suggests running at least one focus-area section first to confirm you are happy with the look. Colour globe can pause after the current tile, and completed tiles stay cached for Resume, including after a restart.

The globe colour pass routes flow, so globe tiles show rivers. They are drawn wider than in a section, at 0.4 km for a 10 000 km² catchment against a section's 0.15 km, so the network reads at globe scale. Lakes and the exported water mask stay section-only.

Editing large sections at a working resolution#

A section whose native long edge is over 4,096 px prompts once on open with Edit at a working resolution?. Terrain edits at full resolution are genuinely slow, and a single coastline edit on a very large section can take minutes.

The prompt offers 2K, 4K and 8K, filtered to those below your native long edge, with 4K marked recommended, plus Native to opt out. The choice is remembered per section, so you are never asked twice.

Picking a working resolution gives you a smaller copy of the terrain to edit, and the full-resolution original is not touched. The copy covers the same ground, so every edit set in metres or kilometres means the same thing at either resolution. Dayside keeps a list of your terrain edits so they can be replayed on the original later.

While a working resolution is active the banner under the top bar reads, for example, "Editing at 4K, native 8,192 x 8,192, 3 edits not yet baked".

Bake to native#

Bake to native replays your edits onto the full-resolution original. It is an explicit button and never fires automatically. It is disabled until you have drawn at least one edit, and it runs as a background job with progress in the banner.

Which bake runs depends on the machine. When the terrain model and a GPU are available, you get the region bake. Otherwise Dayside falls back to the structural bake, which replays your edits directly at full resolution without the model. Editing works either way, and both report through the same job.

Region bake#

Rather than regenerating the whole section, the region bake regenerates only the area around your edits, widened a little so the new coast blends into the surrounding shelf, and blends it back into the original. The rest of the section is left exactly as it was.

Height is blended locally. Colour is then recomputed for the whole section, so there are no colour seams, and the job only reports done once that recolour has finished.

One case cannot be kept local: a coastline refine from the heightmap reshapes the entire waterline, so the bake regenerates everything.

Progress runs through preparing, generating (piece by piece), compositing, publishing, then recolouring. The structural fallback reports replaying instead.

Discard#

Discard throws the working-resolution edits away and goes back to the untouched original. Like Bake to native, it is disabled when there are no edits to act on.

After a bake, a large section that is back on native shows a resume banner offering Edit at 4K again, or Change… to pick a different working resolution.

Traps worth knowing#

Lower SNR means more adherence. It is the single most inverted-looking control in the dialog. And no SNR buys fidelity below the model's scale floor: under about 1.5 cells the detail is always the model's own invention.

A re-generate is not an iteration on the last result. Every run starts from your authored terrain. If you want to build on a generated result, import it back as the section's terrain first.

Move sea level before you generate. Afterwards it reclassifies land and ocean the model authored.

Base-lite ignores nearly every control. Only Seed applies. If you set an SNR and a coastline policy and then switched to base-lite, none of it applies.

The model's coarse cell is the feature scale. A 30 m run on a continental extent produces correct-looking terrain at the wrong scale, and the dialog tells you when your section passes about 1,000 km.

Generate reads what is on disk. Apply your paint first.

Once the terrain is in, the next step is the colour render. See Rendering the satellite image.