• Shaun Eschmann

  4 months ago

  WOW, WOW, WOW!

  This tool is absolutely amazing—terrains, water, and scattering all for just $99?! It truly embodies the spirit of Blender: freedom to create and build. This tool is the embodiment of what a great team can do in software like Blender!

  True-VFX has knocked it out of the park here.

  For anyone torn about buying this:

  - You might not get the exact same level of control as with Geoscatter, but it's incredibly close—by a razor's edge. You receive around 100 high-quality assets in TrueTerrain, including trees, rocks, flowers, and more. With all the preset systems and most of the same controls, it's a formidable tool. Geoscatter does offer more fine-tuned controls if you need to make very specific adjustments.

  - In terms of terrain creation speed, it may not match World Creator or Quadspinner, as they have custom GPU engines that accelerate the process. However, the range of options you get here is impressive: erosion, water types, materials—it's all included, and for just $99! Plus, there's no monthly fee like with World Creator, and even though there are paid upgrades, it's similar to Quadspinner but much more affordable.

  This isn't a tool for absolute beginners—it's clear that True-VFX designed this for users with some intermediate Blender knowledge. However, if you're familiar with most of the basics in Blender or you're new to Blender but have experience with other software, you should be able to pick this up easily.

  Oh! Important caveat, Eevee support is limited here. If I'm not mistaken, you can make the materials in Cycles and then bake those out to normal image maps which you can assign like a normal material in Blender. But this is more steps than I imagine most people will take. Eevee just isn't powerful enough. I looked at the nodes and it's HUGE in there. I actually got lost and couldn't find my way back out the groups...

• Vikar Zhang

  4 months ago

  TrueTERRAIN 5 is an incredibly powerful terrain tool that has completely transformed how I handle terrains in Blender. Here are its main advantages:
  1. Intuitive Interface and Workflow: The UI is clear and well-organized, making it easy for even new users to get started quickly.
  2. Comprehensive Features: From terrain generation and material management to environment setup, TrueTERRAIN 5 provides a complete solution, eliminating the need for tedious manual adjustments.
  3. Highly Realistic Results: The terrain textures and environmental effects deliver a professional-level quality that’s hard to beat.
  4. Exceptional Customizability: With a wide range of adjustable parameters, it meets the needs of various projects effortlessly.

• Mark Lucas

  4 months ago

  True Terrain 5 is, without question, the best terrain generation tool for Blender today.

  Here's my experience after a year as an alpha/beta tester:

  Terrain geometry
  You can create large terrains using vanilla Blender (using the displacement on subdivided planes workflow), but I've found True Terrain's implementation much more stable and flexible. Use its powerful layers-based terrain creation system to combine noise, textures, and displacement maps with loads of options for masking and filtering. Making your own geology/erosion-based terrains isn't a "one-click" task, but the creation tools are deep. It's easy to pick up, but you're unlikely to exhaust its creative potential in a hurry. One enhancement I'd love to see is a terrain sculpting component that lets you paint displacement and apply erosion filters. That said, True Terrain 5 can use height maps made elsewhere (World Creator, Gaea, etc.) and comes with its own varied selection of high-quality height maps.

  Materials
  Terrain shaders are layer-based and support loads of masking options for things like slopes, valleys, and strata. Make incredible terrains by grouping materials, so instead of choosing a single rock material for your cliffs, you can create a group of different rock materials that you can blend, mask and filter for cliffs with unlimited variety. I think there is room for improvement in the UI side of the layering system; it seems a bit clunky, although this might be due to the Blender limitations and expectations heightened by "drag and drop" capabilities in layer-based applications like Photoshop or Affinity. Recently added presets are so good that many users will only need to get their hands dirty tweaking filters or swapping between material maps from the fairly large set of bundled materials.

  Water
  The water system is a recent implementation. It's a massive improvement from True Terrain 4, especially with the support for foam on shorelines - that adds so much to a scene! You add a water system, then choose from ocean, lake or river. Each has its own editing options, with rivers and lakes applying appropriate deformations to your terrain. I've yet to work through the massive amount of parameters that let you tweak every conceivable water property. I've yet to tap the full power of this system. Thankfully, there are plenty of presets for getting started.

  Scatter
  I already have a dedicated scatter add-on (Geoscatter), which I prefer to use simply because it works well and I know how to use it. True-Terrain's system offers most of the key functionality. The scatter system uses the same layer model used for geometry and materials:
  * Add a layer/ object.
  * Apply masks to tell the system where to put the object.
  * Apply modifiers (currently just clumping for scatters) to control placement variation.

  It's intuitive, well-designed, and offers solid performance. While it doesn't have the range or depth of Geoscatter, you are getting the whole of True-Terrain 5 for the same price. True Terrain's scatter does some things better: the way it integrates with bundled scatter objects is very nice. I particularly like the procedural rocks, which give you much better control over variation than picking from a set of rock objects.

  Value for money
  True-Terrain 5 is one of the more expensive add-ons. It's certainly not an add-on that you'll purchase on a whim to play with it -- which is probably why you're reading through customer reviews! Rest assured that if you want to create terrains in Blender, this is the one. Everything comes in one well-integrated add-on.

  Support
  I've now purchased a lot of add-ons, and it's clear that while you can pick up some great, cheap add-ons, often created by a single person. If you invest in an add-on, you want to be confident of long-term support. You don't want to wait months for updates whenever a new version of Blender is released. The True-VFX team, although small, is talented, passionate, and highly customer-focused developers. They have a track record for building great Blender tools and, importantly, quickly getting updates and bug fixes out. The TrueVFX Discord is friendly and very responsive to questions. Now that the full release is out, I hope that we'll see the product documentation expanded. What's available is fine, but it needs expanding.

  Performance and stability
  I've been using True Terrain for two years. True-Terrain-5 since it was first made available in early access (Nov 2023). I've found it stable and well-performing, but I have a workstation-class PC. Even so, complex terrain generation, especially with scatter systems, is notorious for hanging even the most powerful systems or causing a crash because of one careless adjustment. You need to be mindful of what you're asking Blender to do if you adjust the terrain resolution, scatter density, or pile on countless material layers. True-Terrain 5 has a number of features that help reduce the chance of you asking too much of your system, but it's still possible to get into trouble. Just because True Terrain 5 lets you create a 16-million-polygon mountain range with an 8000-node shader stack and decked with two million trees, Blender and your computer probably won't support it.
  Last year, I experienced a brief period of extreme instability that turned out to be caused by the infamous Intel i9 CPU defect, which caused them to burn out. So note that most of the earlier reviews that report crashing didn't contact True-VFX for assistance or do a proper investigation before blaming the add-on. As with all such things, your mileage may vary.

• Mark Spence

  4 months ago

  Amazing add-on. The learning curve is not steep at all and the TT5 and TTSky used together is great and also not resource intensive all in all. The Creators are easy to work with and are very responsive on Discord. The community there is also very helpful. If you are debating getting this do it. It will save hours and hours of landscape creation. There are links to tutorials that walk you through lots of the nuance of the settings to add even more realism. If you have any doubts put those aside and get this add-on. Thank me later.

• 

  True-VFX

  4 months ago

  Hi Mark,
  Thank you for taking the time to leave this review. It means a lot to the team when we get comments like this and I will relay your kind words!

  We're happy to see that you're enjoying the tool and community. If you ever have any ideas or feedback, we're more than open to them and would love to hear them.

  Thank you again!

  Rich @ True-VFX
• Cleo

  4 months ago

  I want to start by highlighting that True-VFX provides excellent documentation and very helpful guides. From my experience, any issues mentioned in reviews seem to stem from not following the provided instructions.

  I’ve encountered no crashes while importing content, and only four files (out of the many included in the ZIPs) didn’t import successfully. The addon displayed a handy text file to let me know exactly which files failed and which pack they were from. Re-importing that specific part of the pack fixed everything in seconds.

  As of now, I can confidently say that this product is both stable and incredibly powerful. It offers a vast amount of content, and honestly, it’s surprising that it isn’t split into four separate products. You get tools for terrains and materials, water systems, scatter systems, and presets for all of them—all in one package.

  From purchase to installation, it took me about 30 minutes to download the files and start creating scenes with just a few clicks. On occasion, I pushed the limits by running 20+ scatter layers in a scene, which slowed things down. However, that was easily resolved by reducing the viewport display to zero or switching scatter layers to show bounding boxes instead of full 3D models. Thankfully, these adjustments don’t affect the render—they still render correctly and not as boxes.

  One area for improvement is proactive optimization. For example, in GeoScatter, the tool warns you if a scatter layer is too heavy. True-Terrain 5 doesn’t have this feature yet, but I expect these kinds of quality-of-life improvements will come with future updates. Even so, right now, this is the most powerful product of its kind on the market.

  The value for money is remarkable. If I were to buy separate terrain, water, and scatter tools, I’d easily spend around $160. With True-Terrain 5, you get all of this for $99, with seamless integration between systems. Even if they charge for major updates, they seem to offer significant discounts for existing users upgrading.

  For Eevee users, unfortunately, this tool isn’t a good fit—it’s simply too complex for Eevee’s shader compilation. However, it works well with Blender’s system requirements, even on lower-spec machines, as long as you manage expectations. If you load millions of assets or try running 8-million-polygon terrains at high frame rates, performance will dip—that’s just a limitation of hardware. For reference, I use a 12th-gen i7, RTX 4070, and 32GB of RAM, and even I slowed my scenes down when everything was visible.

  I’m excited to see future updates! The team is highly active on Discord and always positive, even when dealing with users who seem to misunderstand or misuse the tools. Their dedication to improving the product is clear, and I can’t recommend True-Terrain 5 enough for anyone looking for an all-in-one solution for terrains, water, and scatter systems.

  More creators should look to charge for updates! If charging a small upgrade fee can transform a product from True-Terrain 4 into True-Terrain 5, there's no doubt in my mind that money is money well spent.

• 

  True-VFX

  4 months ago

  This is a very consice and helpful rating. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave this.

  We agree, we could (and will) be doing more active things to ensure optimisations. GeoScatter has a very good implementation for their presets with the warning about scatter density and providing options to limit 90%, limit it all, or ignore their warning. It's so good in fact, we may do something similar!

  Yes, you certainly can bog down a scene if you get carried away. This is, in part because we basically offer so much (maybe too much) for the user. So from a psychological view, it's very easy to be like "this should all work together with no problems". It's easy to get carried away when all the buttons are in the same tool.

  The other part is that Blender, isn't the most optimised software. It's huge in scope, it offers everything it can, but in some respects, it's not top scorer in any one thing. There is no GPU enabled goemetry node calculations. There is no OpenGL instancing optimisation. So as a tool, we can only do so much within the confines of the software we're building in without building our own custom compute engines, which has historically been tempermental and a lot of work to ensure compiling for Mac, Linux and Windows.

  I can't thank you enough for this rating. I've taken what you've said on board and we will work on making it so we automate more, and require some user interventions to ensure we're optimising for their scenes.
• Erik Althoff

  6 months ago

  So I review the product I bought, not the product it should be or could have been. The product I bought doesn't work. I'm aware it says "early access" on the download and I've dealt with other addons that can feel a bit unstable but this one just keeps crashing and crashing and crashing. Trying to install packs, crashing. Trying to use the addon, crashing. I have no idea if I've even managed to install all assets because I've never seen it reach 100%. I've installed all at once, separately. It just crashes. I can use the addon, for a couple of minutes before it crashes blender. Blender 4.2 has been surprisingly stable and rarely ever crash. I'm on a Macbook Pro M1 Max all maxed out.

  I'm sure this addon will get better. I'm not upset or demand a refund, I can wait it out. But I'm reviewing what I bought, and not the trailer for it.

• 

  True-VFX

  4 months ago

  Hi Mark,

  Hope you're well and get this.

  We only get one shot at these responses so I will quote your original in here in the event that you change it.

  We have updated to tool and it's fully released now. Any issues that you had, I believe we have addressed. If not, please contact us and we can address any concerns.

  If your thoughts or feelings have changed from the original review you left, please take the time update them.

  Original Rating:
  (1 Star)
  "So I review the product I bought, not the product it should be or could have been. The product I bought doesn't work. I'm aware it says "early access" on the download and I've dealt with other addons that can feel a bit unstable but this one just keeps crashing and crashing and crashing. Trying to install packs, crashing. Trying to use the addon, crashing. I have no idea if I've even managed to install all assets because I've never seen it reach 100%. I've installed all at once, separately. It just crashes. I can use the addon, for a couple of minutes before it crashes blender. Blender 4.2 has been surprisingly stable and rarely ever crash. I'm on a Macbook Pro M1 Max all maxed out.

  I'm sure this addon will get better. I'm not upset or demand a refund, I can wait it out. But I'm reviewing what I bought, and not the trailer for it."
• Jackson

  7 months ago

  The tool does exactly what it promises. I was in doubt between TT and World Creator and I'm sure I made the right choice. I did basic tests and the work is very fluid, with many incredible functions that will certainly increase the range of projects I create even more. Congratulations to the developers for the excellent work.

• Jon Ame

  7 months ago

  This is amazing! I hadn’t used any True-VFX tools before, but I decided to give this and True-Sky a shot, and I’m seriously impressed.

  True-Terrain isn’t just a ‘one-click and done’ kind of tool. You can jump in with the presets to get going fast, but if you want to make super detailed landscapes, there are tons of options to play around with. It can feel a little overwhelming at first because there are buttons like ‘add mask’ and ‘add modifier’ everywhere.

  Also, if you crank up the quality in the viewport but don’t use the settings to keep it low-res while you work, the scene can get pretty slow. Make sure to use the optimization tools.

  The docs are great, but dense. There's a lot of information here and it covers all aspects of the tool but it's clear this was built with power-users in mind.

  I’m honestly surprised I hadn’t come across these guys before!

• Daniel Cabrera

  7 months ago

  Great Addon, crashes a lot, Wait for the full release.

• 

  True-VFX

  7 months ago

  Hi Daniel,

  Sorry to hear this. From the communication we've previously had, the logs you sent had no indications of True-Terrain crashing but did show another addon and Nvidia drivers not initialising.

  If you could provide any crash logs as we've asked, or a video capture of Blender when the crash happens we can certainly look more into it.

  Kind regards,

  Rich @ True-VFX
• Timo

  7 months ago

  True-Terrain 5 installation instructions are missing. It crashes frequently during configuration.

• 

  True-VFX

  7 months ago

  Hi Timo,

  Sorry to hear this. The documentation are linked on the product page, and in a readme file in the downloads. The docs also make it clear that when installing content packs, Blender may crash as it tries to automatically reload the extensions. This is not something we can stop Blender doing unfortunately.

  Kind regards,

  Rich @ True-VFX

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