Talus

Terrain from noise.

Talus is a small diffusion model that draws 4 km heightmaps for games, right here in your browser.

Generate terrain GitHub
Talus-3 output

Make a map

Pick a terrain type, set what matters to you and leave the rest on Auto.

Stored sample. The first run downloads about 54 MB.
Terrain
Properties
Quality

Islands, seed 209

64 x 64 cells, 4,096 m across

Weights and runtime stay in your browser's cache after the first run. The maps you make never leave your device.

From noise to terrain in 25 steps

    Every map starts as random noise. At each step Talus predicts the clean terrain under the noise, and the sampler keeps a little more of that prediction. Above is the island from the generator at six of its 25 steps.

    We trained the 23M-parameter network from scratch on 45,000 maps from our own procedural generator: layered noise, rivers cutting valleys, and loose rock sliding down to its resting angle. That pile of rock at the foot of a slope is called talus.

    Here, ONNX Runtime runs the network on WebGPU, or on the CPU when WebGPU is missing. The same seed and settings give the same map.

    80.3

    Talus-3's average over nine scores on held-out test maps. A score of 100 would mean its maps can't be told apart from the procedural terrain it learned from.

    Read the scorecard
    Playability
    99.9
    Walkable routes as often as real maps.
    Clean detail
    99.4
    No excess pits or bumps.
    Control
    92.1
    Measured relief, slope and water stay close to what you asked for.
    Realism
    66.2
    25 terrain statistics compared with real maps.
    Spectrum
    11.0
    Fine detail is off: too smooth on mountains, too grainy on plains. This is the next fix.

    Take it into your engine

    Every map comes with a JSON file that gives its size and height range. For hundreds of maps, run Talus locally with the Python tool.

    git clone https://github.com/osfv/talus
cd talus && pip install -e .
gh release download v3.0.0 -R osfv/talus -p talus-3.pt -D checkpoints
nullscape sample --checkpoint talus-3 --archetype ridges \
    --n 64 --formats png16,r16,obj --unity
    Unity
    Terrain, Import Raw: 65 x 65, 16-bit, Windows byte order. Set the terrain to 4,032 m wide and 1,200 m high.
    Unreal and Godot
    Use the 16-bit PNG as a landscape or terrain heightmap and scale its height to 1,200 m.
    Blender
    Import the OBJ. It is in meters with Y up.