Unity Endless Terrain

Terrain displacement shader using perlin noise.

Based on code I wrote for a game jam that generated terrain meshes procedurally on the CPU. Procedurally building geometry in Unity can be quite slow so I ported the code to HLSL. It can run either as a vertex displacement shader (using the "Terrain" shader), or output to a render texture which is useful for if you need the data in CPU memory as well (say, for generating collision meshes).

Future plans

• Upgrade the shader to work with proper pixel lighting instead of being vertex-lit.
• Support blending between multiple textures based on height or introduce a concept of "biomes".
• Write a system for loading/unloading chunks around the camera to simulate infinite terrain.
  • Should recycle chunk objects to avoid overhead of spawning/destroying objects
• Use tesselation shader to blend smoothly between LODs.
• Support deferred rendering as well as forward.