I've spent about 7 days building a North Atlantic island in Unity URP (WIP). I wanted to see how much I could enhance my tech art and graphics programming abilities with AI, using mosty Opus 5.5 and Astra for a few critiques on techniques used.
The goal: one island you can walk across from the surf to a snowy summit, that looks good wherever you stop and look around. The terrain is real elevation data from Lofoten in Norway, reshaped and modified into an island about 4 × 5 km with a 1,000 m peak. Overcast is normal, fog is common and sunshine is rare.
Not a single thing was placed manually, there's procedural systems to place anything from fallen leaves to the meso-/macro-scale terrain changes, undergrowth and rock placement etc. AI-generated procedural systems produce all the terrain surfaces, generate most of the trees, plants and grasses and their placement. Some rocks fallen trees are pre-made assets, but some of those too are procedurally manipulated.
So far: the terrain and its rock, moss and heath; birch and pine forests from my own tree and forest generator, 25,000+ trees; and hundreds of thousands of ferns and ground plants; an ocean with waves and surf, underwater visuals with caustics, lakes, ponds with murky water, a stream and a waterfall; clouds that form and dissolve; rain, fog, starry sky and a full day cycle.
Terrain surfaces are textured in high-resolution with quite high pixel density (per metre) detail with diffuse color and normals, and some surfaces also utilize parallax mapping. These details are then blended together based on a set of rules which take the local terrain shapes, altitude and a few other factors into consideration. There's no "distant" locations on the island, every spot is equally detailed.
Trees and the undergrowth plants have a wind deformation system, and they react to rain visually. Various fine-grained growth and placement rules exist, as an example lichen grows more likely certain spots of the rocky hillsides and big rocks, pond water is still if wind doesn't touch it, etc.
The system currently has kilometres of draw distance, custom volumetrics, atmospheric system, lighting/shadow-casting and geometry generation in compute shaders.
Footage straight from the engine, running well above 60 fps at 1440p. Work in progress.
Wildlife and sound not yet implemented.
Terrain based on Nasjonal høydemodell DTM 1 m, © Kartverket (CC BY 4.0), modified.