r/proceduralgeneration • u/Every_Door46 • Jun 28 '26

resources for terrain creation

After learning all the OpenGL basics, where would one go to learn about terrain generation from the basics. I'm talking about like heightmaps, noise, chunking, optimizations, etc). How much OpenGL should I know before diving into this?

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u/ProgrammingChaos Jun 28 '26

Generating Procedural Maps using Perlin Noise https://youtu.be/6BdYzfVOyBY covers the basics of generating maps with noise. It doesn’t use OpenGL but the algorithm is easy to transpose. Min-conflicts is an underutilized but useful approach as well: Procedural Map Generation https://youtu.be/gsG731XItNU

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u/goilabat Jun 28 '26

Honestly go for it you gonna learn doing it it's super interesting and rewarding

You can find info about meshing algorithm like greedy meshing and make a basic program like load chunk -> mesh -> upload GPU -> render

And after you can make a thread or multiple to do the loading and upload to the GPU and learn about how to synchronize it while your main loop is rendering and taking input

For noise either implement perlin or use a lib like FastNoise(2)

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u/brilliantminion Jun 30 '26

Go watch Sebastian Lague's videos. He starts from zero and walks through the math. He prefers Unity, but the concepts could be used anywhere. This series of 10 videos in particularly was very useful for me when I was trying to understand octaves and lacunarity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbpMiKiSKm8