Where to begin for a newbie on creating procedurally generated worlds/biomes? (Sorry if asked!)

Hi!
I'm a bit of a newbie, but I'm interested in learning how to procedurally generate worlds in Unity. I'd like to develop a survival/rpg game in the future, and as I don't have much money, I'd like to take on as much of the workload as possible.

The style would be relatively low-poly, ie. Spellbreak/Breath of the Wild, with large biomes of differing types (forest/plains/desert/mountains/etc.)

From what I understand so far, terrain is done via noise in Unity, and things like trees (which would be interactable objects) would be assets that would be populated after?

I've checked YouTube but am a little unsure as where to begin. I'm sure this sort of thing has been asked before. Someone on Reddit told me it's actually quite easy to learn, but didn't have anywhere to point me in the right direction.

The actual style of the look comes from the assets/shaders I will use, right? And the terrain is just generated through Unity and the 3d mesh? I'd be super grateful if anyone could point me in the right direction here or give me a hand. I'm a quick learner and have some time to invest in this.

 

google is your friend: unity lowpoly procedural terrain

yes, its usually 3d mesh generated with certain parameters, often perlin noise or similar.

if you haven't generated meshes before, start from something simple,
modify existing unity sphere, or generate plane, using mesh api:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.html
(there's many tutorials for unity procedural mesh generation too to get started there)

some links, try and then modify
https://forum.unity.com/threads/procedural-landmass-generation.383036/
https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/mesh-basics/
https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/hex-map/

for materials / shaders, can search for things like: unity flat shading

trees and objects, yes, its usually assets that you spawn there. (based on some criteria, could be perlin noise again, or checking terrain angles, type, color, height..)

 

I just don't want to go TOO low-poly with it, which is generally what I ended up finding when I searched. As I said, something more like Breath of the Wild/Spellbreak. Maybe that's more "toon" style? I don't know.

Do you recommend Gaia? I found a decent tutorial here:

From what I gather, I could do this and change the resource pack/assets to develop my style?

I'll definitely check out your links for sure, thank you! Do you consider this a big mountain to climb for a newb? What about the biomes part? Does that become basically repeating the same process X number of times and then defining rules about what can spawn against what biome in the world?

 

ok yeah, Gaia works only on unity terrain object i think. (i wouldn't necessarily buy that right now, try other things first, unless you want to have ready terrain generation by today)

yes, unity toon shading is a thing also, check for that.

you can do similar stuff with noise + modifying unity terrain heights and textures (and finding good noise algorithms)

https://answers.unity.com/questions/923144/heightmap-generation-using-perlin-noise.html
https://forum.unity.com/threads/procedural-terrain-generation-with-perlin-noise.207891/#post-1401675

you could also try this external terrain generator, just to get ideas how to generate natural looking terrains:
https://www.world-machine.com/
(from that you can import exported heightmaps and textures into unity terrain for testing)

 

Try MapMagic 2

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/mapmagic-2-165180

The core asset is free and you can use to to create procedurally generated terrains.

If you want to add things like objects and trees you need to buy the other modules that go with it. Or you can buy all of them together in the bundle version