Multi-Stage Procedural Terrain Generation Pipeline with Hydraulic Erosion and Neural Realism Scoring

Procedural terrain generation is fundamental to interactive 3D environments, but achieving geological plausibility remains challenging. We present a multi-stage algorithm that transforms a single random seed into a realistic 3D landscape. The pipeline combines fractal Brownian motion (fBm), ridged noise, and domain warping for base heightmap generation, fol- lowed by particle-based hydraulic erosion, D8 flow accumulation for river extraction, slope-aware settlement placement, A*-based road planning, and finally a neural network inference engine that rates terrain realism. We demonstrate that the proposed method produces geomorphologically consistent environments suitable for simulation, games, and digital twins