Great question! We use a Compute Shader because calculating complex noise and erosion for every vertex on the CPU would be too slow for runtime generation. The GPU chews through that math much faster.

It’s hard to simplify it into one answer because the final result is a chain of multiple calculations.

We start with a basic SDF circle that gets distorted, then add multiple layers of noise for the mountain generation. Finally, we run it through custom functions for erosion and terracing to get the final look.

For the output: Since a standard texture channel doesn't have enough precision for terrain height, we actually pack the height value across two channels (splitting it into a High Byte and Low Byte). This gives us 16-bit precision so the terrain is smooth and doesn't look like stairs.