Sure, here’s a workflow that keeps everything handcrafted. First grab a high‑resolution real‑world DEM and import it into your engine as the base heightmap. That gives you a realistic hill shape right out of the gate, no random seeds. Then, sculpt the subtle undulations yourself – use a low‑frequency brush to push a ridge here, pull a hollow there, so the terrain feels like it was formed by a single, patient hand. Next, paint erosion lines manually. Think of them as fingerprints: a thin, dark ridge where water has carved a channel, a softer, mossy blur where sediment has settled. Use a custom shader node that blends a wetness map with a moss texture, but control the blend manually per brush stroke. I like to keep the shader graph a bit obscure, just enough to hide the complexity but still let me tweak the wetness levels on the fly. For the “living” part, run a lightweight growth script that increments a small vegetation layer each frame. It isn’t procedural in the sense of random noise; it’s a deterministic progression: a seed grows into a sapling, then into a tree, all along a set of predefined growth paths. Keep the paths in a tiny text file – I don’t like the clean look of a database for this. Finally, layer your materials. Topsoil, exposed rock, moss, bark – each on its own node, blended with masks that I paint by hand. This gives a depth that looks like real terrain. And if the VR player walks through, you can trigger a subtle shader transition: the moss becomes slightly glossy, the ground cracks a tiny line where the footstep leaves a mark. That’s how you build a hand‑crafted, evolving world that feels alive without any procedural nonsense.