You might remember hoahluke for their Unity project featuring a Christmas tree, and this time the developer has shared a demo of their upcoming game, showcasing planetary-scale terrain.
As they explained, the approach differs from most traditional terrains. Here, LOD is managed by subdividing an icosahedron. Each terrain patch is triangular and can be subdivided into four smaller triangular patches as needed. The entire system is built using Burst and DOTS on the CPU, which makes adding physics colliders simple.
The planet featured in the video has a radius of roughly 830 km, but the system is capable of supporting Earth-sized planets, as demonstrated in this clip:
