How can I continue redrawing my UI while generating a procedural world?

I'd like to have my UI display status updates while the world is being generated. I tried forcing the camera to render mid-function, but nothing seems to happen. If I use Camera.current.Render(), it renders correctly once then gives me a NullReferenceException. If I use a specific reference to the camera, it doesn't render the UI updates at all. I've been trying to figure this out for two days, but it seems that I've run into something that Unity isn't going to make easy for me.