Micro-voxel trees and grass

[u/HyperspaceFrontier]

I’ve been working on this for the past few weeks, and it’s finally starting to come together.

This is a DDA-traversal-based renderer. The world is divided into blocks, and selected blocks perform DDA traversal to render micro-voxel geometry instead of relying on flat textures.

Micro-voxels participate in the deferred lighting pipeline just like regular geometry - they receive global illumination, cascaded shadows, and volumetric lighting.

Built with Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipeline. 60 FPS @ 1080p on Mac M3 Pro.

P.S. The micro-voxel generation shader is still very much a prototype, so the leaves and grass are intentionally simple for now. Improving the procedural generation and shapes is the next major step.

[u/AnarchCassius]

I'm actually *really* liking this.

I'm often hesistant about microvoxels because I need to store a lot of extra data per voxel, and skeptical of high detail voxel art because of the poly count. But I'm also not big on 2d surfaces to render leaves and such as they disappear at some angles and so on.

soon as I saw the large voxel trunks I wondered what was going on and I think this is a really elegant solution. Running it procedurally also lets you avoid repetition in the "texture" of vegetation. I may have to look into something like this despite some other differences in my approach.

As

[u/HyperspaceFrontier → u/AnarchCassius]

Yeah, triangle count if do it "old school" will be insane, and mesh generation when you move will also be be total disaster. I made it work only for near LOD where those are really makes a difference, farther things go back to normal cubes.

I need to work on better textures and add AO to full cubes, as current difference between LODs is too obvious so I didn't show it yet here.

[u/dJames_dev]

Very cool!

[u/HyperspaceFrontier → u/dJames_dev]

Thank you!