Voxel Displacement Renderer – Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic

https://blog.danielschroeder.me/2024/05/voxel-displacement-modernizing-retro-3d/

by greeniskool • 2 years ago

141 11 2 years ago

blog.danielschroeder.me

This is great. Granted, it would only work for very specific art styles and even environments. Not sure that any hard-surface would look good with it. But organic surfaces end up looking pretty nice.

Have you considered destructability of surfaces? Or, even better, subsurfaces? Dirt, which can be swep, showing with a level of rock below. Breakable wood.

erwincoumans2• 2 years ago

He mentioned the game Teardown, that allows destruction and physics on its voxels.

whizzter• 2 years ago

HN post and discussions from yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40464558

sydd• 2 years ago

I'm kinda sad that the whole voxel technology could not become mainstream. There were some really ambitious projects started in the 2010s like Voxel farm https://www.voxelfarm.com And people were speculating that the current technology of rendering triangles will be obsolete because voxels represent reality better. I'm a bit sad that we did not see the breakthrough, it would have been as large as the introduction of the GPU to accelerate rendering

erwincoumans2• 2 years ago

Not mainstream but the game Teardown uses voxels, rendered on gpu, first screenspace , later voxel space:https://blog.voxagon.se/2018/10/17/from-screen-space-to-voxe... More recently Voxlands also renders its voxels entirely in gpu shaders using raytracing, beautiful: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2283580/Voxlands

dahart2• 2 years ago

This looks really neat, but I’m very confused on what it meant by “voxels” in the demo itself. Minecraft makes sense, I’m just not seeing where there are “voxels” in the author’s engine… it looks very much like (and is described explicitly as) low poly meshes with displacement mapping. Where is the voxel grid?

nuancebydefault2• 2 years ago

A voxel is a little cube that is small enough to be confused with a pixel, from a distance.

dahart2• 2 years ago

Ah yes I see it now. I had to really zoom in on the stills in the article. The tiny solid color bricks are voxels— most places it looks like low res texture, you can only see the little cubes in a few spots. Very interesting, seems complicated and impressive to voxelize displaced meshes like this.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

I see it more like the voxels in the game "Comanche". So, a height map.

Voxel means "volume element", like a pixel means "picture element". A "pixel" in a height map is not an element of a picture but an element of a volume, so, a voxel.

nine_k• 2 years ago

This is wonderful; please develop this further, and use in an actual game!

I'm very much longing for game graphics being not movie-like. I want to feel inside a game, which has its internal logic and aesthetics, but which is not trying to copy the real world to the very minute detail. The movie-like quality breaks down due to various limitations, and we end up in the uncanny valley, where the world looks real but feels like a puppet show.

What made Doom great was not only its gameplay and art, but also its kinda realistic but not realistic light and animation. What made Monument Valley great was exactly the departure from the real-life geometry The in-your-face pixelization / voxelization of Minecraft not only did not repel the kids who never saw 8-bit games, but became iconic.

What sets out the voxel displacement rendering for me is the departure from flat and glossy low-poly surfaces and edges (which the author pays special attention to). Real-world textures are rarely glossy, and edges are rarely sharp. But modeling it the way it's done in some modern games is apparently crazy expensive and requires colossal graphical assets, such that are out of reach of a typical modder. The author's approach achieves the feeling of a nice palpable texture with low-poly geometry and low-res textures; it's very promising.

Voxel Displacement Renderer – Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic

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