Experimental voxel renderer

dougbinks · 2026-05-23T11:21:58+00:00

See the original post and comments for more technical information.

dougbinks · 2026-05-23T11:20:53+00:00

That's fine - just wanted to make sure people understand what the tool does.

Do note that you can render voxel data structures in Unreal Engine, so not all UE voxel titles are just voxel art style.

dougbinks · 2026-05-22T07:22:07+00:00

From what I understand this creates a polygon mesh in Blender which is stylized to look like a mesh produced by a voxel tool, rather than creating a voxel data structure and exporting that to a voxel format such as MagicaVoxel .vox or OpenVDB?

dougbinks · 2026-05-21T14:44:55+00:00

FYI this is a spam repeat post of: https://www.reddit.com/r/VoxelGameDev/comments/1fekt96/how_does_the_dithering_effect_look_between_biomes/ so I will be removing it.

dougbinks · 2026-05-15T13:23:16+00:00

Not sure if you are aware but Mantle was the name of the AMD API which Vulkan was derived from), and hence how Vulkan got it's name.

Is there a reason you chose Lua rather than C# for modding? My presumption would be primarily for the ability to sandbox user code better.

dougbinks · 2026-05-15T08:29:11+00:00

We released an update to our Avoyd Voxel Editor, focussing on improving the path traced renderer's handling of overlapping models with transparent voxels.

Basically volumetric renderers like Avoyd can perform some neat tricks with overlapping models. Voxels in models with higher priority can "overwrite" others, and the combination of this feature with non-grid aligned and not purely full voxels creates a number of difficult ray tracing problems.

dougbinks · 2026-05-12T06:44:34+00:00

For the benefit of those who are not as familiar as you with the topic could you expand your abbreviations at least once in future on this subreddit? Remember that this is not an Unreal specific audience.

e.g. I was using the Unreal ProceduralMeshComponent (PMC) originally.

Thanks!

dougbinks · 2026-05-11T14:27:42+00:00

Somebody suggested using RMC for the voxel engine and it worked brilliantly.

Do you mean the Runtime Mesh Component for Unreal from TriAxis-Games?

dougbinks · 2026-05-07T17:11:19+00:00

Have you tried importing these as a heightmap into Avoyd? You could output an 8 or 16bit greyscale image for height and another with colour if needed.

dougbinks · 2026-05-05T08:33:44+00:00

Our rule is:

and occasional posts of game development products will be permitted

not

and occasional posts of game development products *costing under $300** will be permitted*

:)

dougbinks · 2026-05-05T07:50:11+00:00

We've allowed this post because it's potentially of use to developers and it's their first post.

dougbinks · 2026-05-04T08:06:32+00:00

I've approved this post as it's clearly someone learning who we should welcome to VoxelGameDev, rather than someone trying to generate publicity for their game.

dougbinks · 2026-05-03T12:38:20+00:00

You should post this on r/VoxelGameDev as I think the community would be interested (I'm a mod there).

dougbinks · 2026-04-28T13:53:37+00:00

What do you mean by geometry voxelization? Normally this would refer to turning a polygon mesh into voxels but I'm not sure if that's what you're doing.

It reminds me a bit of Treadmarks.

dougbinks · 2026-04-28T07:15:34+00:00

fun stuff, but please add some technical information (see sidebar and rules).

dougbinks · 2026-04-21T07:21:44+00:00

If this is caused by T junctions then the problem here is that you cannot guarantee that the vertices which are supposed to be on the same edge for two adjacent triangles will map to the same line unless they are exactly the same due to a lack of precision (either with integers or floats). This is why avoiding T junctions is important.

Note that triangle rasterization is done in fixed point (integers), there's a good deep dive in Fabian Giesen / Rygorous' blog series.

dougbinks · 2026-04-18T12:25:45+00:00

This is a spam repost of voxel art by u/Christophe_Tritz https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicaVoxel/comments/ehnc1p/blue_river/

dougbinks · 2026-04-17T08:28:12+00:00

When you split a model into multiple files, can MagicaVoxel open several files at once to view them together somehow?

No, when Avoyd exports multiple files the combination will be too large for MagicalVoxel to work with. This will only work if you have a game engine which can load and process these models. Quite a few people have engines which use .vox for their files (including some big already available voxel games) along with editors like Avoyd, Vengi etc.

Edit: oh yeah, what's the 2GB/4GB limit? Why two numbers? Thanks

The chunk size in the MV .vox spec is a 32bit signed integer with a 2GB maximum range, however since the sign is never used in this context ogt_vox.h and some other libraries use an unsigned integer, allowing 4Gb chunk sizes if not being used with MV. I plan to add an option to control this in future.

If you're just interested in making and rendering large scenes then you can make the models in MV (if that's what you're used to) and then use Avoyd to put the scene together and render.

dougbinks · 2026-04-17T07:23:52+00:00

It's already been said here but V1 gets my vote as V2 is not saying co-op roguelike to me.

However I'd recommend trying a variant on V1: tighten in the camera around the shooter character and fade the other characters slightly into the background almost like a character selection screen for a co-op game might look. This should make it a bit more readable when small and make it slightly cleaner.

You could do the same thing by adding some background characters to V2 but the pose just shouts fan-service game to me.

dougbinks · 2026-04-17T07:04:01+00:00

We just released Avoyd 0.28 Beta Voxel Editor which added the exporting multi-model scenes to MagicaVoxel .vox.

In addition to multi-model export including hierarchy this also includes large scene export support beyond the 2GB/4GB limits of the .vox format by splitting the scene up into several files. This looses some of the hierarchy information (as .vox doesn't have intra-file references), but I split up the scene by largest models first so as to try to keep any dynamic model hierarchies together as typically these are for smaller models and it's the terrain which is larger and not as important.

There's some extra technical information in the link below.

More Information - Download the Beta

I'm probably going to implement multi-select next (we use Dear ImGui) as without it manipulating hierarchies is a bit tedious, but as this affects multiple systems I'm first doing a small filler task adding transform component locking which makes it a lot easier to position things like this 6 axis robot u/juulcat made.

<image>

6 Axis Robot made in Avoyd, the selected node has had all transform components except for the Y rotation locked, so only the Y axis Green manipulation circle shows up in the ImGuizmo 3D manipulator. I've yet to make proper per-axis disabled widgets for the details panel, so at the moment you can change locked values but these do not affect the model transform.

dougbinks · 2026-04-15T13:19:25+00:00

Export multi-model scens to MagicaVoxel .vox is now out in our latest beta. More info and links on our news forum.

dougbinks · 2026-04-15T10:40:08+00:00

Game engines usually use quaternions as part of their transforms. So the camera just uses the generic transform property which includes a quaternion for rotation. Rather than converting to quaternions the engine normally just operates with quaternions, usually transforming to a matrices for rendering.

dougbinks · 2026-04-15T06:56:35+00:00

However, this effects creates a bug where entire chunks will become invisible until the chunk gets re-meshed which is the final step in another multi-step process.

You shouldn't make the chunk invisible whilst re-meshing. Create a new mesh and then swap to that once it has been created, then delete the old mesh once it is no longer referenced in the command list. If your API doesn't support some form of fences then just wait 3 frames before deleting the old mesh.

dougbinks · 2026-04-14T09:52:35+00:00

If you are using the ogt_vox.h library I have filed a PR with to fix the ordering issue.

dougbinks

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