Sunday, March 22, 2015

UV-mapped voxels

For a while now the team has been working on a new aspect of our voxel pipeline. The idea is simple: we wanted to allow custom made, detailed texturing for voxel worlds.

In traditional polygon-based worlds, a lot of the detail you see has been captured in textures. The same textures are reused many times over the same scene. This brings a lot of additional detail at little memory cost. Each texture needs to be stored only once.

Let's say you have a column that appears many times over in a scene. You would create a triangle mesh for the column with enough triangles to capture just the silhouette and then use textures to capture everything else. A process called UV-mapping links each triangle in the mesh to a section of the texture.

This is how virtual worlds and games get to look their best. If we had to represent everything as geometry it would be too much information even for top-of-the-line systems. If given the choice, nobody would use UV-mapping, but there is really no choice.

With voxels you have the same problem. If you want to capture every detail using voxels you would need too many of them. This may be possible in a near future, maybe for different hardware generations and architectures, but I would not bet on voxels becoming smaller than pixels anytime soon.

The beauty of voxels is they can encode anything you want. We saw it would be possible to keep voxel resolutions low and still bring a lot of detail into scene if we encoded UV mapping into voxels, just like vertices do for traditional polygon systems.

You can see some very early results in this video:


Here we are passing only 8bits for UV, also there are still some issues to address with the voxelization. I hope you can see beyond these artifacts.

Luckily we need to store UV only for those voxels in the outside, so the data is manageable. For procedural objects, voxels could also use UV. The rocks we instance over terrain could be using detailed textures instead of triplanar mapping. Same for trees and even man-made elements like buildings and ruins. For procedural voxels the UV adds little overhead since nothing has to be stored anyway.

Use of UV is optional. The engine is able to merge UV-mapped voxels with triplanar-mapped voxels on the fly. You can carve pieces out of these models, or merge them with procedural voxels and still  have one single watertight mesh:


As you can see the leopard's legs do not go underground in the rendered mesh. Everything connects properly.

This is an earlier video I think never linked before:



Why go over all this trouble? UV-mapping took polygonal models to a whole new level of visual quality and performance. We are going through the same phase now.

This kind of encoding we have done for UV also opens the doors to new interesting applications, like animation. If you think about it, animation is not different from UV-mapping. Instead of mapping vertices to a texture we map vertices to bones, but it is pretty much the same. So, yes, that zebra could move one day.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Get Voxel Farm!

Almost a week ago we announced new licensing plans for Voxel Farm. We have gone a long way since I asked you the readers what would you like to come out of this project. It is hard to believe three years have passed.

So you have three different Voxel Farm flavors to pick from: Creator, Indie and Pro. But before adding anything else, a word of caution: There are rough edges. The documentation lacks coverage for many of the things you can already do with the engine.

We are committed to this project for the long run, and we will be providing constant updates. We want to deliver rather than make promises or hype new features. I do not see this release as early access, or as request for the community to crowd-fund us. This software is released as-is.

In the proper hands there is a lot that can be achieved. There is no question you can use Voxel Farm today to make your next-gen killer game or app. Also, if you run into trouble you can always contact us and we will do our best to get you back on track.

The INDIE license gets you access to our SDK and the Voxel Studio creation tool. Here the engine core remains in binary form. These are C++ libs you can link into your project. The SDK contains a dozen of different examples, including full source code for a Unity plugin. Very important: the Unity plugin uses a DLL, so your game will be Windows only. Also you will need to develop on a Windows machine. There is a one time fee of $295 USD, and a recurring fee of $19 USD per month. When your project has grossed more than $100,000 USD, a 5% royalty fee is applied. While your subscription is active, you will get free updates perpetually to the SDK, example code and tools.

The PRO license gets you full source code, plus the SDK, plus Voxel Studio. There is a one time fee of $995 USD and then a recurring monthly fee of $95 USD. If your project makes more than $100,000 USD, a 2% royalty fee applies. There is an important twist here: The PRO license is organization-wide. It means your company only needs to purchase one license and it can be re-used by many different individuals within the organization. This also applies to the Voxel Studio tool. The INDIE license, on the other hand, is for just one individual.

And there is the CREATOR license. Here you get the Voxel Studio tool for $19 USD a year. Voxel Studio allows creating new worlds from scratch, including the different materials available for procedural generation and voxel editing. It also has fully functional L-System and grammar editing. The current version has limited exporting capabilities, so at the time your creations may be locked inside Voxel Studio, or you may be limited to collaborating with people and groups who have licensed INDIE or PRO. Whatever you create using this tool belongs to you. This is pretty much a content creation tool like Photoshop or Maya.

You can check out the license agreements in our online documentation.

As usual let me know what you think. There is a lot of hard work into this project, the team has done great. I also want to thank all of you who stopped by at our booth at GDC. It was great meeting you all and sharing our vision of the future with you.


(Photo: Michael and Rados at our booth at GDC 2015)