Vorxel

Devlog

• Fixed bug with dynamic direct sunlight and level of detail
  February 04, 2025 by Teknologicus

  2

  I realized the direct sunlight rays marched at non-highest levels of detail were not starting from correctly intended world space coordinates. This video shows off dynamic direct sunlight with bug fix... Continue reading
• Voxel Cone Tracing Experiment
  February 04, 2025 by Teknologicus

  1

  I'm working on implementing voxel cone tracing global illumination in my voxel engine. Here's an animation output by a prototype application that demonstrates voxel mip (as in mapmap) coordinates and... Continue reading

  
• Dynamic direct sunlight working with level of detail
  February 01, 2025 by Teknologicus

  2

  Occasionally I see a weird flash, which when I see those, it's usually caused by a synchronization issue I haven't tracked down yet... Continue reading
• Improved dynamic direct sunlight
  January 27, 2025 by Teknologicus

  2

  Continue reading
• Dynamic direct sunlight
  January 26, 2025 by Teknologicus

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  I've got the dynamic direct sunlight pass working... P.S. Someone on Reddit pointed out, "Why do we see jumps in brightness on the roofs and not on the ground?" It's due to both the angle of the sunli... Continue reading

  
• Previous folly and finally success
  January 19, 2025 by Teknologicus

  2

  So my previous attempts to reduce voxel world space coordinates to a unique set for voxel lighting passes was complete folly due to my ignorance of shader programming and not being able to find useful... Continue reading
• Rasterized triangles are evil!
  January 10, 2025 by Teknologicus

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  [Concept art] What if in a world of ray marched voxels the rasterized triangles are the villians? P.S. Or maybe this. ;)... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally Generated Blocks (Video)
  January 07, 2025 by Teknologicus

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  P.S. With the video recording software running, my voxel engine runs slower unfortunately. Without the video recording software running, I can place 32x32x32 sized blocks as fast as I click in rapid s... Continue reading
• Fog is working again
  January 04, 2025 by Teknologicus

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  I've got fog working again after the deferred rendering changes broke it... Continue reading

  
• Improved fragment/compute shading rates
  January 02, 2025 by Teknologicus

  2

  I've got shading rates working correctly and are optimized with the raymarching compute shader as well as with the fragment shader again. I also added additional shading rates for finer control over p... Continue reading

  
• Debugging variable compute shader rates
  December 28, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  With compute ray marching it means part of the shading rates logic must be done in the compute shader (in addition to it still being done in the fragment shader for the gbuffer render pass) for perfor... Continue reading

  
• Deferred gbuffer rendering update
  December 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  Deferred rendering is working nicely now. I even sped up the ray marching compute shader by changing local_size_x from 1024 to 64. I've got mipmaps and voxel level ambient occlusion optimization bits... Continue reading

  
• Deferred gbuffer rendering via compute shader ray marching output
  December 26, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I've got deferred gbuffer rendering working following compute shader ray marching output pass. (This is a prerequisite to implementing global illumination and dynamic lighting.) GPU buffer usage went... Continue reading
• Fast and Accurate Color Depth Conversion
  December 21, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  My voxel engine uses colors which are converted from 24-bit to 16-bit color (5-bit red, 6-bit green, 5-bit blue) to allow space for additional properties (alpha, emissive, specular, and voxel level am... Continue reading
• Update: Hilbert Curve surface grooved stone block
  December 19, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  Non-grooved at left and grooved at right. Edges are now left untouched by Hilbert Curve... Continue reading

  
• Hilbert Curve surface grooved stone block
  December 19, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  P.S. I'm close to getting raymarching working in a compute shader and having its output gbuffer displayed via a fragment shader... Continue reading

  
• Overhaul of buffer use in voxel engine
  December 07, 2024 by Teknologicus

  2

  I still haven't started in on implementing the global illumination part of my voxel engine. I've overhauled the semantics of how Vulkan buffers are used in my engine to send/update shader buffer data... Continue reading

  
• Tetahexacontree 4x4x4 Occupancy Bitmasks Lookup Table
  November 25, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  My voxel engine uses a tetahexacontree (or 64 way space partition tree) with occupancy bitmasks at each brick (or node which references up to 64 [4x4x4] other nodes or voxel volumes). The bitmasks are... Continue reading

  
• Voxel-level ambient occlusion optimization bits generation via compute shader
  October 15, 2024 by Teknologicus

  3

  Test scene: nuke.vox (1932x615x1136 or 31,734,800 non-air voxels) Times from/to on scene load to generate voxel-level AO optimization bits: CPU (only using one execution thread @ 3.20GHz) : 134 second... Continue reading

  
• Image rotation via shearing
  October 10, 2024 by Teknologicus

  1

  I'm planning on implementing rotating things in game made of voxels, so this is why I'm experimenting with image rotation via shearing. I wrote a simple program to test image rotation via shearing. (S... Continue reading

  
• Rotation without rotating
  October 09, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I came across this and found it very fascinating! It could be used to rotate groups of voxels about an axis without rotating them (keep them grid aligned). Link: Youtube - Stand-up Maths - Rotation wi... Continue reading
• Voxel volume mipmaps generation via compute shader
  October 08, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I've got voxel volume mipmaps generation via a compute shader working. It was a struggle because I knew little about implementing compute shaders from both the Vulkan and the GLSL side before tackling... Continue reading
• Dynamic global illumination methods
  September 26, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I've been doing research into how to implement dynamic global illumination in my voxel engine. I have decided on "voxel cone tracing" over "path tracing" for performance reasons. Here's an example (no... Continue reading
• More ambient occlusions optimizations
  August 30, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I got to thinking about the GLSL voxel level ambient occlusion code and realized that the biggest bottleneck in performance with it is determining adjacent voxels in order to calculate how much ambien... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated grooved, cracked brick blocks
  August 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Left is grooved and right is non-grooved:... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated cobblestone blocks with surface indentations
  August 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Left with surface indentations and right with no indentations:... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated mortar grooved brick blocks
  August 26, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Left is grooved and right is non-grooved:... Continue reading

  
• Testing other colors of procedurally generated mushrooms
  August 22, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Continue reading

  
• Miscellaneous Updates
  August 21, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I'm currently working on moving the voxel volume level of detail mip map generation and voxel ambient occlusion adjacency bit optimization pre-calculations into compute shaders for much better perform... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated mossy cobblestone block
  July 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated cobblestone blocks (preliminary)
  July 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I'm using Voronoi noise to generate patterns. [Cut to show pattern extends to interior]... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated mossy stone brick blocks
  July 25, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Continue reading

  
• Fixed level of detail voxel mip map "bleed"
  July 25, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Level of detail uses voxel volume mip maps to render voxels at a given level of detail for a given distance and (adjustable) settings to increase performance. The issue I ran into is that some 3D scen... Continue reading

  
• Graphics Settings UI
  July 21, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Most of the settings work except for "Ambient Occlusion - Volume - Far", "Debug Display - Depth", "Ulta Low" to "Ultra High", "Revert", "Defaults" and "Cancel". [click image to open in new tab]... Continue reading

  
• Update(2): ambient occlusions optimizations
  July 21, 2024 by Teknologicus

  [See devlog entry Update: ambient occlusions optimizations ] With 3D graphics programming, it's always good to be able to visually verify something is working correctly, but with a performance optimiz... Continue reading

  
• Update: ambient occlusions optimizations
  July 20, 2024 by Teknologicus

  See previous devlog post Ambient occlusions optimizations and comment I made: "In implementing this optimization, I realized the voxel-level ambient occlusion could also be sped up even more if I keep... Continue reading

  
• Ambient occlusions optimizations
  July 17, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I've managed to improve frame rates by over 25% in some scene views when ambient occlusion is on with some optimizations I implemented! Without optimizations: With optimizations:... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated brown mushroom and interiors
  July 15, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated mushrooms (gills and sizes)
  July 14, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated mushrooms
  July 14, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  (Gills need stripes, but looks good otherwise.) 2D version of equations I'm using to generate cap shapes: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/flaxw9q8ht... Continue reading

  
• Noise function for procedurally generated blocks
  July 13, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I'm using a stateless pgc hash function in 3D coordinate space to generate noise for my procedurally generated blocks. In case anyone is curious about the code, here are pcg hash functions for 1D, 2D... Continue reading
• Procedurally generated dirt and dirt with grass blocks made of voxels
  July 12, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Right and bottom blocks have a smaller block size cut out of them to show interior... Continue reading

  
• Better looking procedurally generated log blocks of voxels
  July 10, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Bark now has vertical lines in noise pattern, reduced noise on rings so they are less obscured by noise, and center of cylinder's vertical axis is calculated from center of block to eliminate four not... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated log and leaves blocks
  July 08, 2024 by Teknologicus

  This allows for procedurally generated blocks (made of voxels) of various sizes... Continue reading

  
• Procedurally generated block types (larger)
  July 07, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• More procedurally generated block types
  July 07, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Continue reading

  
• Experimenting with placing blocks of voxels using procedurally generated 3D textures
  July 06, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• Nighttime (black fog), Level of Detail and Fragment Shading Rates
  June 24, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• Fog Function With Density Percentage
  June 18, 2024 by Teknologicus

  For anyone wondering how the fog function works with a density percentage: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/g3nqt5r236... Continue reading
• Testing Fog
  June 18, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• Graphics Settings GUI
  June 16, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I'm nearly done with the graphics settings GUI and all the "hooks" into the graphics engine code... Continue reading

  
• P.S. Image showing graphics settings in better detail
  June 15, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Sliders control size of shader rates regions. Entire screen can be set to any one of the three shading rates or a combination of two or three at preferred region sizes. With the below level of detail... Continue reading

  
• Fragment Shading Rates Graphics Settings
  June 15, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  In Graphics Settings, the red indicates 1x1 pixel shading rate, yellow indicates 2x2 and green indicates 4x4. What this means for performances is that the yellow area will render at about 4 times fast... Continue reading

  
• Voxel Raymarching Level of Detail (fixed visual artifacts)
  June 14, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I fixed the issue of visual artifacts with the level of detail by calculating ray distance in discrete units of voxel volumes. Before the distances were calculated from the origin to where ever the ra... Continue reading

  
• Yet More Voxel Raymarching Level of Detail Tests Videos
  June 13, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Continue reading

  
• More testing of level of detail (different scene)
  June 12, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Model with level of detail set for all levels of detail in use: Color coded levels of detail on: Tetrahexacontree wireframe display on:... Continue reading

  
• More testing of level of detail
  June 12, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Model with depth cues on and level of detail set to log2(t/64) for all levels of detail in use: Color coded levels of detail on: Tetrahexacontree wireframe display on:... Continue reading

  
• Voxel Raymarching Level of Detail Tests
  June 11, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Initial tests of level of detail support:... Continue reading

  
• Voxel raymarching and much better performance
  June 09, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I changed the layout of the buffers (tetrahexacontree and voxels) used with the glsl shader to be more cache friendly and now I'm seeing frame rates around 200 while exploring this high detail voxel m... Continue reading

  
• Raymarching voxel volumes stored in a tetrahexacontree.
  June 04, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Previous versions used an octree. This version uses a tetrahexacontree for better performance with raymarching. Video:... Continue reading

  
• Voxel raymarching now with fragment shading rate
  March 30, 2024 by Teknologicus

  Here is the mask (if you will) of shading rates I'm using: Red corresponds to a 1x1 to 1x1 fragment shading rate, green is 1x1 to 2x2, and blue is 1x1 to 4x4 This feature with be adjustable and will b... Continue reading

  
• Raymarching higher resolution voxelized Sponza model
  March 25, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I realized the only voxelized Sponza model files I could find have a quantized color palette and that is why there are not smooth gradients of colors. https://youtu.be/pwdcPCcGp0U... Continue reading

  
• Fixed visual artifacts and running voxelized Sponza model
  March 24, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I fixed the visual artifacts which were due to a numerical error in the code. Here's a screenshot of my engine running a voxelized version of the Sponza model commonly used to test graphics engines an... Continue reading

  
• Massive model / scene
  March 21, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Statistics: 1589 octree nodes (non-leaf), 5363 octree volumes (leaf nodes), 889171 (21966848) voxels That's 889,171 non-air voxels and 21,966,848 voxels if air voxels in volumes are counted! No wonder... Continue reading

  
• Another raymarching and sparse octree of voxel volumes growth demonstration
  March 20, 2024 by Teknologicus

  This also tests dynamic use of Vulkan buffers for octree nodes and voxel volumes... Continue reading

  
• Octree growth test
  March 18, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I've got voxel placement and removal working. Here's a test of what the octree does if I place voxels outside of its bounds to make it grow... Continue reading
• Hybrid raymarching + raster rendering
  March 12, 2024 by Teknologicus

  The graphics engine now supports rendering lines and triangles via raster pipelines with correct depth test (z-buffer). Here's a scene with lines representing the octree nodes (blue, cyan, green) and... Continue reading

  
• Improved voxel ambient occlusion lighting
  March 03, 2024 by Teknologicus

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• More stylized ambient occlusion
  February 28, 2024 by Teknologicus

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• Now with MagicaVoxel file loading...
  February 27, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  Continue reading

  
• Smooth shaded voxel ambient occlusion!
  February 26, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I got smooth shaded voxel ambient occlusion working. I've implemented it in such a way as to have very little performance impact on the GLSL ray marching shader I wrote and this is all done in one ren... Continue reading

  
• Voxel crash test bunny exploded!!!
  February 24, 2024 by Teknologicus

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  I'm working on the code to add and remove voxels. The code to break a voxel (remove) works fine, but there are bugs in the add voxel code which adds a voxel to the voxel volume octree and does updates... Continue reading

  
• Per voxel ambient occlusion lighting
  February 24, 2024 by Teknologicus

  I'm planning on having voxels which are 1/8 of a square meter each in size, so I can't afford slow ambient occlusion (smooth gradations) calculations per ray marched into the scene, so I've decided on... Continue reading

  
• Voxel volume based octree ray marching rendering working!
  February 18, 2024 by Teknologicus

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• Prototype / proof of concept voxel ray marching
  February 09, 2024 by Teknologicus#voxel

  I'm working on a voxel rendering engine written in C++ for a video game I'm planning on writing. Here is a prototype / proof of concept voxel bunny rendered with the Vulkan graphics API and glsl fragm... Continue reading