Introducing Voxelform - voxel terrain (Marching Cubes) with real-time deformation.

I copy that ... This is really awesome. Just makes me wonder how the hell I can further speed up development so that I can start integrating voxelform as soon as possible...

 

I resign. Here, take my money! (I just bought it.) I tried something similar to your voxel terrain in unity a while ago, yet my execution didn't live up to my expectations. If anyone's interested: I blogged about it here. I did mess with marching cubes, but finally settled on something simpler (blockier hex-based).

First of all, I want to thank you for developing this. I'm the standard multi-hatted one-man unity dev team, so coding "engine tech" seriously delays or even halts the progress of the real game I'm working on - even though it's so much fun. I was just investigating into my options and almost settled with writing my own voxel terrain for Ogre3D, since my attempt to do so for unity failed performance-wise. And then I stumbled upon Voxelform. Jackpot! ;-)

Do you plan on any speed optimizations? Like handling chunk updates in another thread (like those guys did) or moving calculations to a C++ plugin?

Keep up the rock-solid...erm...soil-soft work! I'm looking forward to the multi-mat/editor update and basically to every update there'll be!

 

Looks absolutely amazing! I look forward to future updates. Keep up the great work, I will be purchasing it soon.

 

btw - I hope you will add functionality so there is darkness in the tunnels. This will make it much more realistic.

 

@All - Thanks so much! Guess I got a little side-tracked adding that extra shader support, but just couldn't live without bump mapping, and specular highlights! It was using substance based textures that gave me the motivation to do that. One thing I've noticed with substances though, is that when you crank up the texture resolution, load time can really suffer. So I'm back to using Filter Forge for creating diffuse/normal/specular textures.

Something else... I've decided to go ahead and keep Unity Free editor support in the package, but am going to really focus on Unity Pro editor support as it's the only truly integrated way to go.

@September - Thanks so much for such a great compliment. I took a look at your EcoChunk game, and read through your posting on inspiration. Very cool work with the hexagonal blocks, and your insight on game inspiration really hit home! I think a lot of us feel like that. I certainly got the "oh noes, somebody did it already!" feeling when taking a look at Minecraft for the first time, and then realized that not only did he do it, he took it further in some directions than I had every imagined... so then it was off to marching cubes, and Voxelform.

I do plan on introducing multi-threading capabilities. If they don't show up in the next version, they'll follow soon thereafter in a small release.

@wsworin - Thanks! And I agree... I'll give this some serious investigation right after bring multi-threading into play.

 

Thanks, I look forward to the update. I am using Unity Pro and Substance, so I look forward to the support with your voxel terrain. I just love the opportunities players will have to play with the terrain, hopefully will get the time to put it in my game one day.

 

New multi-material sandbox DEMO with bump + specular support

So still plugging along... at this point, v1.2 is actually more of a v2.0... so perhaps that's what it'll be. Things are taking far longer than I'd like, but progress is speeding up again, and I hope to finally have a release within several weeks. To make that happen, some suggested features may not make the cut, but this thing needs to get out the door!

BTW, the demo uses 2 new shaders. Every material in the demo uses fractal noise to perform volumetric blending of 2 textures. The first 8 materials support diffuse, and bump. The next 8 materials support diffuse, bump, and specular. The shaders also use triplanar texturing.

NOTE: This is a preview, not the actual shipping product.

 

Very fun!

 

Thanks!

Just posted a small update to this demo... minor fix to the fractal blending + 4 new solid textured materials supporting normal mapping. This is the original shader that Voxelform 1.0 shipped with, but tweaked to provide normal mapping for bump + spec, but without spec mapping as found in materials 8-16. It's a subtle effect, and possibly cranked up a little too high, producing some dark spots... but everything's cranked up a bit for the demo. You'll have full control over normal and specular power per material, including the ability to flip normals as some normal maps are generated backwards depending on the utility used.

 

Wow, definitely very nice and great looking! Although there was one problem, when I build multiple materials, and then destroy it slowly, the game shows the wrong material after destorying. For example, lets say I build a mountain of blue, and then when I left click in this mountain, randomly(maybe 10% of the time), it will show a different texture on the newly created voxels.

I hope this can be fixed. As well, I hope the light in the tunnels can be implemented, and some simple editor to make levels or maybe even form it to an existing unity terrain. Keep up the great work!!

 

This is a little piece of awesome. Also, the brush behaves a lot better!

I figure the "other material showing" bug has to do with removing a material's presence, but the chunk update kicks in and properly affects the mesh with the voxel influence from other materials.

I can't wait to see how you changed the internal workings.

Playing with the example brings two more questions:
1- Do relatime shadows and image effects like SSAO work on your materials?
2- There seems to be a significant increase in framerate. How did you manage to have the mesh collider updates be fluid like this? I figure they update since they are somewhat essential for raytracing.

 

Reposting the demo from the last page with yet another update to fix the "other material showing" bug.

 

Thank you for fixing the material bug! I just bought it, really want to support great products like yours.

I was wondering, will the user be able to know through raycasting what material he is aiming at(hardness of material).

As well, how is progress on a basic editor, or something that allows a person to generate a level or even form it to an existing heightmap or terrain. That way rolling hills would be possible? I think that would be pretty cool.

Finally, in one of your older demos you have it so the grass was on top of the terrain and then ground underneath. But when you dig in the tunnels, it will always produce grass on the bottom. Is there anyway your system could generate materials like grass on the top only, dirt underground always, and the such, but without the creator having to place it all by hand in editor?

Thanks again, keep up the great work! Your a very talented programmer.

 

Is it possible to make the voxelform materials blend together? We're working on a somewhat minecraft-like game, and having a gap between the different materials would break the suspension of disbelief.

Also, perhaps you've fixed this already, but the loop which alters voxels (m0|m1) in VoxelTerrain seems to repeat itself a few hundred times more than needed from what we could tell. Altering the loop kept the frame rate at a more stable level while the terrain was being altered.

Keep up the good work!

 

I just noticed that you were asking for wishlists on your homepage, so here is a big wish: support for endless levels

If you could pull that off it would be one heck of an awesome feature IMO.

Unity Pro's asynchronous loading could (at least theoretically) pull it off from what I've heard.

 

@wsworin - Thanks so much, and apologies for the delayed response.

Yes. Currently, and in the future, you can extend the Voxel (future: VFVoxel) structure however you'd like. The raycasting will clue you in as to which voxel was hit, and from there you can access or modify any data in that voxel or it's neighbors.

I'm currently working on the Unity Pro version of the editor. I plan to add some controls to allow for some fun (and useful) things like that.

Rant: A few gripes about the creating the editor... I'm a little disappointed with the lack of keyboard input while working within an EditorWindow. I was hoping to provide a WASDQZ navigation scheme, but to my knowledge am limited to mouse input. I'm currently working around that by providing virtual track pads for input. It's the next best thing, but not quite as nice. The other gripe which I've mentioned before, is that I'd like this editor to be available for Free and Pro users, but am not aware of any way to render a camera view to an EditorWindow without requiring a Pro license. I can understand limiting the use of this feature within a game for Free users, but when Free users are paying $100 for an editor extension, I think it'd make sense to allow Asset Store developers to develop extensions which will work for them as well. All that said, I'm also including a light weight run-time editor for Free users, but again, it would be nice put all the effort into a single solution.

Not currently... and I was going to say that multi-material could remove this issue... but that doesn't solve the issue of requiring hand placed voxels. I think there may be a better way involving the use of the vertex color to relay information to the shader, and checking to see what's above or below a voxel that is being placed. Perhaps the vertex color could be used to display 2 floor textures or 2 ceiling textures or both floor and ceiling as appropriate, within the same shader. I'll look into this. I've also been thinking about some shaders that use "sub-palettes" within the now 65K material palette. Note that it was going to be 256, but 65K seems nicer.

@RedMattis - Thanks!

Note to all: This is regarding an unreleased version of Voxelform.

I think this could be accomplished with shader specific "sub-palettes" within the larger palette. Similar to the response above, perhaps vertex color or texture sampling could be used to pull this off depending on the situation. This would essentially be a form of splatting. No guarantees on this feature, but I'll take a look at it when I get a chance... it's something I'd definitely like to have. Regarding the gaps... these can generally be removed by fine tuning the voxel volumes. You still may see beveling though.

This has been rewritten to use a single raycast, and is far more efficient. Despite the delays, it'll be out soon.

Yeah! One large part of the delays is R&D and backtracking... as you might expect, not everything goes to plan, so there's plenty of stuff I've tried that unfortunately just wasn't good enough to see the light of day. This was one of those things where the performance was just abysmal. However... I have another idea that perhaps I should have tried first, and will make another attempt. I might release v2.0 first, but I really want this feature too. Currently, with the right settings, I think you could fit an entire MMO zone into one VoxelTerrain. But it'd be nice if they were stitched together, and pulled from the same data source which in theory could be an infinite terrain generator that kept track of changes, much like Minecraft.

 

I guess I understand that the creator has to place all the voxels by hand to make what I was suggesting. So I look forward to working with your editor! I am using Unity Pro so everything should work fine. Hopefully there is a paint tool that allows you to determine the new voxel materials strength in the up and down direction so you can easily paint a thin grass layer on top of an existing dirt/ground layer of voxels.

As well, I hope you keep support for substance materials. As I am using them in my project too. I know they take time to computer but I like the idea that future computers can set the resolution to whatever they want.

 

@All - I'm making some real progress on the editor. Because WASDQZ isn't available via an editor extension, I'm taking something of a touch-screen style approach, where the terrain display is a large track pad of sorts, and all navigation can be done single-handedly with a 3-button mouse. Given what it is, it actually works surprisingly well, and much better than the usual Maya/Max style modeling controls.

As soon as the Pro Editor is functional "enough", I'll do the usual code cleanup, docs, examples, and then release. v2.0 has been completely refactored so as not to conflict with v1.1.1. This may require some refactoring for existing clients, but it should be possible to drop v2.0 into an existing project and work on the transition without breaking anything.

@wsworin -

Yeah - that will require hand placement using different materials until possibly "sub-palettes" arrive.

The Unity Pro editor extension will provide far more precision, and different editing methods. I'll try to minimize annoyances as best I can, and if the feature you want isn't there, or something's getting in your way, just let me know.

Absolutely. You can use substance textures in place of regular textures, and edit them as you're viewing the landscape.

 

Thank you so much! I really look forward to playing with the editor when it is released. The interface sounds intriguing.

 

Quick update... still working like crazy and making huge progress on getting this thing out. I know a lot of people wanted to see the voxel terrain in the Scene view. It's now possible to edit the terrain in the Pro Editor, and then navigate it in the Scene view. If you save the terrain, and script your game to load it when game play starts, then it's possible to setup a whole scene in the Scene view with the voxel terrain and any number of other objects, which can be physics based. Those objects will automatically interact correctly with the dynamic voxel terrain. For instance... if you were to drop a ball into the middle of a dynamic voxel terrain object at run-time, you could then alter the landscape in real-time to direct the path of the ball. This can actually be done in the current shipping version, but it'd be difficult to see where the ball was going to drop within the landscape from the Scene view. Currently if you want to do this, it'd make sense to do it dynamically rather than by using the Scene view.

Note: The above is in reference to an unreleased version, due for release this month.

 

This is great product, very interesting i have however one question. Is there any performance improvement update comming shortly? Right now it is very heavy on performance for medium end machines and i imagine that if you polute screen with some few more models it can get very dirty.

 

seconded

 

@janpec/spinaljack - There are two performance updates that should help in some situations.

The first is with dynamic manipulation of the landscape. The raycasting in previous versions was very inefficient, and has been improved.

The second is with the shaders that use Perlin noise. The original shaders used an absolutely insane number of texture (table) lookups (for noise) per pass... I think it was well over 40. I was able to cut that down in the last release by replacing some of the lookups with a simple bit of noise generating math. I later found a way to remove the rest of the algorithm's noise lookups. The quality of the noise isn't quite the same as Perlin's, but I think it's well worth the performance boost. Additionally, it can be easily tweaked to your liking via material properties.

For those interested, this was my source for the initial Perlin noise code. They mention an optimized version of their shader at the end of the chapter, but it still requires 9 lookups per function call. For fractal noise, that would be at least 18 per pass.
GPU Gems 2: Chapter 26

A small bit of overhead has been added to voxel data access due to a new interface, but this only matters when chunks are being rebuilt, and even with the overhead, the dynamic manipulation is far more efficient. The new interface should allow for situations (like filters) that require reading and writing without the need to implement double buffering. More importantly, it should also allow multiple terrains (in the future) to pull from the same data source, perhaps to be stitched together. Additionally, data can be easily stored or streamed any way you like if you choose to implement your own class with this interface.

Code (csharp):

1. namespace Voxelform2.VoxelData
2. {
3.     public interface IVFVoxelDataSource
4.     {
5.         int Width { get; }
6.         int Height { get; }
7.         int Depth { get; }
8.  
9.         VFVoxel Read(int x, int y, int z);
10.         void Write(int x, int y, int z, VFVoxel voxel);
11.         void Flush();
12.  
13.         VFVoxel SafeRead(int x, int y, int z);
14.         bool SafeWrite(int x, int y, int z, VFVoxel voxel);
15.     }
16. }

The easiest way to see an immediate performance boost is to increase the terrain's scale which should reduce the amount of geometry being rendered. Of course, whether or not that will work for you really depends on the type of game you're creating. Another way to improve the initial perceived performance would be to make a player wait while the map was being loaded in, rather than using coroutines to load it concurrently. Another performance tweak for someone creating a sim game would be to use a typical overhead camera so as to limit the amount of visible terrain (no horizon), and then use smaller chunks (maybe 4x4x4) for very fast dynamic terrain manipulation. If you don't care about dynamic terrain manipulation, then the use of larger chunks would be better.

 

Well this means practically that one can already edit his terrain and save it, he only needs to play the game and edit in play mode, right?
Of course, if somebody wants a "fine" editor, he'll have to build it himself

 

WTH the pulsating lava??? Will it also be done in Voxelform?

 

@megmaltese -

Right. All the components to build your own editor are there, and that was what I initially thought folks would prefer, as every game is unique.

This could be done via a vertex shader, so why not?

 

Ahhh great

Now, the final blast-a-universe game would be a fractal generator that generates... entire planets and make a ELITE-FRONTIER style game out of it ahhahahah

BTW no joke: that would be the DEFINITIVE game for the next 10 years.

 

@megmaltese - Yeah!! One of the features in v2.0 is virtually unlimited multi-material, and another is an abstracted voxel data source. It'd be possible with a little tweaking to setup wrap-around terrains to simulate a planet surface from the ground level. Because this is an important feature for a lot of folks, and me too, it'll likely make it into v2.1, but that wouldn't stop any hardcore C# folks from hacking it out for themselves w/ v2.0.

@all - Oh, and I know it's taking awhile to get this release out... but I swear, it's almost there.

I'm kind of half wondering if Unity 3.5 will come out right after this is released, and I'll have to go back and rewrite the whole editor interface to take advantage of the new GUI framework... although if they do a good job with it... supporting a modern event system and such, it'd really be worth it. Would be a lot easier to write clean GUI code too.

Not sure if I ranted about this here yet... but Unity could really improve the Asset Store experience for everyone if they switched to a real version control system. It would be awesome to be able to release a stable build, and then make betas and nightly builds available to any paying clients that wanted access. It'd also make breaking changes less of a dilemma, because multiple branches could be maintained. And then if there was a bug tracking system thrown in... aside from ponies, could it get any better?

 

Dark caves in all versions, including the one you have now:

Several folks asked whether caves could be darker than the outside world, and if this could be done while modifying the voxel terrain in real-time. I should have thought to mention Unity Pro's built-in shadows, but didn't.

This functionality should work for you right now, and in all versions of Voxelform.

Directions for Unity Pro 3.4:

• Create a directional light, and think of it as your sun.
• Rotate the light down, so that's it's perpendicular to, and pointing directly at your voxel terrain. Try: Rotation X:90
• In Quality Settings, adjust Shadow Distance until your entire voxel terrain is covered from any view point you care about.
• If you want, adjust the directional light's shadow properties. You'll likely want soft shadows, and a Strength of 1 (darkest shadows).
• Finally, if you've selected the darkest shadows, it's gonna be pretty dark without another light... so create a spot or point light, and attach it to your camera or character...

Viola! Dynamic darkness in caves/tunnels, and shadows under every overhang... updating as fast as you can build or dig.

Note: Radiosity not included... but it'll look pretty nice.

Lastly, and important... if you have Unity Pro, and you're not seeing any shadows (and you've verified that the Shadow Distance is correct for the quality setting you're using), take a look inside the current shader and make sure it has this line near the bottom:

Fallback "Diffuse"

In context:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.         ENDCG
3.  
4.     }
5.  
6.     Fallback "Diffuse"
7.  
8. }

 

Thanks for this tip. I look forward to the new release.

 

Mark Davis can you give some example webplayer test scene with bare system and non-complex shaders? I am wondering what exactly is making such a huge performance input. You said before that shaders are problem, could you please submit some basic test scene, no special shaders, just basic functionallity? I would really appretiate it.

 

Hey Mark, I'm really curious about voxelform, I don't have a voxel terrain editing game in mind. I want to generate meshes wherever a player drags the cursor and be able to save portions of these as individual meshes... or arrays? I know voxelform does the drag the cursor and create voxels, and it looks great!

I guess I'm curious what the storage structure of the voxelform is, and if it's appropriate and simple to keeping separate arrays of the voxelform objects that I can reinstantiate later.

For example, right now I'm instantiating cubes every frame, moving the cursor, creating an array of some portion of those and combining them. Could I do something like this with voxelform?

thanks

 

@janpec - Great idea. I will beef up the demo section of the web site in preparation for the v2.0 release.

@redmacmanz - In v1.1.1, the storage is nothing more than a 3D array of voxels. In v2.0, it can take whatever form you'd like (via an interface), but out of the box it's just easy x,y,z reading and writing. You should be able to do whatever you'd like. If you feel like the demos provide the level of control that you're after, then you're set. If not, there's room for improvement, but please be aware that modeling is organic and not as precise as Blender, Maya or Max.

@all - A little more cleanup and docs, and then we're good to go with v2.0.

 

Ok thanks i will wait for new demo to pop up and also for update v2.

 

hey dude can i just have the terrain deformer script? im a begginer and i have been looking for this for 5 months and i can't seem to make a terrain deformer. Im a script newbie and i though if i get your terrain script i could start learning because i want to make a mining game but i dont have resources. I am also 13 years old and i can't afford to pay for the hole subject and if i get the script i promise not to give to anyone and modify as much as i can with ur credits on it.

 

@hadf - Thanks for your interest, but this is a commercial product that's taken significant time and effort to develop for public consumption, and I haven't created a free version. Additionally, there are multiple scripts that work together, and that functionality isn't something that can be separated out from product. There are modular aspects to the project, and it's made for customization, but that core functionality isn't going to work without the rest of the product.

If you're new to scripting, and interested in getting into game development, I'd highly recommend not jumping the gun, but rather starting with the basics... work on a text based game, or 2D tile based RPG, and create a solid foundation for yourself. If you're 13, there's really no reason to rush, and if you're starting now, by the time you're out of college, you'll have a hell of an edge on most of your competition.

 

Hi Mark,

Sorry if this is a stupid question (I'm not particularly savvey with anything to do with procedural mesh's) but is Voxelform configurable to the point that you would be able to generate a random map at runtime using the marching cubes algorithm? Or would you have to create a terrain first to edit? And, potentially, to save somehow each newly generated map?

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, I've trawled through 5 pages already and I couldn't find an answer.

Cheers,
Sam

 

There are scripts included for perlin and simplex noise. The marching cubes algorithm isn't for generating terrain per se, but a way of transforming a set of voxels (3d points) into a mesh. The initial set of voxels is what you need to generate, and can be done at run-time using the noise algorithms.

 

Thanks for the response Sagron!

 

I'll second that - thanks Sagron!

 

How's the release coming along? Looking forward to get working with it.

 

Another Exemple :

Build :

Wheel click to change the size;
Wheel += Distance;
Left click += Elements
Right click -= Elements

Build WebPlayer

Destruct :
Destruct WebPlayer

 

Hi I Mark Davis.

Im currently in a Unity cave project, and its a very complex cavern sistem, I have bin searching for a triplanar material for a long time, but more importantly than this is a shader that would work Triplanarly but that I can ad extra textures to spesific parts, like make roads and paint some axtra mossy spots, almost as in the advansed terain editor material, but that would work for poligon generated geometry, just in case I will send a screen shot of my cave, so you can see the complexity.

The cave texturing looks flat for now...

Do your materials suport any of this? thank you for your time, and keap up the good work.

oh and check your mail in the VoxelForm wep page I couldent use it for some reason.

 

Does this come with source? I'd like to hack it to bits to use with my custom terrain solution

 

@Dyox - Badass! I love it!

@staincorb - Cool! v2.0 comes with triplanar shaders that support diffuse, normal (aka bump), and specular mapping. You can specify maps for ceiling, wall, and floor textures in the most complex shader. They don't support the use of vertex colors for drawing in roads and such, but you could probably modify them to do it. Some of the shaders will let you blend from one texture to another, using volumetric fractal noise to provide an organic look and feel... that would allow for mossy patches on a rock wall for instance, and although it's tweakable, you're at the mercy of the fractal noise when it comes to exactly what the results will look like.

@duke - Full source, fully XML code doc'd.

 

And finally, finally... I've just finished the docs and cleanup job... or so I hope. With any luck, I'll try to push a v2.0 package out tonight or tomorrow. Thanks for all your patience. More info on this when it's confirmed.

 

It's like Christmas

 

Heheh... it really is. Pulling an all nighter to get this thing out. Waiting on the insanely long preview process right now... probably enough time to jump into a bit of Skyrim really.

 

Last minute bug fix... should be in for review tonight and hopefully out tomorrow.

 

Yay, can't wait to try it out! And Skyrim is also awesome, I played way to much of it lately.