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I'm making a *tiny* voxel renderer
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- Опубликовано: 18 май 2024
- [set quality to 1440p for best results]
This is a custom renderer that uses very small voxels to create detailed, stylized environments. I wanted to modernize the retro look of games like Doom and Quake, where pixelated textures give surfaces a blocky appearance up close. Now, surfaces have blocky three-dimensional details - voxels. The result has a foot in both worlds between retro 3D graphics and something much more modern.
Despite all the voxel detail, I actually modeled this environment with textured, low-poly triangle meshes. How does this work? What am I planning to do with it? For more info, or to get in touch, see here: blog.danielschroeder.me/2024/...
Captured on a Radeon RX 5700 XT at 1440p with frame-times from 4 to 9 ms, or 250 to 110 FPS. (There are some small skips in the video capture; OBS doesn't like my computer.) The same demo sequence stays above 60 FPS on a Steam Deck OLED at its native 800p, with many parts locked at 90 FPS.
![Adding ray tracing (back) to my game engine [Voxel Devlog #17]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/aY4Zet_C9Zs/mqdefault.jpg)
Dont let Big Polygon buy you out, stay strong brother
fk that take the bag
maybe just read his article on it, it is polygons behind
@@dranon0o Yeah I read the article afterwards XD it's a good idea
@@dranon0o At the end of the day, it has to be because of the way GPUs work.
They'd buy him out and bury the project
This. This is what Doom and Heretic and Hexen looked like to me when I was 12.
yesss
accuraate
Yeah! Wow, such memories! I remember that game Hexen - that seemed kind of exotic or new when it came out as it was something different to Doom and Quake.
I was trying to think of why this was making me feel nostalgic. Totally made me think of Heretic.
I'm glad I'm not the only one instantly going to Heretic's level textures
This style is perfect for nostalgic remasters of classic games. I can imagine the PS1 remakes looking so good with this.
Imagine if we got a New Xwing-Vs Tie Fighter, Quake, Elder Scrolls, Marathon, doom etc in this engine
Ultima Underworld 🙂
This is really cool. It's the first time voxels look like 3D pixels to me. Usually, since voxels used are so big, they stop looking like tiny components of a bigger thing and just look like cubes, which is why I've never been a big fan of them. Here you can see the big picture, and the voxels just give it the texture. I've seen nice art made out of tiny voxels, but never in the context of a game. So yea, nice work!
I agree. It's a strange phenomenon. Once you miniaturise them enough, they feel much more like pixels. I'd love to see different sized voxels compared in each scene, so we can see just how much they impact the feel of it. I've got a feeling this is the optimal size already though. Too small and they're essentially just pixels.
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I like how it looks retro and modern at the same time, crazy
No kidding! The rough surfaces give it a more 3D look than most high-end 3D games.
Someone needs to make a Quake-like game from this ASAP
@@user-iq6gp8qo8b I would love to have a "clayspace" server friends can log onto & sandbox play RPGs with destructible terrain.
Finally, minecraft 2
God I fucking wish
It's like calling Terraria "Minecraft 2D" lol
This is my first comment in 2024 in which I use the word _lol_ 🤔
SHUT UP
@@nix-wizard There are hundreds of "tiny voxel" projects, if not thousands, created by hobbyists over the past 15 or 20 years (at least). And every time one of them is posted on RUclips, the comments include people for whom it's the first such project they've ever seen. So there are always comments like "wow, why has nobody done this before?" or "Minecraft 2."
Usually with these, they remain cool tech demos and never get past that point. Eventually the creator of each project moves on to something else.
Just adding some context here. I have a project like this too, for example. I feel like probably 50% of all graphics programmers have one of these on the backburner.
That being said, I think this one is prettier than most.
Many have tried and hopefully someone will succeed. It is quite hard to make game like Minecraft. Yet to see one that comes close to being as good.
This mix of pixelated graphics with realistic lighting is giving me such an awesome atmosphere! This is awesome, congratulations on the results!
The chunky detail of the geometry really makes it feel like it has mass to it. Very nice!
Really neat! Does this rendering technique also work well with dynamic lights and moving objects? Could an animated displacement map be used, like the surface of water or fire?
Holy moly its CodeParade!
It would be very cool to see how this project works with dynamic lights and animated displacement maps
Thank you! Short answer: yes, yes, and yes.
In the current demo, all the lights are dynamic and can be moved freely. Lighting is one of the big places where I want to make further improvements, though I'll need to decide what direction to take it. (I talk about this a little in the second blog post.)
The individual meshes are static but can be moved with rigid transforms, for things like doors. This is implemented, but I don't take advantage of it yet. I plan to handle more heavily dynamic elements like enemies in a different way; that's work for future me :)
It's possible to update which texture is mapped to each part of a mesh (think material slots in Blender), and this is free from a performance standpoint. I plan to use this in the future for things like old-school animated water. It would also be pretty easy to scroll the textures, again for things like water, though I haven't implemented that yet.
CodeParade + Voxels = 5D Chess
@@dan5sch Where can I find your blog?
code parde
Dude, this visual style in a 3D dungeon crawler would be absolutely epic.
It reminds me of the MS-DOS game Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny, I loved this game as a child
I second this! What an incredible job!
It really would. If we got dungeon Crawler RPGs and some Quake-like FPS games in this engine I would be so pleased
And I'll be the voxels can be converted into pixels after being rendered to save on processing power and improve performance while wtill retaining the same visual style
notch is making exactly that conveniently enough
This looks absolutely awesome. Easy simplicity on the eyes while still showing delicious detail. The shadows cast by the lighting of the 3D textures makes them look so noticeable and lifelike.
I really dig the pixel aesthetic that still managed to have an absurd amount of surface detail! As a person that enjoys video games that *look* like video games, this is some really great stuff!
I think something a lot of people in the comments are missing is that this isn't true implementation of voxels in the sense of being able to edit individual voxels in real time ala Minecraft. As far as I understand this, it's not actually creating a voxel grid (for that you'd need a voxel engine like Teardown's) as it's just interpreting displacement maps in a granular manner with grid-aligned displaced vertices to create tiny cube-like structures. Don't get me wrong, it's massively cool and reminds me of DoS and FMV games of the 90s. Love it, fantastic work. ❤
yeah he stated this in paper, it's just not the same as John Lin or teardown
Damn, I for a moment thought it was an actual voxel grid, not an illusion I was spinning in my head on how this could be done optimally 😅
Ah like Delta Force games
Yeah the give-away is where the surfaces are angled, you can see the cubelets are angled, too. So they are extruded from a polygonal surface. But regardless it looks really cool, and world destruction is not something every game benefits from. I can imagine psuedo-destruction can be achieved with decals affecting the topography of the cubes.
I do wonder if something more than just displacement of a 2D texture is happening though, to add detail to the extruded areas. The knobbly stairs at 1:00 are interesting, I'm not sure if extrusion alone could create that edge definition (perhaps it's a mixture of polygonal meshing and extrusion in tandem though)
@@merkaba48 Daniel Shroeder actually replied to another comment stating that it's entirely possible to even do animated textures with this effect, so you could probably even do stuff like flowing water with a scrolling/animated texture. Definitely would like to see how this progresses! I see a lot of DOOM and Duke3D remasters where artists make voxel remakes of item/character/etc sprites, and this would fit perfectly into that.
*Standing ovation*
I had the honor of seeing a live demo. The video does not do this justice. Even on a portable device, it looked and performed so well, I started tearing up. Keep up the fantastic work, I can't wait to see this in a game!
Thank you!
hahahahahahhahaha
holy moly, i thought this would have to be pre-rendered, but it's fast on low-end hardware ? ridiculously cool
...tearing up over this?
It's so amazing how detailed and unique stuff can be on vortex! Thanks man! This will be the main someday!
This looks sooo cool 🤩! Your render is really inspiring. Maybe voxels still rocks.
Even with phong diffuse, no shadow casting, no AO, etc, the increase in geometric detail (especially given how clean it is) makes quite exquisite. And it's only really detectable at edges, and with very subtle parallax, but it informs an "idea" of dense geometry over the entire scene. Very interesting..
This really gives things a much greater sensation of texture compared to the standard ways.
I mean yeah, because the texture is _literally_ there in the traditional sense instead of artificially placed there via visual tricks like bumpmapped textures on top of flat polygonal triangles, or achieved by simply vastly increasing your polygon count, which can be expensive to achieve a rough textured appearance like we see here with voxels.
@@KissyKaede i mean, this IS achieved by vastly increasing polygon count
@@vibaj16 Sure, in wholly unoptimized games that require NASA computers to run (Think Starfield). Voxel engine games by contrast are much less resource-intensive to run.
@@KissyKaede these aren't true voxels. This uses displacements to achieve the voxel look, which does indeed vastly increase the polygon count.
Holy shit! This is so cool :D. I love all the details you can put in to the 3D enviroment. It not just texture work. Its actually 3d :D. So cool.
Voxels are amazing and I love you for doing this
Voxel is fantastic as technology as its possibilities are (despite still limited) potentially vast! I love this and I hope you get further with your experiments!
I've been dreaming about a FPS with this + destructible environment/enemies my whole life
Battlebit Remastered has it to some degree
He just displaced textures, there is no data inside...
In terms of 2D, Noita exists.
Look at John Lin voxel game
Have you seen Teardown?
the effect of things looking smooth at a distance and then obviously being voxellated up close is really neat
I am absolutely enthralled with this, it looks just like I imagined old PC games looking when I was a kid. Fantastic, I can't wait to see more. Will definitely also be reading the blog, and thanks for sharing!
This kind of voxel style is what I've been thinking about, if i ever were to make a voxel renderer, this is what i'd be aiming for. Keep up the work, excited to see progress!
OMG I love it. It's like those old pre rendered graphics but live.
Like Ecstatica?
Looks really good! Thought for sure it was a pre-render and was amazed when I found out this is real-time.
Ok, that looks fantastic, it's a genius idea ! I can see this kind of rendering becoming a new style in modernized retro video games ! Please continue your work in this project !
This is perhaps the most incredible things I've ever seen! At 1:18, where you see the wall right next to you and it's all voxelated, and then you look down the cave and it looks like high quality assets... Amazing!
People are talking about physics and stuff, but this just looks like a really cool graphic style to play an rpg or something in
Yeah this actually looks so good.
There are already plenty of games that look like this and better
@@hypno5690 For example?
@@Irowned He has no examples. Because they don't exist.
what's so "cool graphic style" about fixed voxel resolution? Is Minecraft a cool style instead of a compromise for you too? :D
Looks amazing. Really captures that old-school look albeit with more depth. I’m looking forward to see more.
this looks super sweet! keep up the good work!
Wow this is beautiful. It's simultaneously very modern looking, but still super retro too. The voxels give it a very nostalgic feeling. I'd love to see a game built in this style. It sort of reminds me of Boltgun, which uses a pixelated retro aesthetic on a modern looking game engine, except this is doing it with voxels, which just looks much cooler. Great job!
This smells like massive unexplored potential. I'm sure everyone seeing this can at least think of a game or two this could enable.
Imagine elder scroll morrowind or older made in this style, would be cool ngl
Voxels are definetly not an unexplored potential, common guys..
This is an incredible unexplored aesthetic! 3d environmets with the granularity and detail of Pixel Art!
not unexplored
@@vibaj16 it's new to me! Where else can I see it?
Is your name Hugh Mann by chance?
Looks amazing! This makes me feel very inspired
I think this is really really well done, and perfectly captures the aesthetic of the time. I'd love to see this in VR.
I love it
Wow from a little distance you can’t even tell they’re voxels.
You're onto something awesome, keep that up!
This is so aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. Absolutely love what you're doing here.
Since some people, including me, had a fight in the comments about this renderer and how it works, I want to summarize what we've discussed as well as provide some insights from the linked article in the description. Also I am very intrigued into this renderer, because the artstyle is in my opinion just genius. I am no fan of games trying to achieve "realism"; especially not with graphics. Here it goes:
The main discussion revolves around the term voxel. In this renderer, voxels are used to add fine geometric details to low-polygon meshes. This is achieved by applying displacement maps to these low-poly meshes, defining voxel-scale surface details that protrude from the base geometry. The author's approach allows for sharp edges and corners to be rendered accurately, overcoming limitations of traditional displacement mapping. And this is the reason why I am intrigued into this. That's a really smart move and has a lot of potential.
From a game dev perspective this is nice, because one only needs to consider the voxel details for selected game systems, while most of the game can treat the geometry as conventional low-poly meshes.
And now the fun part: Physics. As an example, in a first person shooter, one could implement a displacement-aware raycast function so that bullets can respect the exact shapes of the displaced geometry. Things like this can be done right away as they require additional systems anyway. A lot trickier are actual physic simulations like fluids or environmental destruction. To achieve this with this renderer the best approach (my opinion in it's current state) would be to generate a voxel representation of the displaced geometry. This presents us with the same problem as all other voxel renderers: Implementing a physics engine that can handle voxel-based rigid body simulation and collision detection. But this is not really the problem of this renderer anymore. Depending on the usage of this renderer, the development of systems to synchronize the rendering output with the physics simulation could be crucial as the voxel displacement requires updates based on rigid body transformations.
My approach to pair physics with this renderer would be clearly to do it based on the low-poly meshes; not the voxelized data. I do not see the need of voxel physics here at all. I mean we are all here, because we love the asthetics, right? These originate from old games like Doom and Quake. Why make things complicated and computationally intensive by trying to merge voxel-based physics into it? From a game design perspective I don't like the idea anyway.
The steps I'd take from here on would be:
1. Develop a custom rendering pipeline and shaders (the author of the renderer mentioned that shaders are basically done already) in Godot to render the voxelized geometry data.
2. Develop a custom voxel physics systems. (please, see my explanation above)
3. Use these systems to implement gameplay interactions like shooting raycasts against the voxel representation for accurate collision detection. I would use this only if the game design requires it which shouldn't be often.
4. Develop systems to synchronize the rendering output with the physics simulation.
5. Create tools to generate displacement maps from mesh data during asset import, and integrate them with the voxelization pipeline.
6. Implement optimizations like level-of-detail, occlusion culling, and limiting the voxel resolution based on camera distance to maintain real-time performance.
7. Create awesome looking games in Godot!
As you can see it requires a significant engineering effort, but I hope the author can assemble or find a team willing to do so. I'd be happy to be part of it, but my main activity and passion in video game development is game design, which is why I can only contribute fully developed concepts without being able to (properly) program them myself. If this project makes progress and is actually incorporated into Godot - as free-to-use or even better as open-source - I will create game design documents that capture the essence of the games of that time and make them available for free. I would like to see the gaming industry revitalized and I see the potential for this renderer to achieve that.
If I have made any mistakes, please let me know as I am always eager to learn.
Thanks for reading! Have a great day :)
I dont even understand half of it, but please make this happen!
Have a great day too ^-^
Bro wrote the only useful comment i ever witnessed on youtube
@@Brinkology for real.
Damn, sounds like a smooth approach to using the renderer in such a way. Less computation is preferred anyway.
I'm sold for sure!
I agree with everything you said... except Godot. That project should take some cues from Blender, because right now it's still a buggy nightmare to actually pull more than a few things into. Despite all the progress made on some features, in other ways it's even more buggy than it was years ago.
looks amazing! can you actually do voxel physics with that or you only have meshes with displacement mapping and no actual voxel data to simulate physics on?
The latter. The way I like to put it is that I'm focusing on voxels as an art style, not voxels as a game mechanic. I have a ton of respect for the folks who do physics on small voxels, though.
@@dan5sch I am curious about your other showcases - what is your ideas for dynamic LOD / voxel size blending as they getting closer to camera?
Great work! Looks amazing! Especially in rotation.
Looking good! Keep up the good work!
This is super fun in concept, but because of all the small changes in angle and such, it almost looks sort of fuzzy. Like it’s all covered in hair. I don’t really know how you could change that though…
Make the voxels smaller and add molecular interactions and now we've got a chemical physics sim
And a molten GPU.
Very nice!
And very sweet blog post too .
This is pretty neat! I also really like and appreciate your blog post about it
I remember John Lin from back in the day... Hope you can achieve what he gave up on!
Not sure he gave up or was paid to stop ;)
i wish he made it open source or something if he gave up anyway
He hasn't given up on the game, which name is Sunheart, by the way.
If voxels keep getting tinier each day eventually they'd be so small taht they could replicate reality
integration
It's called Nanite.
@@2.Plus.2.Equals.5 Yea but the thing with nanite and other polygonal things in 3D is that it cant properly Replicate Volume, Like in voxel games you can dig in a mountain and you can find more mountain under that mountain, unlike most polygonal games I've seen
@@lelordiii8702 still a far cry from much more challenging tasks like a water (ocean, waterfall, river..) and fog (ground volumetric fog, godrays thru clouds, moving headlights thru smoke...) for voxel engines.
This looks great and i would have never guessed that you can do this and have it run that smoothly
Oh, this is so wonderful, I love that textured look everything has.
at 480p you cant even tell that you are looking at voxels! Honestly, I think this is a promising approach at rendering 3D geometry. Maybe one day we will make voxels the size of molecules to build our virtual realms out of.
at 144p you cant even tell what your looking at!
I wonder if it would look even better on a crtv
Instead of making voxels the size of molecules, could you make them the size of pixels on your display? Then increase or decrease the detail density of how precisely any given object is rendered based on the distance from the camera. I suspect that real time transformations like that would be quite taxing to calculate though.
@@Moshugaani I guess that's LOD for voxels, but for every voxel to be the size of a pixel you'd need to have some not-voxel representation of the scene to make it from (maybe polygons lol)
@@Moshugaani That's what Atomontage's engine does. But they moved away from games to more industrial applications.
video game consoles stole voxels from us .
Voxels is the way to render
Uhm, I don't know really. Everything in this video is opaque, no dynamic elements, no visual effects, no physics and/or destruction. I think that right now it's not clear if voxels are superior to polygons.
@@user-ix6xw8ww6uAre voxels superior to polygons? These are completely different things, obviously, voxels are a 3D array of physical objects, and polygons are just flat cardboard decorations
@@user-ix6xw8ww6u voxels consist of polygons and can have any kind of shaders applied just like any polygon, the same way a blocky game like Minecraft has PBR shaders.
how you render voxels to screen is entirely up to you, it's just in this video there's only diffuse lighting, because dev wants retro game aesthetic.
@@Deniil2000 There is no way he's rendering that with rasterization. I'm guessing it's a renderer similar to Teardown that does raytracing but massively optimizing for voxels. I don't know what the technique is called, but Unreal 4 used Voxel Cone Tracing for GI back in the day so it's a proven and fast technology. Not all raytraced graphics look like "RTX"
@@SomeRandomPiggo There is a link to a blog post with details in the description. It is rasterized! It is also just traditional meshes with displacement mapping that is processed to look like voxels.
The look of it is fantastic. Love that retro vibe and yet, very modern with all the geometry details. Very promising. 🙂
Wow this is so cool! Love it!!
This looks absolutely amazing!
this is very cool 👍
Love to see it with lighting/normals 🤞
this is really dope brotha, I'd love to see some characters in this style/environment
This could really shine with more detailed lighting, but I cannot imagine the work required for that. Always great to see something outside the box.
Thats a REALLY cool visual style wow
Excellent work, friend, this is very impressive.
Looks amazing, can't wait to see where this goes
I hope you know you have huge potential here, keep working!!
This is really cool looking!
This is strangely satisfying.
Is very good!
that looks fantastic, good job mate
This is some serious next level thing man. The universe could be rendered in your engine. Entirely.
This looks fantastic. I absolutely love voxel graphics, and wish they were used more.
this has a really fantastic look to it. great retro modern mix
This is so cool! I hope we end up seeing this system used in more places.
I just love voxel graphics. Its so nice and organic looking even if you can see the pixels.
love it - keep up the good work!
This looks so great! 👍
What a lovely crispy look this has. I hope, you will be able to use it in some kind of indie project.
Amazing project 👍 subbed to watch your progress
excellent! This is going to be a real success mate.
this is very pretty. ever i saw ken silverman's work on voxel rendering, i have been looking forward to the resurrection of the aesthetic in a more practical form. great work.
I love this aesthetic! I'll be keeping tabs on your success with great interest, lol.
Looks really great!! Very good job!!
this looks amazing. always loved the look of voxel game wish more games used them.
My gosh, this looks incredible! Now I really want to see a remake of Doom or Dungeon Master in this style!
Incredible! This would look excellent in my early 2000s modern-retro RPG I'm working on
This is incredible. Something about this feels so much more tangible, every bit of the environment is made of a piece of a greater whole. It feels more real, even while looking less realistic
I couldn't help but want an Ultima Underworld remake after watching this. Your intended goal for the style was definitely met -- well done!
yoooo this is sick man, good job
The resulting look is so incredibly cool
Stunning! Well done!
Stunning work! I would love this tech for game development
This is actually amazing and has insane potential
There is something pleasing to see about those pixel texture
Iam impressed on how smooth you are able to move. This must take tons of computational power
This is insane, I love the amount of actual 3D detail going on with apparently more than correct pefromance
This looks fantastic! Well done!
As someone that doesn't like the look of most voxel games, this looks breath-taking. Perfectly captures feelings of nostalgia as if this fell out of some parallel universe where games just kept building off of 90's FPS. I'll be sad if nothing comes of all this effort, but it can easily stand on its own as a beautiful work of art.
Dude, this is amazing. Actually it feels like future tech that we should have years ago. Thanks for doing this!!!❤
This is an absolutely gorgeous effect.
That looks amazing!
This looks incredible!
This looks very cool. It looks modern, but old-school at the same time. It gives me vibes of Hexen, or Heretic with all those rocky walls. Love it