Transparent ice would be cool, also maybe more of a light coloured dirt, and a grey dirt. More grass and sand features would be great too.
Why not have another âvoxel propertyâ (like water direction etc) thatâs related to the materialâs color?
Have it be (127,127,127) by default, which would make the material look like it is now.
If you change the color of a voxel, the materialâs color in that voxel changes too.
That would suddenly âadd more materialsâ, as coloring current materials opens up a lot of possibilities.
We could also have different colored grass with smooth transitioning using this.
Itâs not an idea that can implement on a week, but it would be very nice and open up a lot of new terrain stuff.
I can imagine thatâs quite a heavy data load if you have millions of voxels (24 bits times millions of voxels is easily tens of MBs of extra data), and if there are any rendering optimizations that assume the colors of certain groups of voxels are the same, that code has to be deoptimized.
ROBLOX has a nice method of âgroupingâ lots of cells with the same material.
The same can be done with colors, so the data load is a lot less.
(Especially if almost everything is the same color)
(Not to mention you donât really need to transport the default color)
That is currently optimized for the limited set of terrain materials that are available, no color is being sent right now. It would probably require a lot of engineering work on the data format and whatnot to also transfer the color and take this into account when rendering is performed. If you have differently colored parts with the same texture, you need to calculate the resulting textures for each color in the map. Thereâs no way it wouldnât impact performance.
How does CellDirection work with the new terrain? Is it still being used?
Random idea, what if water direction was stored as pressures/densities and water would flow from points of high pressure to points of low pressure, and the acceleration of the water graphics would be derived from the pressures, as well as world gravity. This would possibly make the âvoxel propertyâ take up less space than a 3D vector.
Maybe that âvoxel propertyâ could be applied to the orientation of brick and some of the stone paths @woot3 suggested.
Iâm getting a little carried away lol, eventually weâll need good rivers and waterfalls, and blocky textures arenât too useful unless we can control their direction somehow.
Nope
Not terrible but not awesome⌠some colors work in really strange ways (which means I should work on the color mixing formula more). No promises thus far
Youâre doing gods work
Howâs the api looking so far? Iâd understand if nothing is final. Just curious
I assume those are new materials, not the âcolor the voxelâ-thing?
I like the properties you showed there, looks promising and fun.
I think thatâs just grass material coloured differently, not ~5 separate materials.
Separate the smooth water from the solid terrain ?
IDK maybe two different terrain / layer.
So the water border when it touches the solid terrain could be clean, and the water shore must be better !
Ideally terrain wouldnât be a singleton, and youâd be able to move them around like models. One day maybe the water material will work for parts
If these experiments end up in shipping something then I think there would be another optional 3D array for WriteVoxels (and another return value for ReadVoxels) with BrickColor as the data type. Probably every material would have a âdefaultâ color for compatibility with existing content and WriteVoxels calls that donât specify color array.
Yeah, that would be cool. Itâs unfortunate that we ended up with a singleton not so easy to change now.
Can we get some sort of metal material that places like brick and wood planks? It could look a bit crumpled and rusted when blended with other things like grass, but in relatively decent shape by itself.
Something like this:
Any updates on this?
We have art for new materials pretty much finalized, working on integrating it into production builds.