[HN Gopher] Voxel Displacement Renderer - Modernizing the Retro ...
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       Voxel Displacement Renderer - Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic
        
       Author : greeniskool
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2024-05-23 20:41 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.danielschroeder.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.danielschroeder.me)
        
       | klaussilveira wrote:
       | This is great. Granted, it would only work for very specific art
       | styles and even environments. Not sure that any hard-surface
       | would look good with it. But organic surfaces end up looking
       | pretty nice.
       | 
       | Have you considered destructability of surfaces? Or, even better,
       | subsurfaces? Dirt, which can be swep, showing with a level of
       | rock below. Breakable wood.
        
         | erwincoumans wrote:
         | He mentioned the game Teardown, that allows destruction and
         | physics on its voxels.
        
       | whizzter wrote:
       | HN post and discussions from yesterday
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40464558
        
       | sydd wrote:
       | I'm kinda sad that the whole voxel technology could not become
       | mainstream. There were some really ambitious projects started in
       | the 2010s like Voxel farm https://www.voxelfarm.com And people
       | were speculating that the current technology of rendering
       | triangles will be obsolete because voxels represent reality
       | better. I'm a bit sad that we did not see the breakthrough, it
       | would have been as large as the introduction of the GPU to
       | accelerate rendering
        
         | erwincoumans wrote:
         | Not mainstream but the game Teardown uses voxels, rendered on
         | gpu, first screenspace , later voxel
         | space:https://blog.voxagon.se/2018/10/17/from-screen-space-to-
         | voxe... More recently Voxlands also renders its voxels entirely
         | in gpu shaders using raytracing, beautiful:
         | https://store.steampowered.com/app/2283580/Voxlands
        
       | dahart wrote:
       | This looks really neat, but I'm very confused on what it meant by
       | "voxels" in the demo itself. Minecraft makes sense, I'm just not
       | seeing where there are "voxels" in the author's engine... it
       | looks very much like (and is described explicitly as) low poly
       | meshes with displacement mapping. Where is the voxel grid?
        
         | nuancebydefault wrote:
         | A voxel is a little cube that is small enough to be confused
         | with a pixel, from a distance.
        
           | dahart wrote:
           | Ah yes I see it now. I had to really zoom in on the stills in
           | the article. The tiny solid color bricks are voxels-- most
           | places it looks like low res texture, you can only see the
           | little cubes in a few spots. Very interesting, seems
           | complicated and impressive to voxelize displaced meshes like
           | this.
        
             | nuancebydefault wrote:
             | The nice thing about voxels is that it gives this nice
             | retro look without feeling low quality.
        
         | GuB-42 wrote:
         | I see it more like the voxels in the game "Comanche". So, a
         | height map.
         | 
         | Voxel means "volume element", like a pixel means "picture
         | element". A "pixel" in a height map is not an element of a
         | picture but an element of a volume, so, a voxel.
        
       | nine_k wrote:
       | This is wonderful; please develop this further, and use in an
       | actual game!
       | 
       | I'm very much longing for game graphics being _not_ movie-like. I
       | want to feel _inside a game_ , which has its internal logic and
       | aesthetics, but which is not trying to copy the real world to the
       | very minute detail. The movie-like quality breaks down due to
       | various limitations, and we end up in the uncanny valley, where
       | the world looks real but feels like a puppet show.
       | 
       | What made Doom great was not only its gameplay and art, but also
       | its kinda realistic but not realistic light and animation. What
       | made Monument Valley great was exactly the departure from the
       | real-life geometry The in-your-face pixelization / voxelization
       | of Minecraft not only did not repel the kids who never saw 8-bit
       | games, but became iconic.
       | 
       | What sets out the voxel displacement rendering for me is the
       | departure from flat and glossy low-poly surfaces and edges (which
       | the author pays special attention to). Real-world textures are
       | rarely glossy, and edges are rarely sharp. But modeling it the
       | way it's done in some modern games is apparently crazy expensive
       | and requires colossal graphical assets, such that are out of
       | reach of a typical modder. The author's approach achieves the
       | feeling of a nice palpable texture with low-poly geometry and
       | low-res textures; it's very promising.
        
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