New Voxel Engine Reveal - Crystal Islands Experiment

Follow me on Twitter for more updates: This scene is composed entirely of voxels. What started as an innocent attempt at increasing the view distance evolved into a 4 month quest to achieve not only that, but rewrite a brand new voxel engine from the ground up that would feature: - An 8x (512 cubic) detail increase with animation support, high compression rates, and per-voxel material attributes - Fast collision detection that physics and player walking will utilize - Full fracture and mutation of objects - Improved path traced global illumination that features 5 bounces from the sun, atmosphere and all emissive objects - A powerful asset pipeline that can utilize Quixel Megascans, PlantFactory/PlantCatalog’s detailed vegetation, and other highly detailed polygon models after being converted and processed into voxels (all 3 seen in this video) - Ray-traced world generation that could easily place trees, grass, flowers, and other assets (eg. crystals) in designated areas: eg. in sunlight, on cave walls, in big open areas, and so on - A 10x speedup in rendering over the previous engine Most of these features are showcased in the video. Of course, there are some kinks to work out, like you can see object intersections occurring or being placed in odd places, and the path traced denoiser is lacking a spatial filter, but I got too excited with how this looks that I couldn’t wait any longer to share. The effective world size here is 256K^3 and the island is generated once upon startup (like Terraria for instance), which takes about a minute. Things won’t look this chaotic in whatever the final version is, as it’s more a feature test than anything else. To those who prefer the charm of the old engine, there is a low-detail mode that will be toggleable. More likely than not, this level of detail will be reserved for RTX graphics cards, and the low-detail mode will be the fall back for older ones. I don’t have exact spec predictions yet, because there are so many tweaks to be made like level-of-detail threshold, lighting refresh rates, and the world size itself, so general performance requirements remain to be outlined. Stay tuned for more updates, as in the future we’ll soon see that this world is dynamic and not just there to be looked at. Rigid body physics will make a return, so will fluid dynamics eventually, and really everything seen here is only the beginning. Thank you to everyone who supports this project, and doesn’t leave mean comments calling out how I keep saying the next video will be the official announcement. Soon(tm) ;)