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Voxel Displacement Renderer – Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic
This is the first of two posts about a renderer I have been developing, focusing on what I've built and how it works. The second post discusses why I've built it and my plans for the future. I've been developing a custom real-time renderer which uses very small voxels to produce a distinctive visual style [...]
By approaching the problem of rendering voxels in an unusual way, I’m able to produce these visuals from conventional art assets — low-poly triangle meshes and textures — that are familiar and efficient to create. For my purposes, I wanted to use conventional low-poly meshes to model environments like those of classic 3D games, apply displacement maps to define voxel-scale surface details, and render a result that truly looks like it was built from voxels. The brown stone arches are created as triangle meshes and then displaced, but the results look like they are assembled from voxels, even along the edges of the original mesh.Solving this problem was very, very hard, and involved building a lot of custom machinery.
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