u/OneTrueRou

This week I spent a great deal of time working to port the model into discrete voxels. I wanted the ability to generate variation in foliage without the manual authorship of thousands of trees of the same type, so I built a system to generate the variations based on random rotations and templates. Here are a few images showing the progression of the foliage. The first is the final result, the second image is the underlying collision mask, the third image is the mesh as shown in my editor I built, and the last is the skeleton of the tree.

There are a few cool features of this system, the first is that trees can be destroyed at a per-branch level. The second is that the destruction of the tree cascades through the voxels, so chopping the tree at the trunk destroys the whole tree. I'm really happy with this result, and although I need to work on the mesh geometry for the trees to work better with my style, I'm very pleased with the progress.

This is the last tree post for a bit - I promise, I don't want to overwhelm the sub with tree posts 👀

I am building a procedural voxel world and have had difficulties generating different variations of features in a simple way - additionally I wanted to build my engine with a "modder" first approach that really allows my eventual player base to build and modify the world easily. This is a bevy-built procedural foliage system - it builds skeletons and variations of the same like parent plant, this will be able to be imported and trivially represented in-engine via voxels.

Here are three images of different pine-tree types made in this system - each type can generate an infinite variation set that mimics the parent look and feel. The list image is an example of a pine variation which adds imperfections so that the geometry is not so "perfect".

I am unreasonably happy with this result, and can't wait to see the types of trees people make in their worlds!

[EDIT] Reddit has compressed the images to heck, here are some uncompressed versions if anyone is interested... Pine Tree, Deciduous

Lighting and textures still need a bit of work - but I am super happy with this voxel system. This was the first use of the feature generation and showcases some of the unique building mechanics in the voxel world which allows right angles and a clear visual language for organic vs artificial structures.

Render distance is 10km at 265FPS.

[Edit]
I wanted to share a bit about how I did what I did - there is no magic, just some really clever optimizations... The biggest thing that allowed for these distances is a LOD system - basically the system splits the world into different sized hexagonal grids, one for each LOD. The hexagons in the front of the player are about (0.5mx0.25m) in size, but the ones in the back are much larger. For cube voxels, you could probably achieve this with a an octree, but for hexels I had to design a fully custom system.

The terrain and rivers are both procedurally generated - this effect was achieved with no particle simulation and can be generated in deterministically in real time. Both of these techniques can be used in an infinite world - the entire world state is not required to achieve this effect.