Texture Grain

So far we have been using triplanar mapping for texturing voxels. This is good enough for terrain but does not look right every time for man-made structures. With triplanar mapping, textures are always aligned to the universal coordinate planes. If you are building features at an angle, the texture orientation ignores that and continues to follow the universal grid. That has been a thorny problem for all voxel creators and enthusiasts out there.

It does not have to be like that anymore. Take a look at this previously impossible structure:

It is two wooden beams going at an angle. The texture grain properly follows the line direction. 

It is not only about lines, this can be applied to any tool. In the following video you can see how curves also preserve the texture grain:

This new ability is a nice side effect of including UV mapping information in voxels. This is no different than the zebras and leopards we stamped into the world in earlier videos, in this case the tool comes up with the UV mapping information on-the-fly.

UV mapped voxels are not yet released in Voxel Farm, it is just now we got to work on the tools so they take full advantage of them, but it really looks to me this will take our engine to a whole new level.