Boxes to Voxels to Boxes

MagicaVoxel is an incredibly fun and popular voxel editor. It allows you to recreate that pristine volumetric 8bit look that never was, but we all remember so fondly. We are often questioned whether we could support that kind of look in Voxel Farm scenes, so the team quickly wrote an importer for MagicaVoxel models:

The following video shows the experience, from importing MagicaVoxel models to running a full environment inside Unreal Engine 4:


As you can see from the video, once we began importing these models into the scenes, we figured out it would be nice if the entire world was blocky too. This was now outside MagicaVoxel's realm, but it turned out quite simple to switch off the smooth surfaces in Voxel Farm and make it all look blocky.

A very interesting turn was how to handle the LOD. As I was posting work-in-progress images of this on Twitter I got some interesting feedback. Jens Blomquist, who wrote Blockscape, mentioned he chose not to use LODs in his block game since the larger blocks in the distance produced confusing distance cues. What he meant can be clearly seen in the following image:

Here the boxes in area A should be smaller than boxes in area B.

Paniq (Leonard Ritter) suggested an interesting experiment: What if we used smooth surfaces for distant LODs but keep blocks for near range? It did not turn out well, but it was worth a try:

I found another illusion-based trick that did introduce some improvements: Decrease LOD near player (+2), increase LOD (-2) for buildings, leave far away LOD unchanged (+0). Thanks to the adaptive scene density, the architecture did not need to be degraded so it could remain at the best LOD possible as well:

Then I realized all these were solutions to a problem we should not have in the first place. We were equating voxels to boxes and that was wrong. Instead, we should be using the variable-sized voxels to encode constant-sized boxes. Unfortunately, I did not get to test that theory because lunch was served. When I was done it was time to go back to non-boxy things. Maybe some day in the near future...