This was made by importing an image as heightmap with quantized colour in Avoyd to make a 1 height colour layer from the image, then exporting the materials so I could search/replace the material parameters to make them all transparent emissives. Then I pasted the aurora above the imported MC map.
I might try blurring the aurora image later so that the quantization on import to voxels causes less noise.
Sign text will now finally be shown on the sign. Over 60,000 glyphs are supported. A new pole sign can stand on the ground, hang from the ceiling or a wall.
There's also a spyglass item, and moon phases have been added.
Quick test render of clouds imported from https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57747/blue-marble-clouds (I used the 21600x21600 png) as a heightmap with height 64, using the Cloud: white heavy material. Rendered from above in Avoyd Voxel Editor.
Useful for creating skies for renders, image use policy on their site is 'freely available for re-publication or re-use, including commercial purposes'.
Playing with the water transparency revealed a bug in the CPU rendering of surfaces inside transparent materials.
Fixed in #Avoyd beta 0.21.0.871 https://www.enkisoftware.com/products
Thanks everyone for your feedback. Most answers congregated around an Absorption Length = 8 so we'll change the default Minecraft water and flowing_water to that in the next full release of Avoyd.
For any game devs or voxel software devs out there, what particular reasons are there for often opting for larger cubes for voxels?
My rough understanding (as I've found it tricky to find more accessible technical info on voxels), is that they don't necessarily even have to be cubes at all.
Setting that aside though, I'm mainly interested in the scaling question, as I know smaller cubes can & have been used occasionally.
@gmr_leon
Short answer: bigger voxels = fewer voxels = faster
I've been doing some octree terrain stuff (so voxel adjacent) and been trying to strike a balance between fidelity and speed.
Representing a 10x10x10 volume with voxels 1 unit big takes 1000 voxels. Halve the size of the voxels and you now need 8000 voxels. Halve it again and you need 64000.
There are ways to do things more efficiently but you increase the amount of work/data exponentially when using smaller voxels.
@beeoproblem Hmm, that's what I suspected may be a primary factor. It makes me even more curious how games like 3D Dot Game Heroes and Lego Worlds tackled this challenge.
Will have to try to run some searches for any sort of dev talks their teams may have given