voxelTerrain

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Source
• About
• Showcase
• Examples
• Compilation
  • Tested compilers
  • Precompiled binaries
  • Dependencies
  • Optional dependencies

Introduction

Version

1.3

Author

Markus Lanner

Source

The full source is available at github.

About

The voxelTerrain library implements an iso surface of voxel. Several extras, like serialization, synchronisation to file/network/database, renderer, ogre3d-wrapper, bullet-physics-wrapper and more got implemented too. We focus on an easy-to-use, very fast, editable terrain. For a highly speed-optimized and threadable solution marching cubes and for closing the gaps between two different level-of-details, transvoxel get used. It's easy to implement your own surface generation by simply implementing your own version of voxel::tile::accessor and voxel::tile::surface. This library is divided in several parts:

• The namespace voxel::tile::container::* contains the actual voxels in form of arrays of a constant size.
• The namespace voxel::simple::* contains tiles. For memory effectiveness these classes only save tiles that contain useable content. These classes represent one level-of-detail. If you don't need a terrain for your project use these classes for your voxel. The classes synchronize with each other:
  • blub::procedural::voxel::simple::container holds the actual voxel.
  • blub::procedural::voxel::simple::accessor copies the voxel from the container and produces highly-optimized arrays for the marching cubes and transvoxel algorithm.
  • blub::procedural::voxel::simple::surface takes the voxel stored in the accessor and calculates the iso-surface.
  • blub::procedural::voxel::simple::renderer takes vertices and indices stored in the surface. Updates when to render which tile and sets which lod-crack to close.

These classes dispatch all work on threads, so every tile gets calculated by one thread, but the tiles get calculated asynchronous/parallel. The speedup is nearly the amount of threads.

• The namespace blub::procedural::voxel::terrain::* contains a variable amount of voxel::simple:: classes and produces an easy to use terrain.
• The namespace blub::procedural::voxel::edit::* contains modifiers to the terrain. To implement your own modifier derive voxel::edit::base.

Checkout the Examples to get yourself started.

A terrain with disabled transvoxel. The cracks are a result of tiles with different detail

Showcase

The videos show large terrains. Please note that the lags only occur because of the recording software.

Shows the results of mesh-to-voxel. The white mesh is the mesh that got converted.

Uses a custom voxel-type. Every voxel saves additionally a colour which gets mapped to the generated vertices.

Shows a simplex-noise generated terrain with 3 level of detail.

Examples

• primitives.cpp shows you how convert simple shapes to voxel and render them. If you are new to this library, start here.
• mesh.cpp shows you how to convert a scene loaded by collada to voxel and render it.
• noise.cpp uses the simplex noise to create a random voxel-terrain.

Compilation

Use cmake to compile the library.

Tested compilers

• gcc 4.8 4.9
• mingw 4.8
• clang 3.4 3.5
• Visual Studio 2012 (msvc11)

The library uses several C++11 features like nullptr, strongly typed enumerations, lambda and more. So ensure you got an up-to-date compiler.

Precompiled binaries

There are precompiled binaries for Visual Studio 2012 (msvc11) available at github.

Dependencies

The only dependency mandatory is boost. Used get boost::bind, boost::asio (used for dispatching work and synchronizing threads - Lock-free implementation), boost::date_time, boost::chrono, boost::filesystem, boost::thread, boost::function, boost::log, boost::geometry and boost::signals2.

Optional dependencies

• For mesh to voxel collada gets used.
• The examples use ogre3d for 3d-rendering and OIS for input handling.
• If you'd like to serialize, check out boost::serialization.