Animated Forest | Wonderland: A Raytracing Voxel Engine | Dev Footage
This is some state of working on the whole scene animation. This is something visually near than what was intended when I start working on this project. The later work needs a lot to be rewritten and should take much time on development, so I am showing the results now.
There are some real-time recorded footages: it is about 30 FPS on the most huge scene in Full HD on Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti (the video is upconverted to 4K to prevent YouTube to reduce quality). About 4 GiB GPU memory and 2 GiB RAM are used.
To dive into the atmosphere deeper, I even blown dust off my eight-string Jackson (good old times) to make some music.
What we have here:
1. 6 billion voxels procedurally generated scene with 16 million of viewable ones loaded to GPU and animated each frame. All the voxels have its own attributes (including wind influence factor used in vector field wind animation).
2. Some improvements applied to tree generation algorithm from my previous raycasting version of the project ( • Wonderland: A Raycasting Voxel Engine | De... ). Thanks my friend Evgenij Talickij for some useful notices on tree growing.
3. Ray traced sky light with up to 3 bounces albedo/reflectance model. Bounce count depends on ray path length.
4. Post-effects pipeline with vignette and bloom implemented.
Some thoughts about the future of the current implementation. It is too wasteful not to store voxels in some ‘smart’ container (I mean something like octree or other compressed data representation). But it is too expensive in terms of performance to update that container. Not sure about the tracing performance in comparison because RTX is doing wonders even on AABBs. So, if I could find a way to update octree efficiently (each frame), maybe it makes sense to give a try to implement some custom octree intersection raytracing model. If not, for now I do not know how not to use raw data in such huge simulations.