Concept

This was a fun side-project to explore the creation of meshes using the marching cubes algorithm in a compute shader, I originally made it to run on the CPU and then ported it to the GPU to compare the results (with generation being far faster as expected).

I then created a 3D noise generator alongside a ramp pass to create the mountainous formations, with a few different options to dictate the appearance of the map.

I also added a LOD feature to the generation to allow for the meshes to be rendered at different detail levels the further the camera moved from the map tile segments.

I think that matching cubes could be interesting to implement in a game in the future, for instance a game like Astroneer takes advantage of the wacky generation and tile destructionvof matching cubes in an interesting way.

Features

• Optimised weighted marching cubes algorithm
• GPU compute shaders
• Terrain generation
• Chunk based tiles
• LOD tiles
• Terrain deformation tools

Footage

Project Details

Date: Jan 1, 2020

Tagged: Unity, Shaders