Dont forget you still have a depth buffer! You can do polygons that are obscured by depth if you need to

What you're doing on voxels is called ray marching, advancing the ray in steps until it hits something. Pretty cool way to render octrees or signed distance functions. Also reflection/refraction shows its glory if you add Fresnel and total internal reflection. Without it, it's going to look crappy no matter what you do with it.

*@MaxMakesGames* 9:00 Optimization suggestion, if you could somehow add a bit to each voxel that indicates if the entire voxel is only air, then you can cancel that search MUCH sooner & move onto looking into the next neighboring voxel. In that way you might be able to skip through the first eg: 3 "super clusters", then only start searching inside the clusters when you reach an edge, and all it costs is like +1 byte (ideally 1 bit, but computers only work in bytes, maybe you can use the remaining 7 bits for other data?) of storage per octree "container"

Nice job on the raytracing! It was especially cool to see the water reflections and such at the end. It was also cool to hear you got the FPS pretty stable, similar to the last video

This is really cool. Im excited to see how it looks gene you’re able to incorporate everything back in. The glass refraction is sick.

A bit strange that the destruction code is slower now that you aren't modifying a mesh, is the world generation slow now as well? Also I thought you taking advantage of spatial locality in the octree structure was pretty smart, good job!

Very cool! I've been thinking about doing this as well. One thing I thought a lot about is how the raytracing part would actually work. There are basically 3 types of raytracing that I know of: - First, is the ray stepping which is what you did. - Next is ray marching, which is similar, but instead of stepping one unit every iteration, you step the most amount you can without hitting something for sure. There are many great videos on ray marching and SDFs and I recommend checking it out. - The last one is what I encourage you to look into the most, which I call ray calculating where you do some math to see if the ray hit a cube in a single step! "The Cherno" made a very good explanation on the math behind it, so check it out if you're interested! What's different about ray calculating is that you'd have to check every single voxel to check if the ray hit it, BUT I've been also thinking about octrees, and you can check if the ray hit (or is inside) the highest parent first, if it does then check it's children for the same, then those's children and so on and so on. By the end, you should have only a couple of possible voxels left, all on the ray, just at different distances. Then you can just iterate through those and get the closest. It might not be faster than ray marching, but I personally think it would. I hope my explanation was understandable... Good luck whatever you choose!

This is really cool! If you're struggling with performance a really good optimisation is something called progressive rendering. Its where you render only a quarter of the frame but accumulate frames over time. So that you can render it at 960x540 instead of 1920x1080 with the trade off that there will be a bit of motion blur

If you take a look at how the "multiple frames averaging" works in big budget games with ray tracing, they use things like denoisers, and temporal reprojection. This makes it possible to have complex ray tracing effects and even path tracing in real time, on decent quality. In essence, when the camera moves, you dont drop the result of the previous frame but try to transform it in a way that it fits the new picture. There will be some disocclusion and new things coming in on the edges of the screen, and you only start from scratch on those pixels. Also, instead of starting from scratch, you could render basic rasterized lighting on those pixels, and fill it in with ray traced effects over the next few frames. Denoisers also works in a temporal manner. This results in a "lazy" update but there won't be popping of ray tracing effects and such. Its more like a smooth progression.

5:09 Blud accidentally recreated 4D Miner 💀

There are ways around mesh refresh lag, like having double/tripple buffered mesh thats allow to update changes without halting main thread, but tbh voxels are acually well suited for ray tracing

Good stuff Max! The visualizations of orthographic versus perspective projection were very helpful. Since you're using Bevy now, are you using WGPU and WGSL? What do you think of the API, or are you still working in GLSL?

NICE BROTHER

Awesome work! Are you using hardware accelerated RT or software?

with my bevy raytracer, i just copy the camera matrix from the camera3d and pass it in a uniform buffer. works great. no need to touch any matrix math

if you plan to use this in a future game and need music for it, hit me up.

Great results! I'd like to know one thing. How do you load/unload the world on the GPU using an octree? I'm also making a voxel game and using a chunk system, so loading chunks into SSBO is easy. But it’s not very clear about the octree

Are you planning on implementing anti-aliasing with the new raytracing renderer?

Wow! I'm working on a voxel engine right now as well. This seems incredible! Is this effectively occlusion culling?

Thats really cool ! Whats ur GPU ?

oh ton goes brrr il était chelou xD

*@MaxMakesGames* Congratulations! You actually achieved what the YT channel *Euclideon* (original moves deleted, unfortunately) could not, using an octree + ray-tracer & voxels is a really smart combination! See Reply for link (in case YT is stupid & auto-deletes the comment).

Damn I'm making the same thing in webgl page, and I'm stuck at the same issue you have at 4:40 . Do you still remember how you fixed it?

You should test it on a potato spec pc to see how it runs

hi bro

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Alr

Where and when can I download this.

I don't think what you are doing is ray-tracing, I think it is called path-tracing.

Why not ray marching? All your geometry are squares, so it should be simple