* Also compatible with Unity 6! *

What is Voxel Play 3?

Voxel Play 3 is a fast voxel engine plus a collection of tools to speed up your game development. It leverages highly optimized code, including GPU instancing, compute buffers and texture arrays, to generate beautiful, rich, vast infinite worlds which can be customized, manipulated and destroyed in many ways.

Major new features included in Voxel Play 3:

- New world Editor tools that work in SceneView with undo/redo support

- New model definition creation workflow through the world editor tools

- Microvoxels support with customizable size (2, 4, 8 or 16 subdivisions)

- Voxel definitions now can store microvoxels (a preview is shown in inspector)

- New savegame format that includes microvoxels data and incremental region saving

- Biomes now support additional top and dirt voxels as well as lake bed voxels

- Ability to render far chunks using a raymarch method

- Far chunks water shader with shadow and reflections support

- SRP batcher optimizations for minimal drawcalls

Check the full list of changes here.

Voxel Play is compatible with Built-In and URP (Universal Rendering Pipeline). Includes specific optimizations for URP such as better lighting with full support of directional, point and spot lights with shadows (in built-in pipeline, spot lights are not supported).

Voxel Play also includes high quality under water effects (seamless transition from air to underwater, caustics, volumetric underwater fog) compatible with built-in and URP.

Playable demos: Windows | Mac

Voxel Play provides an integrated solution for sky, terrain, water, vegetation, physics, world interaction, UI, inventory and more.

*** Current Features ***

The goal for Voxel Play is to provide an easy to use but powerful and extensible rule-based voxel engine that fills the open spaces of your world while it allows you to edit any number of areas.

Template based

- Voxel Play works with Scriptable Objects to create world, biomes, voxels and model definitions. Each definition is a set of generation rules plus textures and sounds: a world is composed of several biomes which model the type and shape of terrain as well as the vegetation (bushes, trees, ...).

- Define any number of worlds, biomes, models and voxels within the Unity Editor and model your world in interactive mode at runtime using the same interface (anything you modify gets saved).

- Activate the Constructor: a special area where you can define custom, reusable models (like trees or buildings) and stamp them massively according to biome rules.

Extensible

- Comprehensive set of runtime events (ie. OnChunkBeforeCreate).

- Allows custom terrain generators.

- Plugable detail generators. Develop your own spawner class or reuse the provided examples, and add them to the world generator in the inspector.

- Full C# and shader source code included.

Flexible

GPU instancing, compute buffers and other advanced rendering features are automatically disabled if the platform does not support them.

Ready to Use with Demo Scenes

Voxel Play comes with 5 demo scenes including lot of textures, sounds and predefined biomes and voxels you can use in your project.

Core Features

- Performance. Uses advanced techniques like hidden face removal, greedy meshing, GPU instancing, SRP batcher optimizations, compute buffers and linearized, cached-friendly data structures, pooling and others to provide best performance.

- Multi-threading support.

- Robust. 64-bit internals with support for worlds up to 1.000.000 m in size.

- Origin shift support. Solves rendering problems in large worlds.

- Smart voxel & chunk octree-based culling system for optimized chunk generation & voxel count.

- MicroVoxels support. Add small voxels to create any kind of intrincated details or shapes or remove parts of bigger voxels.

- Customizable chunk pool system.

- Automatic NavMesh generation.

- Greedy meshing (greatly reduces vertex count for colliders, NavMesh and other voxel types, like clouds).

- Standard Unity collider system support

- In-editor rendering capability. See the world inside the SceneView at design time.

- Fast ray-cast system.

- Destructible environment.

- Voxel hit and destruction sounds per type

- Voxel damage cracks.

- Voxel damage particles with object pooling.

- Voxel custom footfalls.

- Custom-shape voxels (eg. half-blocks).

- Native voxel rotation.

- Dynamic voxels (apply transforms).

- Collapsing structures.

- Connected textures.

- Connected voxels.

- Texture variations.

- Animated textures.

- Customizable outline effect integrated in shader.

- Customizable chunk size (16 or 32).

Powerful Rendering Features

- Far Chunks rendering (ability to fill the view to the horizon with terrain with a raymarch technique that mimics the look of the terrain voxels).

- Smooth Lighting (light spread / voxelized Global Illumination)

- PBR (Physically Based Rendering) support including optional per-voxel normal, height, metallic, smoothness, occlusion, opacity and emission maps. Uses Cook-Torrance BRDF lighting model.

- Supports Reflection Probes in PBR mode.

- POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping) using Relief Mapping technique.

- Integrated Ambient Occlusion.

- Emission / Glow effects

- Torch lights and point light support with blinking effect.

- High-performance lighting system.

- Color-based, transparent, cutout, textured and custom vegetation and water voxel rendering variants.

- Standard Unity shadows support.

- Colored shadows support.

- GPU instanced custom voxels with compute buffers option.

- VR compatible (multi-pass, Single Pass Stereo and Single Pass Instanced).

Terrain Features

- Multi-step flexible generator: allows you to combine different heightmaps and operations producing rich and varied geography including mountains, valleys, rivers, islands, beaches, canyons, plateau, ... 20 available operation types (and more to come) to play with.

- Procedural voxel terrain generated automatically at runtime on demand.

- Infinite variations based on seed.

- Half voxels option to produce smoother terrains.

- Unity terrain/SpeedTree/vegetation system to Voxel Play Environment converter. Convert your existing terrain to a voxel scene with a couple of clicks!

- Optionally provide your own voxels, modify the generated chunks before they're rendered or even plug-in your own terrain generator based on a given template.

- Biome support (grassland, desert, forest, rainforest, tundra, taiga, snow, beach, shrubland and bare) with customizable voxels for surface and underground, vegetation, trees, underwater, ...

- Biome map explorer window. Visualize biome distribution on any area in the world.

- Cave system. A default cave generator is provided in the demo world. Modify it or add different cave system generators to create compelling underworlds.

- Village/buildings system. A default building spawner is provided which you can extend with your own village requirements.

- Curved effect. One click and get a curved environment with custom curve intensity. Note: this option does not generate fully spherical worlds but produces a curved effect over infinite terrain giving the impression of a spherical world.

Integrated World Editor in SceneView

- Similar to Unity terrain tools, Voxel Play 3 includes an array of in-editor tools to interactively model and sculpt the generated world.

Water System

- Voxelized water system with no redundant face overlap.

- Advanced flooding system.

- Procedural, variable-height water voxels with slope and flow animation.

- Seamless camera transition from air to underwater.

- Underwater effects: caustics and volumetric underwater fog.

Vegetation

- Voxel style, animated grass and trees per biome.

- Can use custom prefabs for vegetation and trees.

Sky system

- Integrated fog with sky blending.

- Custom voxelized skybox.

- Day/night cycle, blinking stars and cool dawns.

- Voxelized animated clouds that cast shadows over terrain.

- Distance fog with skybox blending.

Character Controller

- Includes sample First-Person and Third-Person controllers adapted to work with the voxel environment:

- Walk/Run.

- Crouching.

- Hanging/peeking on edges.

- Fly.

- Swimming & diving.

- Footfalls. Different sounds based on terrain.

- Includes a fully animated Hero model sample from Dungeon Mason.

- Voxel Play can also work with other character controllers.

UI

- On-screen console, can be shown pressing "F1".

- Shows data useful to debug/help the user customize the world.

- Free pixel font included.

- Integrated FPS counter.

- Crosshair. Color changes to remain visible depending on background. Animates over targets.

- Thumbnail of currently selected material with name.

- Player inventory.

Items & Inventory System

- Collect voxels.

- Select active item & build, including voxels, objects and structures (ie. buildings).

- Create voxel and complex structures objects at runtime.

- Interactive objects framework with events.

- Includes dozens of sample voxel definitions, including +20 PBR high quality examples.

Load/Save

- Load and save functionality included.

- Optimized file size with incremental update support based on regions.

- Save to file or memory buffers.

Custom Tools

- Door creation tool.

- Texture voxelizer tool. Create 3D objects from single textures.

- Noise texture generators (tileable Perlin and Cellular noise supported).

- Imports Qubicle models (binary format or .qb). Generates optimized voxel meshes.

- Custom multi-textured cube generator tool.

Ready to use model shaders

- Optimized shaders ready to use for your imported models with per vertex colors, texture, triplanar, daylight handling and integrated fog for best performance.

Related assets

- Color Studio: great tool for creating pixel/voxel art and textures inside Unity Editor.

Tutorials | User guide | Support forum | Discord | Unity WIP forum thread