3D voxel engine (C++)
A high-performance 3D voxel terrain engine written entirely from scratch, utilizing multi-threaded asynchronous chunk generation, dynamic mesh extraction, real-time lighting, and environment modification.
See the full source code here
Technical Summary & Implementation
- Engineered a fully customized 3D rendering pipeline from scratch to handle real-time voxel streaming, add/remove updates, and camera frustum culling.
- Implemented an asynchronous worker-thread pool architecture to generate infinite chunk topologies concurrently using noise fields without blocking the main render loop.
- Developed an optimized chunk-meshing processor that dynamically evaluates voxel visibility to prune hidden internal faces, significantly reducing draw-call vertex counts.
- Designed real-time voxel modification algorithms, supporting instantaneous ray-cast intersection calculations for immediate runtime block placement and destruction.
- Built a dual-pass rendering system to handle translucent geometry, managing depth-sorting routines to render realistic transparent water surfaces and alpha-blended fluid faces correctly.
- Implemented a vertex-based ambient occlusion (AO) algorithm during the mesh generation phase, calculating corner exposure profiles to bake soft, realistic directional shadows into the terrain geometry.
- 3D skeletal animation with quaternion blending