Lighting a Voxel World Realistically

Posted by sharethis on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by sharethis
Published on 2012-09-10T10:08:48Z Indexed on 2012/09/10 15:50 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 356

Filed under:

lighting

|

voxels

|

octree

|

light

I am new to game development and never implemented a complicated (and realistic) lighting.

My game uses a 3d voxel terrain world (like Minecraft). To hold the data I use octrees. My goal is to render a more realistic world scene like in most voxel games. For that I want to use a bezier algorithm to round out the blocky world. Assume that I already have a large generated polygon of my terrain (or some of them).

I heard of some techniques like volumetric light, global illumination, ...

What approaches of a very realistic lighting are there for my "organic shaped" voxel game?

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about lighting

Is there any difference between storing textures and baked lighting for environment meshes?

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I assume that when texturing environments, one or several textures will be used, and the UVs of the environment geometry will likely overlap on these textures, so that e.g. a tiling brick texture can be used by many parts of the environment, rather than UV unwrapping the entire thing, and having several… >>> More
Performance of pixel shaders vs. SpriteBatch: XNA

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
Precondition: I read this question/answer about using shaders, or spritebatch, to render and mark a sprite. I need to do something like that. I also have a 2D lighting PoC which I need to write. The way it will work will basically be something like: Draw all the sprites Draw lighting gradients… >>> More
How does Minecraft compute lighting for it's non-block objects?

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I was wondering how the creator of Minecraft went about lighting the objects (player and pickaxe) based on the lighting level around the player. I have implemented the ability to light the blocks around the player but I can't really think of anyway to implement with objects. Also, when I the player… >>> More
Innovative SPARC: Lighting a Fire Under Oracle's New Hardware Business

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
"There's a certain level of things you can do with commercially available parts," says Oracle Executive Vice President Mike Splain. But, he notes, you can do so much more if you design the parts yourself. Mike Splain,EVP, OracleYou can, for example, design cryptographic accelerators into your… >>> More
Blender Object Appearing Gray when all Lights are Off

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I have an issue with Blender where, when I turn my only light off (a sun lamp) and render the image my object appears gray rather than black (and thus, not appear to the camera). I can't figure out why this is happening. Here's what I just did in my scene: Added a new UV Sphere mesh (to make a… >>> More

Related posts about voxels

Best way of storing voxels

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
This should be a pretty easy question to answer, and I'm not looking for how to store the voxels data wise, I'm looking for the theory. Currently, my voxel engine has no global list of tiles. Each chunk has it's own list, and its hard to do things like collision detection or anything that may use… >>> More
Efficient visualization of a large voxelized volume

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
Lets consider a large voxelized volume stored in an oct-tree or any other convenient structure. This volume represents, for instance, a landscape, where each block is either empty (air), or it has an specific material that will be later used to apply a texture. Voxels that are next to each other… >>> More
Voxel Engine in Multiplayer?

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
This is a question more out of Interest for now, because I am not even near to the point that I could create this project at the moment. I really like the progress on the Atomontage Engine. A Voxel engine that is WIP at the moment. I would like to create a Voxel SERVER eventually. First in JavaScript… >>> More
Skewed: a rotating camera in a simple CPU-based voxel raycaster/raytracer

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
TL;DR -- in my first simple software voxel raycaster, I cannot get camera rotations to work, seemingly correct matrices notwithstanding. The result is skewed: like a flat rendering, correctly rotated, however distorted and without depth. (While axis-aligned ie. unrotated, depth and parallax are as… >>> More
How does Minecraft compute lighting for it's non-block objects?

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I was wondering how the creator of Minecraft went about lighting the objects (player and pickaxe) based on the lighting level around the player. I have implemented the ability to light the blocks around the player but I can't really think of anyway to implement with objects. Also, when I the player… >>> More