Research particles and compare them to voxels

[acs]

This tweet is motivating: https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1311777674721931267

[acs]

https://github.com/Voxelers/3d/issues/39 more context in using particles in Blender to approach voxels!

[acs]

1.5y later, my feeling is that particles could be the way to go until voxels support is improved in software and in hardware.

Particles have strong physics foundations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics

And thinking more about it, voxels and particles are pretty similar concepts: "Particle physics (also known as high energy physics) is a branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation. Although the word particle can refer to various types of very small objects (e.g. protons, gas particles, or even household dust), particle physics usually investigates the irreducibly smallest detectable particles and the fundamental interactions necessary to explain their behaviour."

So why particles are not been used for voxels in general?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_system: «A particle system is a technique in game physics, motion graphics, and computer graphics that uses many minute sprites, 3D models, or other graphic objects to simulate certain kinds of "fuzzy" phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques – usually highly chaotic systems, natural phenomena, or processes caused by chemical reactions.»

[acs]

Particles support exist in the game engines and probably it can be improved. Let's play with it to understand the limitations. Probably building terrain with them could be a nice use case: 2d demo | tutorial

Particles and shaders

[acs]

Ok, I have decided to explore more this topic in Godot and Blender.

Time to understand in deep how particles work in Godot. Next step after reading the doc and playing a bit to complete the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDNJ2rdJNwQ

[acs]

Blender seems to be more advanced in particles than Godot.

And it also has the molecular addon ported to 2.8

But just with Blender cool things can be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV7RnZguToo

Probably we can create animations in Blender and then import them in Godot. In Godot, we can interact programmatically with the animation. So cool integrations can be done.

[acs]

I love this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkUC0GQ2SS4 This is the kind of stuff I hope to reach at some point in the next months: particles, materials, physics ... Let's see!

[acs]

Nice tutorial showing howto use shaders for 2D particles. The concept is the same for 3D. shaders is a pretty nice computing are where you play directly with the GPU to get great performance.

[javiercuervo]

Pixol is another concept from Zbrush between polygons and voxels.