Number of materials

[Favkis]

Can I have more than 8 materials for blocks? Or at least simply textures I see that I can change color for blocks, but what about materials?

[Zylann]

I plan to lift the material limit for VoxelMesherBlocky. It was 8 originally because it was simpler to implement, and also this is plenty enough for Minecraft-like games (this one uses only 3 of the slots: https://github.com/Zylann/voxelgame). However keep in consideration that the more materials you use, the more draw calls it will need. So if voxel types have the same "effects" on them (opaque? transparent? animated?) then they should share their materials and use texture atlasing or texture arrays if possible.

[Favkis]

@Zylann ahh right, that makes sense. But here's the thing then. I was planning on having multiple 512x512 textures for blocks, however make it so that each block only draws 1/4 of texture depending on their coords (I still am not sure how to transfer voxel ID into shader), but if I'll use atlas for my 512x512 textures, that means if I want 64 textures, I'll have to have 8192x8192 textures for albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, and I'm not sure how new GPU have to be to even be able to load such large textures

[Zylann]

You can use large textures, or texture arrays. If you really dont want to go too high, you could split them up then.

[Zylann]

The material count limitation has been removed in 12862a46d046cb34b56e62bdc991eea7c6aba5d9. They are now defined in each VoxelBlockyModel (or in meshes directly). Baking automatically detects re-used materials, so atlasing is still a good idea to get fewer draw calls.

[Zylann]

The initial request was implemented, so this can be closed.

[slakibk]

Hello. I'm migrating my project (TERROVOX) to Godot 4. I don't understand how "material_override" works. I'm adding a new material, but the voxel is rendered using the base material. In shygu you wrote that the materials for each block are implemented separately, but for some reason it doesn’t work for me.

Godot 16 alpha Voxel-tool 625e4536f12579b1c757afa275e19bded2ad9d72

P.S. Thanks for your work. Adding multiplayer and GI-Mode is something I really enjoy.

[Zylann]

Can you provide a minimal reproduction project showing the issue?

[slakibk]

I'm trying to set up an alpha channel in a separate grass material. To make it look like this:

But for the voxel, the main material is taken in which the transparency is not turned off.

[Zylann]

Grass looks like this because your VoxelTerrain has a material_override assigned. This will override any material produced by the mesher. You have to unassign the terrain material and assign materials in your library.

Also, one of your blocks (black core) has more than 2 surfaces (materials). The baking process doesn't support more than 2 per voxel.

[slakibk]

Thx