Is this module appropriate for handling simple voxel models?

[lonevox]

I hoped this was a more general purpose voxel module but it seems geared towards terrain. I'd like to load a Magicavoxel file of a character and change its voxels during runtime, and I'm wondering if this is the right tool to use.

[Zireael07]

There is already a different magicavoxel loader addon

[lonevox]

I'm aware, but I want to be able to change the voxels during runtime, which this module lets you do. It is also high performance so I'd rather use this if it is possible

[Zylann]

It's possible, though the available API lacks some stuff to make it more accessible, and optimizations in place are not geared toward this case. There are classes to parse a vox file, others to hold voxel data, and others to transform voxels into meshes. So in theory you can build something on top of that, but it's not as great as if there was a setup that would work out of the box as a character for example.

VoxelTerrain is the closest node to do this, but there are several steps to make it suitable as a replacement for MeshInstance (that means not as a root node, but just to hold visuals). Some of them require improvements of the module:

• Turn off its integrated physics, and instead put a simplified collider yourself (it's much better because characters move, and concave colliders currently generated are not suitable for that)
• Change its bounds to be very small for the character, so it won't try to allocate too much voxel data away from it
• Increase its view distance to prevent it from streaming out (or support ability to turn off streaming)
• Have a generator that generates nothing (or ability to have none) because there is no need for one. Currently it is required because it defines what's the "background of the 3D voxel canvas"
• Load character voxels into it with a vox loader using VoxLoader and paste calls, and redo it if regenerating is needed
• Lots of possible optimizations to reduce memory usage and bandwidth in multiplayer scenarios (like sharing voxel data of characters using the same models until they get modified)

This will eventually get adressed over time. So far terrain is indeed the main focus because that's what I and other people used it for most of the time.

[lonevox]

Awesome, thanks for the in-depth response. Although it isn't a priority, this is definitely a feature I'd use if support were added for it. For the time being it looks like I'll have to hack together my own solution.