Voxel Project: UV

Adjusting Values

This week, I wanted to take a look at how I handle the uv mapping for the voxel grid. While I did originally add uv values back when I made my first post, I have not adjusted them since I've added the new shapes. As a start, I took some time and adjusted the order of the vertices and uv values of each shape to line up with each other, to make the texture as continuous as possible.

I don't know why I have this texture

Painting

The main feature is the ability to paint individual voxel blocks on the grid. Instead of the wireframe shader I've been using up until now, the grid now uses a defaul diffuse shader with a custom texture that is generated at run-time. The size of the texture is width * (height + height * depth), and each voxel gets its own pixel. When selecting which voxel to paint, it uses similar logic to the block placement/removal function, except it prioritizes filled spaces. When painting a voxel, the pixel associated with the voxel is painted, which paints that whole voxel the designated color.

Example of a white grid with some voxels painted black

Initially I ran into some issues with the correct voxels not being painted; I eventually found out through debugging that this was because the uv coordinates were being rounded to integers, depite being stored as a float.

There also seems to be a little bit of overlap happening in the uv coordinates, as voxels that are on the middle row seem to not like when adjacent voxels are colored. I'm unsure yet if this is because the uv coordinates are overlapping, or there is some sort of z-fighting going on, but I hope to look into this further next week.

Next Week

While it's nice that I can color the voxels, It looks a little bland now that each voxel is monotone. Next week I'd like to work on a solution that allows me to paint voxels, but also still lets me use more detailed textures, likely using a custom shader. Additionally, I've found a major bug with the collider, as Unity seems to no longer be using the custom mesh I supply as a collider, but instead uses a further simplified collider, which has been causing issues with block placement.

See the source code here