Soft Voxels Announcement

Oi folks,

it’s time for a new project again, and it is once again a pretty unique one too. I’ve had an idea for a shaderpack that would solely rely on voxels and a light-propagation-volume (LPV) for quite a while now, but it getting that idea to work turned out to be more complicated than expected, yet it seemed like it could provide some pretty fancy visuals while also delivering decent performance. As you will be able to confirm yourself soon, my expectations were right about these things. This pack has a strong focus on lighting thats rather soft and pleasing to look at instead of the same ol’ type of lighting you might know from most shaderpacks. Due to that entirely different approach to the outdoor lighting especially I was able to completely ditch the traditional shadowmap that would have been used for direct lighting from the sun and moon otherwise, which was also a key element in achieving better performance.

Another feature that is used to improve performance is temporal upscaling through TAAU (you might be familiar with a similar feature in PTGI’s HRR), though this is still a very new thing for me to work with so it is far from perfect in its current state, but the results are nonetheless very promising.

Given that this is still in a very early state of development, there are many quirks and missing features but I’d always prefer to get some feedback early on to improve upon the core of the pack before it gets overly complex with all the additional features that are yet to come. For the sake of convenience I’ll now list the features it already has and those that I plan to add in the near future.

Currently included features:

  • direct and indirect lighting through Voxels and an LPV
    • including SSPT
  • post-processing chain
    • ACES
    • Depth of Field
    • Lens Flares
    • Motionblur
    • Color Grading controls
    • Bloom
    • Vignette
  • TAAU
    • still requires a lot of work to achieve the quality I am targeting
  • atmosphere simulation
    • similar to Kappa Shader, might change in the future
  • simple planar clouds
  • basic translucency and refraction support

Planned/Missing Features:

  • reflections
    • using the voxel volume as well as screenspace data
  • multiple cloud layers
    • potentially with optional volumetrics
  • volumetric fog

How to get it

Soft Voxels will initially start as an exclusive pack for Tier 2 or higher Patrons (5€), but once it has reached a mature state I intend to also make occasional free releases, given that this pack has no free counterpart unlike KappaPT and NostalgiaVX. It’s fairly decent performance would also make it a good competitor for other free packs that are using path-tracing, so mixing up the market there seems like a neat thing as well :)

 

All in all I hope that you’ll enjoy this pack, and keep in mind that the preview you will be able to get your hands on soon is still in a very early state of development, so things will improve a lot in the near future once I worked out some of the quirks and improved the TAAU.

Make sure to visit my discord server for support, development progress and other information.

 

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Posted in Soft Voxels.