Cubiquity for UE4 - Voxel Terrain Plugin

[milliams]

I'm looking forward to trying this out, could definitely see it being useful for cave systems with copious amounts of static meshes to roughen it up.

One of the things that's been discussed here on the forums is improvements to the plugin system. At the moment, support on the marketplace for code plugins is poor (I don't believe that they allow them at all yet). As one example I need to be able to bundle along a shader file (.usf) with Cubiquity but under the current system this will have to be copied by hand into the engine's shader directory by the user. Since UE4's underlying C++ API is evolving quite rapidly (which is a good thing) I'm trying to not tie myself to early implementations of systems when better ones will be coming down the line. Instead I will focus on the more stable parts of the system first.

Once the first preview of Cubiquity is out, I will try to put my work items somewhere public so that people know what's planned in what order and there I will document any specific requirements from UE4's side.

[DrAculaMD]

You sir, are a genius. I'm already changing the direction of my game based on this being a possibility in the future, AWESOME!

[ArdentDrako]

was literally just pondering about finding a voxel plugin exactly like this for ue4 as my current project will greatly benefit from it in the future luckily i dont need it anytime soon but i will definitely be keeping my eyes on this

[Demolishun]

@milliams,
I am so stoked about your port of Cubiquity. I am in the process of migrating from another engine partly due to your porting efforts. Thanks.

[milliams]

Coloured cubes preview

Hi everyone! I realised that I hadn't posted anything here about what I've been working on with the coloured cubes-style terrain. If you're following me on Twitter then you may have seen this already but here's some screenshots I took of a large example map being processed by Cubiquity. The voxel data for the map shown here comes from a custom map for the game Ace of Spades created by a member of the Build and Shoot community forums member Ki11aWi11. The voxel data has been converted to our custom storage format (VDB) and so can be read natively within Cubiquity.

For now I will just leave you with these screenshots but I'm planning on a video showing the coloured cubes terrain in game as well as some details of the Blueprint API for Cubiquity.


A view showing a chunk of the map from the top of one of the buildings.


Raining down destruction on the ground below.


Everything in the map can be destroyed and interacts properly with the physics engine.

[Mr_SquarePeg]

Awesome!

Is there an ETA for the Colored Cubes Demo?

Or at very least a video?

EDIT: Also I have a bit of a concern. How would you prevent players falling through the bottom of the world?

[milliams]

Awesome!

Is there an ETA for the Colored Cubes Demo?

Or at very least a video?

EDIT: Also I have a bit of a concern. How would you prevent players falling through the bottom of the world?

No ETA but it will be ready as soon as it can be

As for stopping players falling through the world: Cubiquity offers nothing to do this automatically. All editing of the volume is completely under the control of the game author (i.e. you) and so it would be very easy to add an explicit check to make sure, e.g., that the bottom layer of voxels is never destroyed.

[Mr_SquarePeg]

No ETA but it will be ready as soon as it can be

As for stopping players falling through the world: Cubiquity offers nothing to do this automatically. All editing of the volume is completely under the control of the game author (i.e. you) and so it would be very easy to add an explicit check to make sure, e.g., that the bottom layer of voxels is never destroyed.

Alright thanks for the info

Still got a few more questions -

Is the .VDB an custom Import option via Unreal importer? (Similar to how we import FBX files)

As for the blueprint side of things - What are you guys planning to do in a general sense?

Will the .VDB be exposed so that end users can import there own levels into an completed unreal game?

[milliams]

Is the .VDB an custom Import option via Unreal importer? (Similar to how we import FBX files)

VDB is a small database file which sites on disk and is the primary backing store for Cubiquity. It's not just an interchange format but also is updated in real-time to store edits etc. We have a program which converts from a number of standard formats (heightmap, image slices, MagicaVoxel etc.) into VDBs which can the be read at runtime by Cubiquity.

As for the blueprint side of things - What are you guys planning to do in a general sense?

For the first release it will be just the basics. For the coloured cubes you will be able to get and set on an individual voxel level. The smooth terrain editing is a little more complex and so functions to paint and carve will be provided too. More advanced functionality will probably not be part of Cubiquity per se but will be provided as examples of how to use the API. People's use-cases are so varied that we don' want to provide too much specific functionality.

Will the .VDB be exposed so that end users can import there own levels into an completed unreal game?

This will be up to the game author as to how available they want to make this functionality but it would certainly be possible to expose this ability if you wished to.

[Demolishun]

This is THE feature I want in my UE4 game. Well besides some others...

Thanks for updating your progress on here. Very inspiring to see how it is coming along.

Edit:
I do have one question though:
Will this be usable with the level streaming capabilities of the UE4 engine? ie infinite terrain?

[milliams]

Will this be usable with the level streaming capabilities of the UE4 engine? ie infinite terrain?

I haven't really looked into this at all yet and it's not something I'm planning on getting integrated for the first release. However, it's definitely something I want to look at the feasibility of. I haven't really stress-tested Cubiquity yet to see how large a terrain we could get in one volume. We do have some plans in Cubiquity for paging terrain on this scale and to be able to integrate this into UE4's level streaming would be great.

[Demolishun]

@milliams,
The reason I mentioned streaming is because it seems like a natural fit for level paging. It can be controlled through blueprints and so could provide a flexible integration with traditional level modeling. As well as providing complete world generation.

Also, I was thinking it would be really interesting to have structures able to render using blocks on top of a terrain the uses smooth surfaces. Unless of course you have implemented the option for density (smooth or blocky controlled per block)?

[Mr_SquarePeg]

Hey milliams,

Is there an ETA on this?

Really want to use it

[Furroy]

This would be really fun to play with, looking forward to it.

[NarkLord]

@milliams,
Also, I was thinking it would be really interesting to have structures able to render using blocks on top of a terrain the uses smooth surfaces. Unless of course you have implemented the option for density (smooth or blocky controlled per block)?

You should check out the thread for cubiquity on the unity forum as it answers a lot of these questions and is probably a good guide for what to expect.

You can actually layer a cubed volume over a smooth terrain to achieve what you're saying. Do a collision check on the smooth volume and insert a cube at that location (on the cubed volume).

Cubiquity is actually really flexible. In theory you can have lots of volumes in the one level, although, I'm not sure what the performance implications are.

This is all assuming cubiquity will work the same way it does in unity.