Devlog - Recent Blog Posts

With the recent release of Avoyd 0.26 which added a direct to optimised glTF binary mesh export pipeline, I've made a short video showing how to get your voxel models into Unreal Engine 5+ with Nanite support as scene geometry, and then walk through your model in game.

This post covers the specifities of exporting for Unreal Nanite and how Avoyd optimises meshes for games.

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We've introduced a new PRO licence for the voxel editor together with a new payment system using Paddle on our independent store. In order to concentrate on the voxel editor we've put the game development on hold.

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Doug Binks and Matthew Jack gave the talk Rapid Development with Runtime Compiled C++ in 2012 at the Develop Conference in Brighton. It's a good introduction to the technique which has come a long way since.

Runtime-Compiled C++ (RCC++) is primarily designed to shorten iteration times in development - developers can build their project, run it, make changes during runtime and see the results in a few seconds. It is aimed at games development but could be useful in any industry where turnaround times are a bottleneck.

The slides, video recording and transcript of the talk are available:

• Slides - pdf (2MB)
• Video - Youtube (40min)

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This release of Avoyd Voxel Editor has been a long time coming, but it adds a significant feature - a GPU accelerated path tracer for faster renders. In this post I summarise the renderer development, cover the performance gains (with data) and discuss future plans.

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We've been selling Avoyd -our game and increasingly game development tool- on the internet since 2001 using payment providers (merchants of records) WorldPay, followed, after a decade-long break, by FastSpring. A recent event with FastSpring has pushed us to investigate store front Itch.io. In this post we describe how we've moved from FastSpring to Itch.io and what we think about it. Avoyd has now been selling through Itch.io since 15 Dec.

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Reducing the number of polygons in 3D objects helps improve a game's performance. This tutorial explains step by step how to clean up the geometry of voxel models in Blender to prepare them for export to game engines like Unreal, Godot or Unity.

Note you may have encountered 'polygon reduction' techniques under other names such as 'vertex reduction', '3D model optimisation' or '3D model clean up'.

This post covers the following workflow:

1. How to use Avoyd Voxel Editor to convert your voxel model to mesh for Unreal, Godot or Unity.
2. How to use Blender to optimise the mesh.
3. How to use Blender to export to glTF for Unreal 5 and Godot, and to FBX for Unreal 4 and Unity, and Links to guides for importing and configuring the model in each engine.

☛   Update to Avoyd version 0.26 or above:

• You can now export to .obj with Best optimisation to skip the manual optimisation in Blender.
• If you own Avoyd we recommend you export your voxel model to glTF Binary Mesh .glb instead of .obj. This both optimises your mesh better and simplifies your workflow. You can then directly import your .glb mesh into your game engine.

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Learn from my mistakes as I implement a GPU voxel octree path tracer based on my current CPU implementation in Avoyd. I cover the C++ to C conversion, buffer upload issues and data visualisation, enhancing the shader error logging along with a basic comparison of the performance on CPU and GPU.

One can program modern GPUs in a variety of languages. However only a few of those languages work well on all the main vendors' GPUs and operating systems: essentially the C like HLSL and GLSL shader languages. Since I use OpenGL with GLSL shaders in Avoyd I choose to write the path tracer in GLSL. (Avoyd runs only on Windows currently but I intend to support other operating systems eventually.)

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Release 0.13.0 of Avoyd is out. For the first time we're introducing specific builds for each of the full, beta and demo release streams. You can buy Avoyd and download the full and beta releases from our store.

Read about the full release features, how the demo is changing, how to teleport using the camera or Minecraft coordinates, and the workaround for exporting materials to Unreal Engine 5.1.

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You may have noticed we've changed our Products page. There is now an Avoyd Beta release stream available to download alongside the Full Avoyd and Avoyd Demo.

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We recently released a video tutorial on how to make an isometric voxel render of a Minecraft map in the Avoyd Voxel Editor, and thought it would be useful for those of you who prefer text over video to write up a short overview of the process here.

This tutorial covers: how to make an isometric voxel render of a Minecraft map in Avoyd, using the arcball camera, tweaking the atmosphere and lighting, tips for using the voxel editor, graphics quality and user interface customisation.

Before you start, you need to download Avoyd and install it on your machine.

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