So, it’s been a fair while since I’ve written anything on here, sorry about that! I have however still been working on Galaxia, and as the title suggests, it’s now in Unreal Engine 4! I’ve also made quite a few upgrades while porting the code over and learning about UE4. Here’s a video showing the […]

Read more "Galaxia now in UE4"

Well if you’ve seen the movie Interstellar, or if you studied any astrophysics at all, you’ll know that black holes look weird because of their huge mass and gravity. The effect could be partly explained just using Newton’s law of gravity, by assuming the mass-energy equivalence as discovered by Einstein (E=mc2, i.e. by assuming the […]

Read more "Black Holes & Accretion Discs – Gravitational Lensing"

    Download from https://1drv.ms/u/s!Arp4D6YSlcg0jGFY1hZ2Wr-E7gWB New things in this version: Different galaxy types and improved galaxy distribution New galaxy rendering method Black holes and star classification system Bug fixes and performance improvements Enjoy!

Read more "Galaxia Test Release 09"

The current raycasting approach to rendering galaxies in Galaxia is already pushing the limits of what is possible with the technique, and the result is somewhat messy and low in detail, in particular the aliasing artifacts are very noticeable. So I’ve been thinking about a different approach to rendering galaxies for a while now, with the […]

Read more "Galaxy rendering revisited"

  Download from https://1drv.ms/u/s!Arp4D6YSlcg0jGDe5NtGbe5wR5F3 New things in this version: Selected/hovered item name and distance info XInput support and better control configuration Voxel collision (WIP!) Bug fixes and code improvements

Read more "Galaxia test release 08"

  I had a realisation that the functionality of my voxel level-of-detail blending technique might not have really been documented anywhere. Others have probably already implemented the same idea (this technique may even already have a name, please tell me if you know), but it’s something I didn’t read about anywhere – I went googling for things like “smooth voxel […]

Read more "Voxels and Seamless LOD Transitions"

So, let’s start at the beginning. All virtual worlds need some kind of a coordinate system to represent positions in. Most 3D games and simulations represent a position with 3 floating-point numbers representing the X, Y and Z distance from the world’s origin (which is located at X,Y,Z=0,0,0). These numbers are usually in a meaningful unit […]

Read more "Galaxia: The basics – Coordinates"

After spending some time researching methods for rendering voxel isosurfaces, I decided to implement a dual contouring algorithm – which is the “dual” case of the infamous marching cubes algorithm. It’s still far from finished but it’s produced some promising results so far… [Fuzzy blobs: spheres with added ridged noise. Header image: spheres with negative […]

Read more "Voxels and Dual Contouring"

I finished implementing some shadows! Basically I ripped the code from the DirectX SDK, the CascadedShadowMaps11 sample. There’s a few things I had to do to adapt it for use on a planetary surface though (as opposed to the tiny scene box in the sample). The most major change was that I had to now […]

Read more "Shadows"

So I’ve just spent the last two weeks building this terrain engine. It’s the second approach I’ve tried in this project for creating a realistically sized planet surface with resolution high enough to walk around on. The first approach I tried was a projective grid, where a fixed grid is spread over the terrain in the screen […]

Read more "Planetary terrain rendering"