Hello! I've been working with PolyVox in UE4. I'm trying to achieve a certain appearance with the mesh and was hoping maybe I can get some input/advice. It is an appearance similar to the ground in the picture below. Ignore the rocks/trees.
A few questions:

• Is there any suggested documentation on density for material density pairs? I feel I don't have a sufficient understanding of how it functions.
• Do you think writing my own surface extractor would be necessary to achieve a similar appearance? I'm sure I can get something fairly close with the marching cubes extractor, but I'm wondering if the more irregular shapes would require some extra modification. If that's the case, I'm guessing it probably wouldn't be worth the extra effort required.

Any other advice is appreciated! Thanks!

Hi, welcome to the forum.


I'm afraid the rocks and trees make it rather hard to see the underlying terrain

To me, the most visually striking aspect of the image is the flat shading, which is what gives it a low-poly look. This is really independent of the actual geometry and can be achieved with meshes generated by PolyVox, though depending on how you do it you might need to regenerate the mesh normals.


I'm afraid there's not much. You can consider the two elements separately though - the density is entirely responsible for defining the shape of the object and the material is entirely responsible for its appearance. I would encourage you to forget about materials and MaterialDensityPair for now and just work with a volume of ints or floats (which then represent density), at least until you understand how to get your desired shape.



I don't think you'll significantly beat Marching Cubes for meshing density fields. More advanced surface extraction algorithms (dual contouring, etc) usually operate on more advanced voxel types (e.g. Hermite data) and at this point you are outside the current scope of PolyVox.


If you want to investigate other algorithms then this page is a useful starting point: https://swiftcoder.wordpress.com/planet ... xtraction/

Thanks for the welcome and response!


Yea, sorry about that. One of the few examples that seems to have the shape I'm trying to get.



Will do! The information you linked is also pretty interesting.

Thanks again for the help!

Turns out, the values I was passing in for density were different than what I expected them to be, and just didn't catch it before. Woops!