Fancy Stylized Rendering With Shader Packs in Real- Time Destructible Voxel Environment
Shangqi CAI
Software Development
Fancy Stylized Rendering With Shader Packs in Real- Time Destructible Voxel Environment
I built a deferred rendering engine using DirectX 12, featuring a modular shader pack system designed for real-time destructible voxel environments. The main aim was to develop an Iris-compatible architecture that allows community-made shader packs to customize the game’ s visuals without altering the engine itself. This engine incorporates a Shader Model 6.6 bindless resource framework, a multi-stage rendering pipeline, and a dual shader pack setup with automatic fallback capabilities. I selected this project to investigate how communitydriven visual customization, popularized by Minecraft’ s OptiFine and Iris shader ecosystems, could be implemented utilizing a modern low-level graphics API.
The project’ s duration was approximately 190 hours, encompassing research, engine development, and shader bundle creation. Through this work, I gained deep expertise in DirectX 12 GPU-driven rendering,
deferred pipeline design, HLSL shader development, and real-time performance profiling with tools such as RenderDoc and dotTrace. I also learned stylized rendering and lighting techniques, including shadow mapping, screen-space ray marching, bloom, screen-space reflections, volumetric lighting, and atmospheric scattering. Additionally, I strengthened my understanding of engine architecture patterns, including dependency inversion, resource management, and multi-queue command submission.
This project could benefit the video game industry by demonstrating a practical approach to separating rendering logic from engine code. A shader pack system empowers communities to extend a game’ s visual identity long after release, increasing player engagement and reducing the burden on studio art teams for post-launch visual updates.
84 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT