Interactive Smooth Voxel Terrain with Signed Distance Field Editing and Multi-Material Blending
Yunfan HE
Software Development
Interactive Smooth Voxel Terrain with Signed Distance Field Editing and Multi-Material Blending
My Thesis explored the development of a real-time, interactive smooth voxel terrain system with signed distance field( SDF) editing and multi-material blending, built from scratch in my custom C ++ engine using DirectX 12. To accomplish this, I implemented two dual isosurface extraction algorithms( naïve surface nets and dual contouring) to produce smooth, organic geometry from voxel density fields; designed a three-level clipmap LOD system with implicit octree traversal for frustum culling; and built a fully bindless rendering pipeline featuring triplanarmapped, height-based texture splatting and a Cook-Torrance physically based shading model. I also developed an offline Houdini asset pipeline that voxelizes arbitrary 3D meshes into a custom runlength-encoded binary format that the engine loads as in-game SDF shapes.
The final application shipped with three world modes: an SDF shape editor for level authoring, a real-time brush mode supporting add, carve, paint, and flatten operations, and a space combat mode where a spaceship fires projectiles to destructively carve the terrain. I chose this project after seeing the Donkey Kong Bananza reveal at a Nintendo Direct, where the destructible terrain immediately fascinated me.
Across roughly 229 hours over four months, I gained deep experience in volumetric geometry, bindless GPU rendering architecture, multi-threaded system design, and asset pipeline engineering. The resulting system can serve as a practical gameplay foundation for games featuring destructible or procedurally generated environments.
90 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT