Voxel light volumes

[johanhenriksson]

Current issues:

• Adding noise to the voxel colors makes things look more interesting, but kills any chance of mesh optimization
• Using vertex colors for ambient occlusion kills any chance of mesh optimization, and causes weird blending due to the triangulation of the faces.
• How to implement per-face lighting (or better) while merging voxel faces?

Idea:

• Add a 3D texture for each voxel chunk, with a single byte for each voxel representing the light/occlusion at the center of that voxel.
• Pass untransformed vertex coords to the fragment shader, and use them to sample the light volume.

Considerations:

• Light volume textures will be quite large. Will the saved memory from mesh optimization make up for the memory used to store the light data?
• How much will the per-fragment lighting improve overall visual fidelity? It will presumably be more costly due to the large amount of added texture lookups.

Something similar could be used to sample noise, instead of embedding it into the vertex data.