R4_Unit

how are you getting that 3d printed look?

Probably one of two things: volume rendered after slicing into planes, and subsurface scattering making the material look transparent

ah the subsurface scattering gives it that plastic look. nice :)

the lighting is lovely! are you doing it via ray casts?

A discrete voxel subsurface scattering technique. 5 casts per voxel all upwards so it is computed in linear time in number of voxels

Oh yeah and a fake ambient occlusion so you can still see detail in the dark areas which just gives light depending on # unoccupied adjacent

Sweet! Mine are not dynamic and instead are just generated at one time. It uses a modification of the diamond-square algorithm. (1/n)

It starts with a 3d square grid at low resolution, where the top and sides are empty and the bottom is random noise. (2/n)

Then you fill the centers of every cube by applying a totalistic rule on 3 states (empty, green, tan) on the 8 values on the corners (3/n)

Next, fill the centers of each square using another rule on the values from the 4 corners of the face and the two adjacent centers. (4/n)

Finally, fill the centers of the edges using the values at the 2 corners and the 4 adjacent faces. This gives another cubic lattice. (5/n)

Each lattice is 2x as large, so repeating this many times gives the large voxel structure. (6/6)

Thanks! Makes sense, and a clever idea, I never thought of that. Also nice in 2D as the diamond rule can be same as square rule

that's ridiculously good looking

Thanks, I've really fell in love with this technique. In a few days I plan on tossing it on my BitBucket for everyone to play around with!

Ping! Did you get around to publish some code?