Working with Voxel Plugin

What Voxel Plugin does and doesn't do, and how the different systems interact with each other.

Voxel Plugin 2 specifically means to address the creation and generation of interactive terrains.

World Creation & Graphs

Worlds are authored by adding 'brushes' to the world. Brushes can generate height (2D, top-down) or volume (3D) data. Some brushes are driven by static data, like Heightmap brushes, while other brushes generate their data using Voxel Graphs.

World generation is always done on the fly. There is not currently any kind of support for static/pre-baked data.

Rendering & Materials

The plugin targets Nanite as main rendering pipeline, and comes with an advanced material framework for that purpose. This pipeline can render any material anywhere. Non-Nanite rendering is supported, but does not support any material; it uses a single material for the entire terrain, similar to a stock Unreal Landscape.

Tessellation and displacement are supported as part of the Nanite pipeline.

Foliage

Foliage generation is no longer handled by Voxel Plugin directly. Instead, the plugin has a strong integration with Unreal Engine's PCG framework. Voxel terrains (and their metadata) can be queried from PCG. Additionally, a PCG graph can call a Voxel Graph to off-load complex math or noise-based operations. This way, Voxel Graphs can be used as an extension of PCG.

(foliage interaction?)