Custom material / shaders

Voxel Play supports two groups of voxels in terms of rendering features:

- Default/basic types: opaque, cutout, vegetation, water, transparent and opaque with no AO are predefined render types which come with optimized shaders.

- Custom voxel type: for custom geometry, they use materials which supports instancing (more info about custom voxels here).

Custom voxels allow you to use any material derived from VP Model* materials provided by Voxel Play. However, custom voxels although very fast produce independent geometries. They don't benefit from chunk-related shader features provided by the default types like face occlusion, integrated AO, POM and other effects.

Starting v4.0 Voxel Play allows you to provide a customized material/shader for any of the default types (opaque, cutout, water, ...). This means you can duplicate the default material and shader provided by Voxel Play for any of the default types, customize it and assign the new material to the voxel definition:

The Override Material option shown in the screenshot allows you to specify a customized material/shader for this render type.

Currently up to 12 additional custom material/shaders can be assigned to voxel definitions for a total of 16 different materials per chunk. Note that this count does not limit the number of different textures. The same material can use hundreds of different textures in Voxel Play because all materials support texture arrays. A material here is to be understood as a different shader or rendering type.

A "Locate Original" button is provided for convenience, so you can quickly locate the default material used by Voxel Play for the selected render type.

The "Textures By Material" option specifies that the material/shader uses specific textures assigned to the material and that VP should not pass the global texture array to the material.