Duration: 2:29

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Experimenting with mipmapping voxel chunks. In a Minecraft-like voxel world we're used to all blocks being the same size. But what if the blocks themselves could mipmap?

This is not a trivial problem or simply not necessary. I have not seen this done in any voxel game, and I think the reason becomes clear in the video. The main problem being that as you decrease the resolution, you must make sure not to remove any voxels from view (that could create visual gaps in the world at mip level 1 and higher).

Thus every voxel that exists will have to double in size at mip level 1 and quadruple at mip level 2. Essentially you can have a 16x16x16 voxel chunk with only 1 voxel set that will end up an entirely filled chunk at mip level 3 or 4.

I wonder if this still pans out to be a thing of properly scaling the mip level distances, or whether it will make the voxel world look increasingly ugly at greater distances.