Voxelisation and Voxel Management Options in Unity3d

Abstract

Abstract. Voxels have been used in various application domains successfully for the last several decades. Their main advantage is the underlying discrete data structure allowing to reliably work with surrounding voxels all the time. In this paper, capabilities of the Unity game engine for voxels management and geometry voxelisation are assessed, where 4 native solutions and 7 open-source projects written for Unity are investigated. Although many voxel-based options exist in Unity, they only deal with one part related to voxels. Therefore, the available capabilities to voxelise, visualise, structure and export voxels are combined and extended with the goal of successfully processing large 3D models and geometries. Many voxel visualisation techniques are investigated including mesh, VFX, point clouds and SVO, which have distinctive benefits in various aspects. Possibilities to structure voxels for effective management in simulations and other tasks are shown. Also, it is enabled to export voxels as point clouds and to the Postgres database for further processing, spatial analysis and distribution. One of the main conclusions is the lack of support for state-of-the-art voxel data structures, where the presented platform can easily be extended to support any. This platform can be used by people who deal with 3D discrete data, require voxelising 3D data, visualise voxels in different ways and technologies, as well as manage more efficiently sparsely occupied voxels.