What's New?

Voxel Play 4 builds on everything in Voxel Play 3 and adds a new generation of terrain, rendering, model and gameplay systems. This page summarizes everything that is new, grouped by feature area and ordered by impact. Each headline feature links to its dedicated guide.

3D Terrain Graph

A visual, node-based editor for volumetric terrain generation - the flagship VP4 feature. The graph drives a true 3D density field, enabling overhangs, caves, floating islands and water placement at any height. See Terrain Graph Overview and the Node Reference.

• 21 nodes across noise generators, math operators, blending, terrain shapers, cave carvers and biome assignment.
• Graph-driven water placement at any height, controlled entirely by the graph.
• Biome blending for graph worlds via the new Biome Blend parameter in the Climate Map node, which dithers biome borders (0 = hard cut).
• Terrain Generator to 3D Graph converter to migrate classic worlds.
• Performance: parallelized halo evaluation for multi-core CPUs (~5x speedup), column caching (~10x for 2D-heavy graphs), an all-air fast path and an optimized binary-refined height scan.
• Editor quality of life: node rename via right-click context menu, node groups to organize the graph, and dedicated Voxel / Vegetation / Tree / Water output ports on the Climate Map node.

Smooth Terrain & Smooth Voxels

Optional Surface Nets meshing renders terrain as smooth, rounded surfaces instead of hard cubes, driven by the 3D Terrain Graph density field. Per-voxel control lets you mix smooth ground with blocky structures in the same world. See Smooth Terrain & Smooth Voxels.

Super Chunks (Distant Terrain LOD)

A distant-terrain level-of-detail system for Terrain3D worlds. Far regions are rendered as coarse super chunks, extending view distance without the cost of full-resolution meshing. See Super Chunks.

Clouds

Clouds offer two styles, selectable in the World Definition under Clouds > Style:

• Chunks (default) - legacy voxel clouds written into the chunk system.
• Mesh - a dedicated cloud mesh that enables smooth coverage transitions, horizon reach and volume.

Shared parameters:

• Voxel - the VoxelDefinition used to render the clouds.
• Coverage (0-255) - amount of cloud cover.
• Altitude (0-1024) - cloud layer height in the world.

Mesh style adds three parameters:

• Max Height (2-12) - ceiling for vertical voxel layers per column; actual height is driven by Height Variation and noise.
• Height Variation (0-1) - how much per-column noise drives height toward the ceiling (0 = flat layer height, 1 = full spread up to max height).
• Altitude Spread (0-1) - how much cloud bases and tops shift vertically between formations (0 = aligned layer, 1 = full spread).

Biome System Upgrades

The biome system gains finer climate control and richer underground detail. See Biome System Upgrades.

• Geological Layers: define global underground strata in the World Definition, shared across all biomes. Layers are assigned by absolute altitude (Y); biome-specific underground voxels take priority, with global strata filling the remaining probability proportionally.
• 3-axis biome selection: BiomeZone now adds a temperature range alongside altitude and moisture.
• Per-biome shore voxel via the new BiomeDefinition voxelShore field.
• Underground ceiling vegetation: place CutoutCross vegetation on cave and overhang ceilings (graph bottom-facing surfaces and classic tunnel ceilings) reusing the same VoxelDefinition as surface vegetation - no duplicate upside-down asset needed. Cross voxels auto-render upside-down when there is solid rock above and air below.
• Inspector: new Smart Biome Surface toggle; Biome Mixing is hidden for 3D Terrain Graph worlds; the Textures section is grouped under Rendering.

PBR Materials & Rendering

• PBR support extended to the model shader with full surface map support (metallic, occlusion, height, smoothness). Voxel shaders already supported PBR in VP3; this brings the same maps to ModelDefinition rendering.
• Surface map packing utility to pack separate PBR textures into a single surface map, plus runtime packing via API.
• Configurable Max Point Lights (8-128, default 32) under the Bright Point Lights section.
• Improved bright point light frustum culling and sorting performance.

Texture Anti-Tiling

A new option in the Voxel Play Environment that breaks visible texture repetition on opaque voxel albedos using stochastic sampling, with an optional far-detail crossfade that restores low-frequency variation when mips flatten distant surfaces (Grid Scale, Far Detail Scale, Far Detail Blend). See Texture Anti-Tiling.

• Per-voxel Disable Anti Tiling toggle.
• Biome top voxels automatically skip anti-tiling on their side texture slices, preserving baked grass-to-dirt gradients.

Colored Microvoxels & Model Conversion

The model converter now renders microvoxels with the correct textures from the parent VoxelDefinition and its secondary material profile (Slabs, TopCap layouts, per-quad palette routing), enabling detailed colored decorations that blend into the chunk mesh. See Colored Microvoxels & Material Profiles.

OBJ Export

Export any ModelDefinition or VoxelDefinition (including microvoxels) to OBJ with full texture support - primary and secondary materials included. Use the Export button in the inspector or the API. See OBJ Export.

• Cutout and CutoutCross voxels: binarized alpha cutout baked into PNG + map_d in the MTL; CutoutCross also gets double-sided crossed quads.
• Custom prefab voxels: prefab hierarchy baked honoring vd.offset/rotation/scale, with Unity-standard materials preserved.

Voxel Behavior & Gameplay

See Voxel Behavior & Gameplay.

• Drop item prefabs: voxels with a VoxelDefinition.dropItem assigned now spawn the item's own prefab when destroyed, instead of a generic recoverable voxel.
• Configurable pickup radius: a global Default Pickup Radius in the Voxel Play Environment, with a per-item override via ItemDefinition.pickupRadius (0 = use global).
• Destroy With Voxel Below option for CutoutCross voxels (default true); disable to keep cross voxels in place when the voxel below is removed (cobwebs, barbed wire, decals).
• Cross voxel Width Variation (vegetationMinWidth/vegetationMaxWidth) exposed as a MinMaxSlider, giving each grass/flower instance a deterministic horizontal scale.
• Cross voxel Highlight Scale (Vector2) to fine-tune the highlight box when the texture does not fill the full cross quad.

Scripting & API

See Scripting Support (C#).

• VoxelPlayOBJExporter.ExportModelToOBJ / ExportVoxelToOBJ gained an optional fileName parameter (useful for in-memory ModelDefinitions); ExportVoxelToOBJ also gained an optional forceAlphaCutout nullable bool.
• VoxelPlayConverter.GenerateVoxelObject overloads for microvoxel / PBR voxel / model conversion.
• TextureTools.PackSurfaceMap() for runtime PBR texture packing.
• ModelPlace gained an optional skipEmptyVoxels parameter so empty voxels no longer overwrite existing ones (place models inside water or filled volumes without air pockets).
• MicroVoxels.GenerateThumbnail() renders a preview image of any microvoxel shape to a Texture2D (runtime and editor).
• World-position MicroVoxel brushes (no VoxelHitInfo / normal offset required): cube (position, size), box (boxMin, boxMax) and sphere (center, radius) overloads of MicroVoxelPlace / MicroVoxelDestroy, with a single-voxel fast path.

Demos & Samples

• New Demo 8: Floating Islands showcasing the 3D Terrain Graph, smooth terrain and underground ceiling vegetation.
• Demo7_SmoothTerrain ships a terrain graph that replicates the Demo 1 Earth terrain.

Fixes

• OBJ export: compressed texture formats no longer trigger "Unsupported texture format" console warnings during PNG write.
• OBJ export: exported orientation now matches the in-Unity model (no more manual Y=180 rotation on reimport).
• Null biome crash in the 3D terrain generator.
• Missing boundary faces when neighbor chunks appear after meshing.
• PBR shader normal map handling for DXT5nm compressed textures.
• Color space mismatch for linear textures in non-array model shaders.
• Model materials shadow attenuation inheritance.
• Model Definition placement: offsets now rotate with the model; torch normal direction at 270 degrees.
• Highlight box for cross voxels now follows the real cross AABB and the Height Variation, matching the visible plant.
• World space normal reconstruction in shaders.
• Microvoxels placed on smooth (Auto) voxel definitions now render as cubes preserving their detail instead of collapsing into a smooth blob.
• VoxelBeachDirt top face no longer uses the beach side texture; it now uses the correct dirt texture.