There's another approach - Deep Bump.[1] Addresses the same problem, but in a totally different way.
Deep Bump is a machine-learning tool which takes texture images and creates plausible normal maps from them. It's really good at stone and brick textures like the ones this voxel displacement renderer is using. It's OK at clothing textures - it seems to be able to recognize creases, pockets, and collars, and gives them normals that indicate depth. It's sort of OK on bark textures, and not very good on plants. This probably reflects the training set.
So if you're upgrading games of the Doom/Wolfenstein genre, there's a good open source tool available.
If I read that blog post correctly, it's a model to infer normal maps from textures, not a new way to render geometry.
The article in this thread is more about a small-voxel-based representation of displacement maps. A tool like Deep Bump could conceivably be used to aid in the creation of texture assets for the system discussed in this thread.
Yes, it's a model to infer normal maps from textures. Then you can use a modern PBR renderer on old content and have a better illusion of depth. It doesn't introduce the blockiness of voxels.
It seems the blockiness of voxels is the whole point. Applying normal maps to low-res textures doesn’t look good and completely changes the look. Generating high-res textures from the originals makes it even worse.
This voxel approach preserves the aesthetics of the old pixelated (now voxelated) graphics in a much more pleasing way.
As the article points out though, normal maps don't "work" in all situations though, as they don't actually change the geometry just the lighting and the illusion of the geo, so viewed at the edges of meshes displacement is still the better high-fidelity option.
DeepBump might be able to extract 1D (height only, not full 3D vector displacement) maps to use with traditional displacement though.
Deep Bump is a machine-learning tool which takes texture images and creates plausible normal maps from them. It's really good at stone and brick textures like the ones this voxel displacement renderer is using. It's OK at clothing textures - it seems to be able to recognize creases, pockets, and collars, and gives them normals that indicate depth. It's sort of OK on bark textures, and not very good on plants. This probably reflects the training set.
So if you're upgrading games of the Doom/Wolfenstein genre, there's a good open source tool available.
[1] https://github.com/HugoTini/DeepBump