Fast GPU Generation of Distance Fields from a Voxel Grid

🚀 Overview

Fast GPU Generation of Distance Fields from a Voxel Grid is a real-time voxel painting application built in Rust, designed to explore and optimize techniques for generating distance fields directly on the GPU. The project compares several existing algorithms and proposes a new optimized approach suitable for interactive applications.

Whether you're painting in voxels or pushing the limits of real-time computation, this project showcases how GPU acceleration can make complex field generation blazingly fast.

✨Features

• Interactive voxel painting interface
• Real-time distance field generation using GPU shaders
• A comparison of multiple distance field algorithms in the report
• Optimized distance field generation pipeline for minimal latency

🛠️ Running the Application

You can either download a prebuilt executable for your system or build it yourself from source.

📦 Download

Prebuilt executables are available on the Releases page for:

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux

🔨 Building from Source

If you prefer building yourself, a nightly version of rust is required for the following features:

• generic_const_exprs
• duration_millis_float
• map_try_insert
• variant_count

You will also require the shaderc tools to be installed, this can easily be acquired by installing the Vulkan SDK.

To build the project:

1. Install Rust Nightly:

rustup install nightly
rustup default nightly

2. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Fedron/gpu-voxel-fields.git
cd gpu-voxel-fields/implementation

3. Run the application using Cargo:

cargo run --release

📈 Results Summary

Through a comparison of existing distance field generation techniques, this project develops an optimized GPU-based method that achieves real-time performance, significantly outperforming naive approaches especially on larger voxel grids.

Key improvements:

• Reduction in computation time by 99% compared to a brute force approach
• Improved scalability to larger voxel volumes

Limitations:

• Large memory usage as memory representation and compression was not a focus of the paper
• Ray marcher computation time bottleneck at large voxel volumes

📂 Repository Structure

/implementation - Rust source code for the voxel painting application and distance field generation compute shader
/report         - LaTeX source files for the full dissertation report, and a complete PDF

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.