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Geometric Algorithms for Translucency Sorting in Minecraft [pdf]

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by HeliumHydride

5 hours ago

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| 5 comments

| douira.dev

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ANighRaisin

17 hours ago

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Binary Space partitioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning) is an elegant algorithm that solves this issue. This has fallen out of popularity due to the invention of the depth buffer and the power of modern GPUs, but it was used in DOOM and Quake.

This technique, due to the unique limitation of the children's drag-and-drop coding platform, Scratch, has made it proliferate in the 3D community. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1203675921 is an example of such a project.

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ANighRaisin

17 hours ago

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A prettier demo: https://turbowarp.org/984959784/fullscreen?stuck&hqpen&fps=6...

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djmips

9 hours ago

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BSP was not used in Doom and Quake for rendering translucency.

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CamperBob2

16 hours ago

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They seem to point out some examples in section 4 that can't be handled with space partioning. I'll confess I don't follow the reasoning. Figure 4.2 is the go-to example of a sorting problem that is handled with BSP trees.

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user____name

3 hours ago

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It works, it may just degenerate into a worst case scenario, and this particular scenario is pretty common in minecraft.

I think this is particular to auto-partitioning BSPs where the splitting planes are aligned with scene geometry.

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rendaw

12 hours ago

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Only slightly related, but since Minecraft seems to have a lot of community graphics programming associated with it I thought I'd ask here...

Does anyone know how those Minecraft realistic rendering mods work? I'm guessing today there's a lot of RTX, but e.g. in 2018 there was still fairly impressive global illumination in SEUS Renewed. Minecraft is the definition of a world with dynamic geometry, and I'm not aware of any decent realtime GI algorithms for 3d. The lighting in base Minecraft is a super basic and ugly hack. I've seen Unity's dynamic GI features and those are nowhere near as good either.

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amlib

50 minutes ago

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A lot of non raytracing GI solutions uses voxel grids on top of the world geometry, SVOGI is one of the fancy ones used in cry engine games. I imagine since minecraft essentially gives a voxel grid to you for "free" most of minecraft GI solutions also uses a similar technique.

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HeliumHydride

10 hours ago

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I don't know much about lighting, but looking at the source code of the shaders might give a clue. https://modrinth.com/discover/shaders has a lot of shaders that change the lighting. In other parts of the rendering pipeline, there are some very impressive mods utilizing GPU magic. One of them is Voxy (https://modrinth.com/mod/voxy), one that massively increases render distance with mesh shaders and level-of-detail based rendering.

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jacobp100

18 hours ago

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I had a blog post on something similar (but less sophisticated)

https://jacobdoescode.com/2025/05/18/precomputing-transparen...

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Sharlin

44 minutes ago

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This is… essentially a BSP tree traversal without splitting polys that straddle a partition plane, right?

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