What is Clayxels exactly?
Clayxels is a Unity plugin available on the Asset Store that adds volumetric capabilities to the engine. It's an extremely simple tool to sculpt, animate and create volumetric effects from the editor or in your game. Internally it uses SDF and voxels to make this tech perform well enough to make games with it.
How's performance?
Clayxels is a GPU hungry system, how well it will perform for your case really depends on how you intend to use this plugin.
When used to create models, Clayxels will compute the data upfront and only once, no constant processing per frame will be required. Since Clayxels will still evaluate your sculpts, your game will not be able to easily run on low-end hardware without a dedicated modern GPU. If you end up freezing your assets to mesh you will no longer need Clayxels runtime at all and you'll end up with a standard unity mesh assets. Note that Clayxels meshes are fairly dense by default. Nothing stops you from doing more interactive work like procedural animations or effects, but know that this kind of work is best suited for a dedicated modern GPU. Skipping frames, manually triggering evaluations, limiting video ram usage, you will have control over all of that to tweak how Clayxels can perform for your interactive game content.
When used to create models, Clayxels will compute the data upfront and only once, no constant processing per frame will be required. Since Clayxels will still evaluate your sculpts, your game will not be able to easily run on low-end hardware without a dedicated modern GPU. If you end up freezing your assets to mesh you will no longer need Clayxels runtime at all and you'll end up with a standard unity mesh assets. Note that Clayxels meshes are fairly dense by default. Nothing stops you from doing more interactive work like procedural animations or effects, but know that this kind of work is best suited for a dedicated modern GPU. Skipping frames, manually triggering evaluations, limiting video ram usage, you will have control over all of that to tweak how Clayxels can perform for your interactive game content.
Is it just ray-marching?
Clayxels doesn't do any heavy per-pixel SDF ray-marching, it splats a lightweight point-cloud around the surface or generates a smooth mesh, and only when it's strictly needed. This data is very compact in memory and can be rendered in a whole bunch of different ways, even just using plain vertex shaders.
Which platforms are supported?
Right now Windows and Mac Os M1, no mobile or WebGL, but you can always freeze to meshes and deploy just about anywhere.
Can I use colliders?
You can use any collider Unity offers, you can even generate a mesh while the game is running and use that as a mesh-collider.
Can I export my sculpts to other apps?
You can freeze anything you do to a plain standard mesh at any time and export it to FBX. You can then use the FBX file from Blender or pretty much any commercial 3d app out there.
How can I use Clayxels as a programmer?
You have open c# apis to rely on, you can peek in there and even hack them if production requires so.
You can expand the core compute-shader with your custom Signed Distance Field math.
You can write your own shaders or use Amplify Shader Editor to wire shading graphs with nodes.
You can expand the core compute-shader with your custom Signed Distance Field math.
You can write your own shaders or use Amplify Shader Editor to wire shading graphs with nodes.
Do I get support when I'm in troubles?
Yes, join our Discord channel and ask for help anytime! Just please keep in mind that kindly asking for tips and help is one thing, requesting active development is a whole different story and it won't be guaranteed in any way.
This stuff reminds of Dreams on PS4? : )
Clayxels started as an original personal project to build assets fast and be creative without having to worry about polygon meshes or shaders. This work started before Dreams was released, but it wasn't long before we discovered the amazing work done by Media Molecule and that inspired us to try similar techniques. Dreams surely was and still is a key reference point for Clayxels, getting to where we are now was a long and exciting journey where many things came together, you can read about it here:
Clayxels, my journey into making a game-designer friendly creation tool.
Clayxels, my journey into making a game-designer friendly creation tool.