Smoothing Option for Chiseling

[Blythe]

Good day folks! 

I'm convinced that the chiseling in this game is by far one of the coolest details I've seen in games like Vintage Story, however, I feel it could benefit from one further detail which may be a bit of a game changer with builds. That change would be giving the players the ability to smooth out their chiseling, giving them various different angles they could create as opposed to leaving chiseled edges blocky and jagged. See my crude drawings for a few small visual examples.

I'm convinced that if this were possible for the players to do, it would only increase the depth of detail people put into their builds and decorations.

Let me know what you think, I'd like to hear your opinions!

[Diff]

Nifty idea, only see one issue with it, but it's a big one: texturing. Right now, pixels in textures map pretty directly to voxels. What color is this voxel? Just look at the one, precise pixel that it aligns to in the texture. That all breaks when you cut corners. 

Your sketch works in 2d without textures, but try drawing or imagining how a surface gets smoothed with a texture applied to it. Does it get stretched? Are there multiple seams in cases like your curves? Both could look pretty bad, and I'm not sure there's a good solution. 

[LadyWYT]

43 minutes ago, Blythe said:

I'm convinced that if this were possible for the players to do, it would only increase the depth of detail people put into their builds and decorations.

Let me know what you think, I'd like to hear your opinions!

I do agree that it would be really cool and open up a lot of options. However, I'm not sure how feasible it is to actually code, or how many system resources it would take to render a plethora of smooth surfaces like that. Lower end hardware might struggle quite a lot.

 

1 minute ago, Diff said:

Nifty idea, only see one issue with it, but it's a big one: texturing. Right now, pixels in textures map pretty directly to voxels. What color is this voxel? Just look at the one, precise pixel that it aligns to in the texture. That all breaks when you cut corners. 

Your sketch works in 2d without textures, but try drawing or imagining how a surface gets smoothed with a texture applied to it. Does it get stretched? Are there multiple seams in cases like your curves? Both could look pretty bad, and I'm not sure there's a good solution. 

Yeah, this too. I'm also thinking that while it's a neat idea, it's ultimately going to clash horribly with the game's artstyle. While there are some very detailed models, everything adheres to a blocky aesthetic. Smooth curves like this will look horribly out of place.

[Venusgate]

I don't know much about dynamic voxel rendering, but I do know that a cylinder is an order of magnitude simpler than a complex curve. It would be rough to have that on a wish list.

As for aesthetic, I agree with being able to incorporate angles achievable with beams into chiseling. That could go a lot of places. And if you could make small enough 'chisel beams' you could make your own curvature with enough strait edges.

All that said, it might just be simpler for the same effect to add a mk2 chisel that increases voxel fidelity (vodelity?) one or two more divisions. AKA, cutting a block into 32^3 or 64^3. Add a jeweler's loop, and let the madness flow.

[ifoz]

5 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Yeah, this too. I'm also thinking that while it's a neat idea, it's ultimately going to clash horribly with the game's artstyle. While there are some very detailed models, everything adheres to a blocky aesthetic. Smooth curves like this will look horribly out of place.

Honestly in the last few updates VS has really started to become more of a low-poly game as opposed to a strictly blocky game when it comes to the models. Stuff like the boats having curved hulls, and all of the machinery in a certain story location being quite detailed. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, I think it's a good way to cement VS as its own thing stylistically, in a way that not many other voxel games do.
You'd just have to make sure the curves themselves are a bit lower poly, not completely smooth, and I think it would fit right in.

[Blythe]

On 12/13/2025 at 10:44 PM, ifoz said:

You'd just have to make sure the curves themselves are a bit lower poly, not completely smooth, and I think it would fit right in.

Precisely! For example, instead of making a perfect circle, I'd like to see it being a bunch of slightly steeper or softer angles making up the circle. It's not a perfectly round thing, more like a big ol' polygon of some amount. You still see edges, textures are still flat, but depending on the chisel work done, it'd be harder to see the angles directly from far away and such.