Voxel Renderer

Voxel Renderer

A personal sandbox to learn modern OpenGL beyond tutorials. I wanted a playful scene with chunked terrain, a responsive camera, and quick knobs to test different lighting setups.

Built a chunked world with greedy meshing to cut down draw calls, wired a free-look camera, and exposed toggles for wireframes, normals, and sky gradients. A tiny height-map generator seeds the scene so I can focus on rendering tricks instead of worldbuilding.

Key Features

• Implemented greedy meshing per chunk to collapse thousands of voxel faces into tight vertex buffers.:
• Built a camera + input system with smooth damping to feel closer to a game engine than a demo.:
• Added shader hot-reload hooks to quickly iterate on lighting without restarting the app.:

Learnings

• Profiling early is critical—GPU capture tools exposed silly state changes that were tanking the frame rate.
• Math libraries (GLM) remove friction; it let me focus on rendering ideas instead of vector bookkeeping.
• Simple debug UIs make graphics tinkering sustainable; flipping wireframes on/off saved hours.