Welcome back, after a long haitus to our Unity 3D Voxel Terrain. We’re going to start by looking at how to take advantage of compute shaders to handle advanced destruction techniques. This video will look specifically at introducing compute shaders: highly parallelized computation done on the GPU. Ideally this means we’ll be able to distribute calculating voxel destruction in parallel effectively calculating the effects on every single voxel in our terrain simultaneously. Neat stuff!

We aren’t going to do any of that here though. Instead we’re going to look at introducing Compute Shaders and how to use them in Unity so we can expand on them and do more with them in the next video.

Some handy Compute Shader resources:

Kyle Halladay’s Getting Started with Compute Shaders in Unity: http://kylehalladay.com/blog/tutorial/2014/06/27/Compute-Shaders-Are-Nifty.html

Emerson Shaffer’s Unity3D Compute Shader Introduction and Tutorial: http://www.emersonshaffer.com/blog/2016/5/11/unity3d-compute-shader-introduction-tutorial