Voxel Plugin vs WaveFunctionCollapse

Voxel Plugin is voxel technology for Unreal Engine, with version 2 focused on creating and generating interactive terrain. Worlds can be changed at runtime, and those changes are described as reversible and non-destructive. Terrain is authored with stamps that generate 2D height or 3D volume data; procedural generation is deterministic when the same seeds are used. Voxel Graphs provide node-based control over world generation, but are not included in the Free plan.

The plugin targets Nanite as its main rendering pipeline and supports tessellation and displacement there. Unreal Engine's PCG framework can query voxel terrain and metadata, and PCG graphs can call Voxel Graphs; foliage workflows use PCG rather than direct plugin handling. Voxel Plugin 2 does not support cubic terrain or static, pre-baked world generation. Its documented release targets Unreal Engine 5.6 and 5.7 and is actively being developed, with documentation warning it may be buggy. The Free plan is free; Pro costs $349, paid once and is not for project budgets over $200k.

WaveFunctionCollapse is a free tool for generating bitmaps from local patterns in an input image. It limits output to NxN pixel patterns found in that input, with optional rotations and reflections to expand the pattern data. During generation, it selects an unresolved region with the lowest Shannon entropy, assigns a state, and propagates the resulting constraints. The simple tiled model instead starts from tiles and adjacency data, and a symmetry system can shorten adjacency lists for symmetrical tilesets. Constraints let the method be combined with other generative algorithms or manual creation. The README describes it as suited to game level generation and pixel art, but less suited to large full-color textures. Models can work in higher dimensions, including voxel examples. The project links to an interactive browser version and lists adaptations for Unity, Unreal Engine 5, Godot 4, and Houdini. It supports Linux, macOS, web, and Windows; listed export formats are PNG and TXT. Generation can stop at a contradiction without producing output, and the project describes determining whether a valid bitmap exists as NP-hard. The software is MIT-licensed; the image samples and tiles are not included in that license.