Can i modify terrain on a large scale without using Voxels?

Hi!

I’d like to create the sort of destructible ground that you get in Voxel-based games like minecraft, but on a sphere-shaped planet where the gravity pulls you towards the middle in a realistic fashion. (i.e. it orients your character to stand on the sphere at all times, accounting for the gravity properly)

Is it possible to make a large (but not infinite) world out of a mesh which then you can punch holes into? My problem with voxels is that due to the sphere nature of the world you would run into problems if you used square or any non-sphere shaped voxels as you go down layer by layer towards the center of the sphere.

hi, gravity on a sphere is no problem, just a math thing…
for a block terrain i can recommend this thread for you:

if you want to get those blocks replaced by a terrain matching the cubes you have to process the octree with marching cube algorithm…
i never got so far, just experimented some octree ideas testing performance but polyvox looks really interesting and some people seem to got it working in ue4

some interesting things about this topic:

https://caj.informatik.uni-jena.de/caj/file/view;jsessionid=F87E15B1E0416B337CE0CCB061E2F883?id=1118 (german but really interesting)
Animated Sparse Voxel Octrees: In-depth pt1/3 - YouTube

Yeah, I’ve seen the voxel stuff, the problem with a sphere made out of voxels is that you would run into problems regarding “digging” in straight lines, it would be impossible to dig a straight line towards the center unless you started on the exact center of one of the 6 sides where the cubes line up.

Marching cubes seem like pretty low-level stuff that you couldn’t do in BPs.

Is there really no way to cut a sphere into chunks for optimization (like you would cut a voxel world into chunks) and use some feature to cut holes into it? I have a feeling the basic dynamic mesh destruction of UE4 wouldn’t cut it. (heh)