Rendering a 3D scene at low resolution can make its details jump between pixels as the camera moves. LunarBlank spent months trying to get a more stable look inspired by Project Shadowglass. Billboards and custom sampling got close, but neither stopped the flicker completely.
CUBY, LunarBlank's Godot plugin, keeps the objects fully 3D. The main camera gets its pixelated view from low-resolution cubemaps.
A cubemap captures the scene in six directions from one point. The main camera samples those views by direction, which solved the flicker LunarBlank saw when turning in place.
Walking through the scene raised another problem. As the camera moves away from a cubemap's capture point, the recorded objects no longer line up with the new view. CUBY handles this by rendering two cubemaps in real time through Godot's compositor.
It stores depth in each cubemap's alpha channel, so a screen-space shader can reproject both captures to match the camera's new position. The shader blends them as the player moves.
Once the movement was working, LunarBlank shaped the look by quantizing and dithering the cubemap textures.
The low capture resolution gives the scene its chunky detail; quantization limits the colors, while dithering breaks up the transitions between them.
CUBY renders twelve camera views for its two cubemaps, six views each, on top of the main camera. If performance drops, LunarBlank suggests lowering the cubemap resolution.
The plugin requires Godot's Forward+ renderer and does not support mobile or web builds.
You can see CUBY in motion and find the plugin through the links below:
- Plugin: CUBY on itch.io
- Video: LunarBlank's technical breakdown
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lunar_blank/
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