Render Dragon, the graphics engine for Minecraft Bedrock Edition platforms, is everywhere, and it’s time to see what it’s capable of! Available in Preview today, we’re providing a technical preview of a new deferred lighting rendering pipeline. This is an experimental set of graphical customization features available to creators to use in add-on development. The Bedrock Creator and Render Dragon teams want to get this out to you all early so we can build these features together. Expect lots of improvements and changes over time!
A while back we kicked off the work to upgrade the rendering tech in Bedrock to Render Dragon – our homemade, modern rendering technology that would support new and exciting features. Ray tracing for Windows was one of the first big tests of Render Dragon – showcasing what a fully ray traced Minecraft could look like on bleeding-edge graphics technology. Now that Render Dragon is on all Bedrock platforms, it’s time to do something more cross-platform.
We want to enable new levels of creative expression in Minecraft with new graphics features. But we also want to make it easy for creators to share these experiences with players, regardless of what device they play on.
Features
Our deferred lighting rendering pipeline builds on the work we did for Ray tracing for Windows – specifically the PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material format. If you’ve built PBR materials for blocks in Minecraft: Raytracing for Windows, those same PBR materials will work with deferred lighting. In addition to blocks, this new rendering pipeline also supports PBR materials on entities.
These features are designed to scale across devices from mobile, to console, to PC. Over time, we’ll be able to tune quality levels to balance performance and fidelity so that the most players possible can enjoy these features.
Features included in this first technical preview include:
- PBR materials – blocks and entities
- Primary lighting (sun & moon)
- Shadows
- Bloom
- Tone mapping
We have many more features planned and look forward to hearing what you think is important to build!
For now, these features are available in Preview/Beta on:
- Windows PC
- Xbox
- Android
We plan to bring these features to as many platforms as we can, over time.
We haven’t set minimum requirements on PC or Android yet, so your mileage may vary depending on how beefy your machine is. We’ll be working to improve performance over time and learn what minimum requirements may be needed to run these features.
It’s also important to know that this technical preview is very much “technical”. We haven’t set any default values with the help of artists. So don’t blame any Mojang Studios artists for the programmer visual “artistry” in this technical preview. Also, keep in mind that features are all likely to change dramatically as we develop them. Oh, and don’t worry about the name “Deferred lighting rendering pipeline”. It’s just a technical name for now. Somewhere down the road marketing will help us come up with a new name.
Getting Started
This technical preview is available in Bedrock Preview and Beta builds on Windows PC, Xbox, and Android starting today.
For more information about Bedrock Preview and Beta builds:
- Minecraft Preview (Windows PC and Xbox) information: aka.ms/PreviewFAQ
- Minecraft beta (Android) information: aka.ms/JoinMCBeta
Ready to get started checking this out? Great! Here’s a link to our tutorials to get you started making your own add-ons using these features.
We can’t wait to see what you make and look forward to building these features alongside the community.
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