I have looked into the different methods such as surface nets, marching cubes, dual contouring and laplacian smoothing but I haven’t tried them all as I don’t know how to implement them. I have used simple laplacian smoothing but it doesn’t line up with the next chunk and there are all sorts of problems. At the moment I am using a multidimensional byte array but should I be using floats? Can anyone help me with this and point me in the right direction?
You’re on the right track. Doing smooth deformable terrain just takes a lot of time to learn, implement, and fix fussy bugs. The Voxel Farm blog is a great resource for this stuff and the author documents much of his journey from start to now.