Voxels

[Junttius]

I've been wondering, what happened to them? Pretty impressive terrain graphics were created with voxels that didn't require that much hardware power in the 90's.

Just remembering Novalogic games (Delta force, Comanche etc.) and Appeal's Outcast for instance used to look sweet back then.

[Mastablasta]

If by "not that much hardware power" you mean "goddamn super computers" then sure. And that's also why they disappeared.

[Aethyrguard]

If by "not that much hardware power" you mean "goddamn super computers" then sure. And that's also why they disappeared.

That isn't true at all..

Voxels are still coming.. just not really applied to gaming uses much "yet". I work with voxels daily tho and absolutely love them.. heh

[Junttius]

If by "not that much hardware power" you mean "goddamn super computers" then sure. And that's also why they disappeared.

Yeah, well novalogic's voxel terrain-games didn't require that much, Outcast did. But outcast also didn't support 3d-cards and used polygon objects/characters/buildings + pretty advanced lighting/water effects

That isn't true at all..

Voxels are still coming.. just not really applied to gaming uses much "yet". I work with voxels daily tho and absolutely love them.. heh

Interesting stuff, thanks!

[Junttius]

interesting interview from 2004 here about voxels.

some quoting

In applications where you deal with "real world" data, e.g. data generated by a 3D imaging device like computer tomography, you are able to deal with a much higher level of detail at the same time at much higher rendering performance than any polygonal representation could achieve. E.g. an object scanned to a voxel data set with 1024x1024x1024 voxels = 1GVoxel can be rendered with interactive performance on any Pentium 4 CPU. The same object represented by a polygonal mesh that still does not reach level detail of the voxel object, easily exceeds several ten million triangles. The rendering performance for such a huge mesh on today's most powerful graphics boards is much lower that our voxel graphics technology. Another important aspect is that the voxel data base allows us to generate more physical and therefore more realistic models of the world we see around us. Our real world is solid not hollow. The interaction of a ray of light with an object's surface is typically not an interaction in a single point but in a whole transition layer. When we talk about photorealistic rendering I'm sure that voxel graphics will play a bigger and bigger role in future. As we all know voxel graphics can be found today where the most demanding visualization tasks have to be solved, e.g. rendering of special effects like explosions, fire, clouds, fur. Today voxel graphics is less popular in the animation market only because of missing software tools and because of the computing power needed. Our VGLR graphics technology already solves the later aspect. We are able to handle large data sets with highest levels of details at high performance. However in our days the most relevant question is what the needs of different applications are. Both worlds, the polygonal and the voxel world, have their advantages, polygons for designed "artificial" objects and voxels for "real world", scanned objects. With the availability of modern voxel graphics technologies like VGLR we will see more voxel graphics in future in many application fields.

[Klodovik]

If by "not that much hardware power" you mean "goddamn super computers" then sure.

I thought supercomputers back in 90. were much, MUCH faster then your regular 386 (without added math coprocessor) based one.

[Aethyrguard]

The main reason why we don't see more stuff using voxels isn't because of the demands on the end user as much as the demands for new creative solutions for tools to apply the uses of voxels within todays current gen gaming cards and engines. Simply put developers haven't jumped on the bandwagon "yet".

My system for example can edit a voxel model that in terms of comparability to a standard poly mesh would be somewhere around 100-2000x as many "points of curvature" including cavity modeling and volumetric texturing as a poly without noticing any hit at all in performance.

Meaning, I can work on a voxel mesh that is so high detail that a poly mesh of similar or comparable quality in surface detail would destroy my computers ability to manipulate the mesh at all.

[Omutb]

Simply put developers haven't jumped on the bandwagon "yet".

Its one of need.

If they dont need to use something, they wont.

[Alienchild]

Its one of need.

If they dont need to use something, they wont.

That's a simplification. Game engines use voxels. Red Alert used voxels on for instance (on vehicles).

[Aethyrguard]

Its one of need.

If they dont need to use something, they wont.

Actually it has more to do with people willing to pioneer out the technology itself rather than find applications for it. As of present there simply aren't that many "software" developers (not including game developers at this point for this discussion), who are pushing the technology forward outside of the most intensive applications. That doesn't mean there aren't any but there are very few.

The link included in my first post is one of the few application developers who are actually working actively to pioneer this area of 3D visualization. You have to remember that there are seperate coders who work on various parts of any engine be it 3D visualization, modeling, texturing, even gaming. Because it is a very new technology I'd wager that out of all the programmers in the world that work actively on 3D applications in general only a small handful even understand what voxels can do let alone how to apply this to their own projects.

Furthermore, you have the other smaller "format wars" such as "raster vs raytrace" that is taking up more of the dev dollar because of the media coverage, understanding and hype surrounding it.

[Omutb]

That's a simplification. Game engines use voxels. Red Alert used voxels on for instance (on vehicles).

Indeed, and Crysis used it for its terrain system.

As I said, its one of need, they decided they needed to use them because it made something easier or faster.

[Neista]

Outcast was really something at the time, i wondered what happened to voxels too.

[Boltgun]

For now gamers go for textures and effects on it (which means they go for a bunch of 2D effects). Currently voxels that gives the level of eye candy triangles + 2d effects gives is unattainable for computers. Lack of research on it doesn't help.

It may come back sooner then we think, once people will be sick of all these physics engines (so many games who just slap em in and call it a day), and when textures/full screen effect will be perfected, we'll want deformable and breakable stuff. There is lots of unexplored land at this moment because our games meshes are hard to change dynamically.

That it if we don't move to vector indeed or smoothed meshes. For info triangle polygons is the poor man's 3d, but what programs like 3ds max do our computers can't make it at 60fps.

[PingBong]

ive been working on my hobby voxel/vertex combination engine for a bit over a year now (not like full time avg an hour a day). its ALOT of experimentation as information about the area is kinda thin and ive rewritten big chunks of it several times when i get an epiphany the results in terms of model detail are pretty awesome imo, i render the equivalent of ~2m triangles at around 30 fps and voxels made physics implementation much more painless. All my attempts at decent decent shading systems (aside form raytrace) have ended in flames tho but mebe thats coz im a nub