The impact of streaming architectures on Voxels?

[cygnet]

OTOH, I have.

I notice that almost none (possibly exactly none) of the previous contributors on this thread have written a voxel renderer. At least the commenter immediately previous identifies occlusion ("everything hiding something else") as important. Polygon renderers perform poorly in the presence of massive occlusion. That's why video game environments never have blackberry thickets in them with chinks of blue sky showing through. A "voxel' renderer will be able to do that in realtime before a polygon renderer will. Soon in fact. "Photorealism" is not the same thing as ecological realism, by the way.

 

[thejeek]

I notice that almost none (possibly exactly none) of the previous contributors on this thread have written a voxel renderer.

FWIW, I wrote one many years ago. It took a complex (for the time) animated polygon model of a footballer and then pre-rendered the various animations to sequences of voxel-spaces. The result was uncannily good animation for the time, and worked well on the 486 + VESA graphics hardware we targeted. The pitch was a textured plain. It was a classic space/time tradeoff - acceptable for a game where natural movement of the players was important and it was acceptable to have 22 essentially identical players.

Anyway - that was then and this is now. The same tradeoffs just don't apply on modern hardware.

 

[Guden Oden]

Polygon renderers perform poorly in the presence of massive occlusion.

Actually, that's not entirely true. You can pile on as much occlusion as you want as long as you do front-to-back rendering. There's also tech in today's 3D accelerators to fight overdraw, and besides, today's cards have a sizeable amount of fillrate so that they can tolerate quite a bit of overdraw without having framerates go down the crapper.

Voxels on the other hand will always either look like shit as soon as you get close to whatever object they represent, or else occupy so much memory that there's no way any larger dataset could be represented.

A "voxel' renderer will be able to do that in realtime before a polygon renderer will. Soon in fact.

The thing is though, nobody's interested in playing a game where the ONLY object in the level is a blackberry thicket with sky showing through it. ...Because that's what you're gonna have with a voxel engine. While polygon objects are typically - though not technically neccessarily - coarser, they do not consume as massive amounts of memory as high-res voxel objects do.

Also, as already mentioned in this thread, distant voxels will suffer from enormous aliasing, which hardly meshes with your claims of photo-realism... Voxels is essentially an evolutionary dead-end as far as realtime 3D graphics is concerned. It has fringe uses, but will never be feasible as a general type of tech. If it had been, it would have been in widespread use by now.

Edit:
(Oh, and Holy Thread Resurrection, Batman! )

 

[LunchBox]

All this talk about voxels makes me want to go out and buy a freakishly big amount of

Just have a question...

Do voxels need to be texture mapped?