Hehe all this voxel stuff lately is giving me flashbacks to my elementary school science fair project (a voxel terrain renderer)... back then voxels were very cool, but they haven't really moved a long way in the last decade compared to polygons. That said, I'm willing to revisit the idea and indeed voxels still do have several desirable characteristics.
Let me respond to a few points in the article though. The guy did admit that he wasn't a graphics guy though so I'll cut him some slack
When displaying a forest, for example, it makes a tree and then puts another tree in front.
It has been a while since we rendered using the painter's algorithm
their system has unlimited power.
Ooh, so all that remains is to formulate the halting problem, or even TSP/3SAT/etc. in terms of voxel ray casting and I've put a lot of CS people out of their jobs, not to mention solved a lot of terribly hard problems. Reminds me of this
fun paper .
Point cloud data is much more efficient then polygon data. That’s not in dispute. It’s more accurate and models can be hand made or laser scanned in, but either way the result is that it looks better.
Meh... that's kind of what you're trying to prove one way or another - you can't just "declare" it to be true. Particularly absurd considering no performance figures are given, which means you can't really draw any "efficiency" conclusions whatsoever. The whole conclusions is actually pretty simplified and misleading, but I appreciate what they were trying to say.
They're also falling into the ray tracing trap of making claims like "we can render a bazillion peta-tera-bytes of data!" where such a measure is completely irrelevant and misleading. I can render a bazillion polygons too, if the majority are occluded, offscreen or at lower LOD/tessellation
Anyways there is one, big, huge argument for using voxels in my opinion: easy, efficient, scalable LOD. They mention it briefly in the article, but really this is entirely the motivation for using such a data structure IMHO. Certainly doing good LOD with polygons isn't impossible (and it can be done without popping contrary to what the article says - check out the skydive from Crysis!), but it's also pretty complicated.
I'm interested to see where this stuff goes, and I can understand Carmack's interest in that the design elegantly flows together with virtual texturing (although arguably with voxels you could represent the texture data right in your data set as well, without needing parameterization... maybe that's what he's planning).
Thanks for the link!