   Thoughts on voxels?
  I've been interested in voxels ever since I was introduced to them.I think it would be amazing to have every inch of everything in a game be deformable/destructable.It's a shame more developers aren't interested in advancing voxel tech.What are your thoughts on voxels?   
  http://voxels.blogspot.com/They are pretty slow :) But also pretty interesting!   ;  Too heavy.Modern computers are, if you think about it, DARN SLOW. The current computing speed can be much much much faster in the future, but at the moment we have to do with x86 mainly. Which means we have to apply a lot of optimizations in favour of realism. This includes make set animations for buildings to collapse (BFBC2). BFBC2 does allow to shoot off walls off buildings, but if you look well this is all at a set amount of positions where walls can blow off.This means it is undo-able, especially in a multi-player environment where each action / state of a collapse will have to be transmitted to other peers (else different users see a different map!).Your idea is nice, but not feasible in games. I know some maths research teams at my university do use something you suggest. For instance simulating fluids (this is very complex, I'm not talking about lame Call of Duty water effects).But if you mean on a smaller scale, it might be a nice game concept :)   ;  www.thermite3d.orgSomething else to look at if you like voxels.   ;  Really, voxels aren't slow. they're just harder to deal with because the graphics hardware grew up with polygons.it's strill possible to do some pretty fast voxel rendering off the cpu, though.check ken silverman's voxlap engine and his cave demo.voxelstein 3d was based on this too.i'm building a voxel raycaster in a glsl fragment shader. it' pretty easyand not at all slow.the main drawback of voxels, tough is its memory ccnsumption.even small sets take up a decent amount of ram.   ;Quote:Original post by DecriusToo heavy.Modern computers are, if you think about it, DARN SLOW.It's more that memory and IO are DARN SLOW. CPUs are fairly fast and could probably churn through voxels fairly well but you'd hit the memory wall pretty fast and trying to sync over the internet would just be crazy.;  This talk of CPUs being too slow is nonsense. I remember the early Delta Force games using voxel terrain way back in the 90s. In fact with careful memory alignment management you could do realtime voxel deformation without too much issue, at least at moderate video resolutions.Granted if you want to churn enough voxels to provide full-resolution graphics on a modern display, you're talking about a substantial hike in speed requirements; but memory buses have increased dramatically in speed since the Olden Days, and the actual amount of CPU power needed to do voxel rendering is pretty minimal. As another poster has already noted, the memory bandwidth and processing arrangements of modern GPUs is actually extremely well suited to rendering with voxels.Things can get expensive if you want extremely realistic deformation support, but you can do pretty damned good approximations cheaply.   ;  I've never been a fan of voxels. What they do is some sort of quantization after all, and I'm still not sure why should I want to do that.Irregular/nested voxel grids are better to a certain degree, I can see the advantage of running density computation on a volume and then shooting rays thuru it... but I'm relatively sure polys could do it too given proper management. I realize this management is definetly non-trivial, but I'd still put my bets on polys for at least another few generations...   ;  Using polygons instead of voxels is one of the biggest simplifications done in 3D. In reality, each molecule or atom (or even smaller) can be considered a voxel. A small particle bound to simple rules. One simplification could be to take bigger voxels (which is what we currently do with voxels) and one way is to only define outer layers as a flat surface. The border regions. This is THE optimization done in almost every 3D application, and works very well.Now, if we want to take the next step, which is going for a more realistic representation, this is indeed voxels (or particles). Of course, the hardware is not (yet) optimized for this, and the technique itself is much more defining, much more realistic...much more heavy.@ApochPiQSure, for our current use CPU's are doing well. But really, you really find the computers being fast? As mentioned IO etc is mostly the limiting factor, but still...current CPU's and GPU's are still DARN SLOW.Rendering complex 3D scene's take minutes up to hours. Simulations often need a few BIG simplifications. Why? Our computers are sooo slow. If you think about future developments, computer chips will be a zillion times faster. Then more complex techniques are much more do-able.Voxels are very do-able, but the current hardware isn't helping you much with it.   ;  Content creation is the problem. Imagine if every building had to be made out of bricks and mortar, where each of those is set of voxels.Suff that adds most to visuals (grass, leaves) isn't doable with voxels.Terrain of adequate granularity would need to be sampled at sub-pixel resolution and shaded dynamically to look and feel better than current bump-mapped, shader processed textures do.Collision detection...Physics simulation - voxels could make stuff fall apart in realistic manner, but to look realistic, the amount of voxels would need to be prohibitive.Voxel rendering is a dead end. They might be used somewhere for certain aspects, but to render or process them directly is just a waste.Rendering is a solved problem - as soon as unbiased rendering goes real-time, the distinction between real world photographs and CGI will be only limited by content creation. And for that, voxels are primary means of modeling is unsuitable.Even other applications (medical and similar) process voxels into polygons for rendering, since it's so much easier to manipulate.   