So, instead of dealing with flat triangles with get rasterized to picture elements (pixels), a voxel engine deals with volume elements (voxels). The crudest fo

So, instead of dealing with flat triangles with get rasterized to picture elements (pixels), a voxel engine deals with volume elements (voxels). The crudest form of this would be something like Minecraft, where the world is literally made out of cubes. More advanced work would be something like what Ken Silverman did back during the Build engine days, a modern example of which can be seen here: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/pnd3d.htm http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/pnd3d.htm . The current state of the art appears to be something like voxel quest ( http://www.voxelquest.com/ http://www.voxelquest.com/ ) or Atomontage Engine ( http://www.atomontage.com/ http://www.atomontage.com/ ). ~ If you want to learn a bit about voxel engines, Flipcode had a decent series on landscape engines: http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_Engines-Part_1_Introduction.shtml http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_En... . Basically, the main problem is raycasting into a scene. To learn more about that, I'd look into octrees as a start ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree ).