14 ms·

How Voxels Became ‘The Next Big Thing’

159 points by mariuz 8y ago

Bizarro 8y ago
Atomontage demos are cool, but there's always been some controversy about what their tech can do in the "real-world".
- anfilt 8y ago
  Well demo video's don't tell you a lot. They claim to have some secret sauce. However, the demo video's makes you even question that they have a secret sauce at all. When you see them delete parts of the game world you see how thin the ground layer is when part of it is deleted. The are big problems with voxels. The simplest being space as the game world increases in size the amount vowels grows with the 3rd power. My big problem is no technical details have been published. They claim to have a pending patent on their site. However, that may not really tell us much. I have played with voxels myself and oct-trees and other algorithms related to voxels. The only real use voxels have seen is medical imaging. If they have figured something out they should be having a paper in a math journal. I doubt it though mainly since it would involve pushing thing to the limit or beyond the limits of information theory. The only other option for such small voxels is massive amount data storage or object with relative homogeneous structure at which point it's not much better than hollow polygons. Not only the main memory is limited, and while SSDs are getting better when playing with high density voxels with a pretty how amount entropy you can quickly exist main memory. So what I did instead was just request exposed/surface voxels and arrange the octree data structure to be linear from outside in to help with memory caches. Still all the really mattered was the exposed voxels, and that's not much different from a hollow polygon. Honestly, after having played with voxels myself I would say they are cool, but you not making a whole game out of them. If anything it's just tool to be used in some parts of a game. I will add an other thing that gives me doubt they have anything really new is the fact when they start destroying their models you see the same color in side the model for the most part. Even the brick wall that got destroyed is pretty homogeneous.
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    Looks like they just formed a real company https://www.atomontage.com/blog/2018/4/5/atomontage-inc-launches-to-bring-unprecedented-voxel-technology-to-market-announces-initial-founding-team-and-advisors https://www.atomontage.com/blog/2018/4/5/atomontage-inc-laun.... One of their investors is an MD specializing in imaging. https://www.atomontage.com/#team-section https://www.atomontage.com/#team-section That'll be their bread and butter. I always wondering if the community picked up VoxelQuest https://www.voxelquest.com/ https://www.voxelquest.com/ and ran with it, but last I looked that wasn't the case. I'm too old to do serious graphics programming, but might be interested in a voxel engine written in C# with a good community.
    - echelon 8y ago
      > I'm too old to do serious graphics programming Too old? Maybe too busy, but never too old.
    - fesoliveira 8y ago
      The issue with VoxelQuest is that, while it was an astonishing piece of technology, it wasn't documented in any way a normal human can understand. I spent several hours trying to read it, and while I'm impressed with the results, the lack of design patterns and structured code (the code is separated in just about 10 files, and it is almost 50k lines long, if not more) makes it really difficult to work with. I dabbled in voxels myself, even wrote a Minecraft clone and all that, but VoxelQuest was the first real voxel engine I saw working in a really nice way. It had proper lighting, shadows and even nice effects such as reflections. It is kind of a bummer that the dev quit the project, so much potential wasted :(
      - gavanwoolery 8y ago
        I agree with you on the poor documentation - that stemmed from me almost never working with others professionally and either doing a lot of solo contract work or work where my code was mostly isolated from other systems. I've gotten a little bit better about standard practices after working for a company that uses them and team work is super-critical as small changes can potentially cost $10k+ in damage per hour, so understanding the code and making it testable is more important than producing new code. Over the past year I have been working on Voxel Quest silently, because progress is so incredibly slow that I still do not have much interesting to show (and I dove to the deepest depths of feature creep and tried to build a compiler/transpiler to address a lot of problems I was having with c++ and slow turnaround times). To be honest, over the past month or so I got frustrated with my slow progress and took a break to work on a simple 2D game, just to see if I had any ability to control what I consider my greatest weakness: failure to prioritize. So far that experiment is successful but now I'm asking myself if making a 2D game is a waste of my knowledge - maybe that is true or maybe its just shiny object syndrome. >_< Overall the biggest problem is my past two years have been almost entirely consumed by my work, renovating my house, raising a kid, and other stuff. I typically have less than 10 hours per week to concentrate on projects (more often 5), so I am working about 1/8 to 1/16 as fast as I was when working on VQ full time. Anyhow, it would be nice to work on it in greater capacity, or at least something similar, I just dont know where that money would come from. I am very hesitant to ask people for money at this point, given my track record, so I feel like my next thing has to be self-funded or funded by someone who can truly afford to lose the money. I could easily find people who would throw more money at VQ but I dont think that it would be a sufficient amount to survive off of, so it would be effectively wasted. Not sure what to do in the short term, to be honest, other than work at my current pace. :/ I'll share my current progress publicly once there is something interesting to show.
- gavanwoolery 8y ago
  I was lucky enough to play some of their demos in person recently. I was really surprised by the performance (even in VR). I feel like there are at least a few real-world applications that could benefit with regards to visualization. Particularly "organic" stuff - I noticed that voxels were able to capture details like skin wrinkles and anatomy really well (they demoed a beating heart captured from a CT scan).
kazinator 8y ago
This site does something weird, I haven't seen before. As you scroll around the page, not clicking on anything, it adds entries to your stack of visited pages! You then have to hit the back-button N times to get out. It's stealthily redirecting to itself or something like that. You can monitor this: stay on the page, and then every once in a while right click on the back-button in Firefox (or however it's done in your browser to pop up the forward/back list). See the growing number of repetitions of the page title in the list.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  With JS you can push things into the history. Handy for somethings in a single page application, but misused in this application.
- andreareina 8y ago
  One of the reasons I've disabled js on Medium.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Just another reason to not even visit medium. That site has become complete garbage.
- ivanfon 8y ago
  Weird... Is there any reason for them to do that or is it safe to assume it’s an error?
- seandougall 8y ago
  I’m not getting that on Safari mobile, but I do hit a ton of forced reloads due to repeated JS issues if I try to zoom in on the images. I wonder if that might be related in some way.
- brobinson 8y ago
  HTML5 history API abuse
hartror 8y ago
Waiting for one of these demos to include animated characters. Not holding my breath.
- milesvp 8y ago
  There's been a lot of work done in the last 5 years on animating voxel characters. You can probably do a google search and find some papers to your satisfaction. It is something of a challenge though, in that voxels used as an atomic unit can't deform. I can't remember what tricks are used, but I believe it requires pervertig the voxel engine to add exceptions/complexity to deal with animation.
acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
Voxels always where the next big thing. The problem is they dont just demand ressources n^3 for all dimensions- they demand n^6, if you want to go into fine grained detail depending on closeness to the actor. Cube: Sauerbraten did go there, and it uses something like oct-trees to store these tesselated, refined voxels. And that is where the whole concept crawls on the shore to die - the tooling for this to work with all that has been invented before is just- not efficient- to sculpt in voxels, you basically send marching cubes through polygon models. Personally that was the point where i dropped it- because- when i have polys allready- and dont need the destructable physics (they ruin gameplay &performance anyway most of the time) - then why bother. Its one of those technical superior solutions which never seem to surpass the legacy solutions (like Rust and C). My assumption is, that one day, the polygon world will just eat the voxel world- having a .toVoxel.ApplyPhysicalModel(Sand).AfterPhysicsRestDo(ToPoly), and thats what will remain. Very small cubes of dust.
- teraflop 8y ago
  Where are you getting n^6 from? A hierarchical level-of-detail scheme (e.g. the one used in Sauerbraten) is still only n^3 in the worst case. If you store one full-resolution copy of your world, and then a copy with 1/2 the resolution, then 1/4 the resolution and so on, you get a geometric series that converted to only a constant-factor overhead.
  - acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
    You are right, its been quite a while since i have dealt with the cube-engine. The Level of detail mechanism just adds a constant to the formula- basically speeding up the n^3 voxel growth as the player explores the world in detail and distance at the same time in the worst case. Looking at a ants-mandibles-mikro-biota, while observing a planet near the horizon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsjeiLklThY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsjeiLklThY
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    You need a way to anizotrophpic filter the voxels. This means the mipmap should be fully indexable. That is n^3 * m memory for mipmap and n^4 filtering... Isotopic filtering is easier, just 3*n. However, it will make surfaces look... unreal, as if physics didn't form them, at times. You cannot wing the quality as easily in 3D though. Continuity is paramount as is some degree of smoothness. Ringing is unacceptable.
matte_black 8y ago
Voxels will be key for further VR immersion. In a VR game, being able to look at things very close, and seeing smaller and smaller details almost infinitely, will help go a long way toward making things feel more real. Think taking a break in an FPS, and kneeling down to see the blades of grass, and then closer to see dirt and pebbles, and even closer to maybe seeing ants.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  > being able to look at things very close, and seeing smaller and smaller details almost infinitely That is called tesselation and it's already there in games for more than a decade.
  - veli_joza 8y ago
    There's so much misunderstanding and wrong terminology surrounding voxels. Voxels are a way to store world data in memory, basically 3d bitmaps. They won't give you infinite details, just the opposite - they can only give you single '3d resolution'. To actually get infinite details, you have to switch underlining world representation from static data (meshes, voxels) to mathematical (perlin noise, fractals). Here you make an important trade-off - mathematical representation is harder to make changes to, because each modification would increase complexity of math formula used to describe the world. You can see lot of deformations in voxel demos but they are global transformations (scale, shear). Minecraft uses hybrid approach. Inital world is described by math (called world generation) but it's then serialized (sampled) as data with specific voxel size, that you can easily manipulate. Edit: another, IMO far more impressive approach is Media Molecules' upcoming Dreams software that uses constructive solid geometry and sparse distance fields to describe and manipulate 3d geometry. Here's a detailed tech talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
firedev 8y ago
Hope they'll make it, always liked voxels.
lukewrightmain 8y ago
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asdfnionio 8y ago
I don't think the recent surge in interest in voxels is from people with deep knowledge of the technology. For the vast majority of people voxels are just "that thing Minecraft uses." That's why every indie game made in the last five years is made of huge blocks with low-res textures.
- erikb 8y ago
  I was really surprised that this is the only comment mentioning the obvious. That will be 60% or more of the current revival. Additionally there are probably quite a few people who didn't know anything about Voxels, but transitioned the "pixelart" hype into the 3D world, coming to the same end point. I bet both these reasons together make 90% of the current interest.
strictnein 8y ago
I remember when Voxels were the "Next Big Thing", 20 years ago. Delta Force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game) Which used the Voxel Space engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space
- hardwaresofton 8y ago
  What was/is holding voxel back? the new programming model? computation density? I guess minecraft is an example of a voxel game (supposed a voxel game written in block style according to a random post on the internet[0]) that became really popular -- so I guess the answer could be "nothing", but it sure seems like voxels are still niche (and don't want to be). [0]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/voxel-games-vs-block-games.286747/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/voxel-games-vs-block-games.2...
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > What was/is holding voxel back? The fact that the domains they might be used in are also the domains people are guaranteed to have spent a lot of money on specialized polygon-pushing processors. Voxel techniques seemed to peak at about the time of the last hurrah of CPU-based rendering.
  - s-macke 8y ago
    The „Voxel Space“ engine from the 90th has only very little to do with what we call voxel today. It it basically a raycasting engine for height maps [0]. It is very limited. You can‘t look up and down more than 20 degrees and you can‘t even render houses, cars or trees. [0] https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    The main problem is memory bandwidth at higher resolutions. Minecraft runs at a really low resolution. (Internally.) Occlusion handling is less efficient too because bounding and occlusion volumes are discrete and either very inaccurate or nearly as slow as rendering the voxels.
sergiotapia 8y ago
What happened to that australian company that had millions in funding for voxel tech? They seems quite skiddish and didn't want to show all their information in their demos. Did anything come of it? Euclideon - 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
- Animats 8y ago
  2018 Euclideon video.[1] The big quadrillion-vowel worlds and planet-sized world claims seem to have disappeared, but now they can do small-scale voxel projects and handle deformation. No info as to how, and no products on their site for non-static voxel environments. Voxel systems are straightforward if everything is in memory, but how do they scale? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5JqYYye3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5JqYYye3w [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/content/basics-gpu-voxelization https://developer.nvidia.com/content/basics-gpu-voxelization
  - toxicFork 8y ago
    The video you linked to in your [1] is of Automontage. Automontage and Euclideon are different teams. Euclideon's channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/EuclideonOfficial https://www.youtube.com/user/EuclideonOfficial I myself like Automontage better because they are waaay less "hype" and more "here's what I have".
    - toxicFork 8y ago
      Typo: It should be Atomontage
  - mlvljr 8y ago
    They are now selling uber-fast (orderS of magnitude faster than the traditional competition, from some of the vids) LIDAR / etc visualizers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvmRgi0gZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvmRgi0gZQ
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cwyers 8y ago
I'm not sure what exactly that Playstation 2-looking tank in the video is supposed to do to convince me that voxels are the next big thing, but it's not doing it.
- lawlessone 8y ago
  you're looking at the wrong part.
tjpnz 8y ago
Despite all of the controversy I'm still in awe at what Hello Games were able to pull off using this technique in No Man's Sky.
5kyn3t 8y ago
Is there somewhere a "hello World" code about how to create such a voxel in same sense as this article suggests? Are they just creating "boxes" or "cubes" for each voxel?
- garmaine 8y ago
  Ray tracing is one oft used method. Store voxels in a kd tree and do a directed search to find the first intersection (first “filled” cube intersecting with the ray).
shultays 8y ago
Here is a very old voxel project that still amazes me http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm It has pretty cool looking visuals, dynamic objects and some basic physics as well. I think the most impressive part the developer was able to run this on ~10-15 years old computers.
- Nition 8y ago
  For those that don't know, Ken Silverman also created the Build engine that runs Duke Nukem 3D and others.
alkonaut 8y ago
So voxels makes some things easier than with polygons. What is HARD with voxels? Animation? shadow rendering?
- erikb 8y ago
  Without some tricks, the number of calculations increases drastically.
audunw 8y ago
I think the trojan horse for voxel engines is lighting systems. There are already game engines that voxelizes the world to a very rough voxel representation to efficiently calculate indirect light propagation. I think more and more lighting and physics simulations will be implemented in a rough voxel representation of the game world. Then, to improve accuracy and detail this representation will become finer and finer, until it makes more sense to render this voxel representation directly, rather than rendering the polygons. What's missing is perhaps hardware support for rasterization of polygons to voxels. It's hard to compete against the super efficient hardware rasterization of polygons to pixels otherwise. I think character models will be polygon based for a long time still, since it's much more suited for character animation.
- blackrack 8y ago
  You can use the GPU's harware rasterizer to voxelize a scene. http://www.alexandre-pestana.com/voxelization-using-gpu-hardware-rasterizer/ http://www.alexandre-pestana.com/voxelization-using-gpu-hard... This approach is used in most commercial games that support voxel-based global illumination.
noway421 8y ago
Lighting, shadows and global illumination are still incredibly hard with voxels. And this is true for both Atomontage and Euclideon. Their demos look like really over HDR'ed.
- caffeineviking 8y ago
  Not really, in fact it's the other way around. While rendering triangle meshes using rasterization (the "classic" way) is fast (because modern hardware is built for this), doing real-time light transport is a pain-in-the-ass, and involves a lot of inelegant (but very smart!) tricks (e.g. shadow mapping). On the other hand, we have ray tracing on triangle meshes, which is elegant, but really doesn't perform as well as rasterization, because you need a lot of rays to converge to a non-noisy result. The state-of-the-art global illumination renderers all use a hybrid approach. Either they reduce the triangle mesh so real-time Radiosity becomes viable (like in the Frostbite 2 engine), but these suffer from not being able to simulate specular surfaces as good. While the other approach is to discretize the mesh to a voxel representation and do Voxel Cone Tracing (VCT) (which is the same as ray tracing, but instead of shooting rays, you shoot "thick" rays, and get the incoming importance over an area), which produces non-noisy results, and can be done really fast. There is a reason why engines like Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot have started to implement VCT, and why a lot of research is being geared toward finding efficient ways to do scene voxelization (just look at the DICE/SEED thesis work proposals and you'll see that this is indeed true). The advantage of having an engine that only deals with voxels is that the techniques I've shown above can be done naturally, you can use a "pure" voxel approach instead of a hybrid. There is no need to convert triangle mesh scene to a voxel representation. My main worries with the method shown in the article is that doing animation (those not generated procedurally) using voxels is very hard. Also, the amount of memory needed to store a voxel scene is several orders of magnitude larger than a triangle mesh, even if you compress it, and worst of all, you need to store the animation as well, and depending on how that's done, can be a absolute nightmare (but I'm not up-to-date with the latest reserach there, maybe there are some fancy techniques that solve this problem).
- Assossa 8y ago
  Not at all. Lighting and shadows can be calculated the exact same way as polygons. As for GI, voxels are superior to polygons. If you look at all the real-time GI technologies, they are mostly voxel based. Ex: Nvidia VXGI
timavr 8y ago
The more different approaches the better. It is always worth trying, even if it takes a while.
amelius 8y ago
Perhaps someone here can answer this: if a voxel is an aligned cube in a rectangular grid, how could one represent a mirror (or shiny surface) that's oriented at (say) 45 degrees w.r.t. the grid?
- Ygg2 8y ago
  If all pixels are squares in a grid, how could one represent a curved line? Answer is similar - approximation, and lots of tiny squares/cubes/voxels. E.g. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa5ba4b55b02ca2a2f3b593/t/5aa72daf9140b794ec5e990f/1520905671050/voxbun2.gif?format=500w https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa5ba4b55b02ca2a2f3b...
  - amelius 8y ago
    The problem is that no matter how small you make the voxels, the reflection will never converge to something accurate. You have this situation: * * * **** * <=== incoming light * ====> reflected light **** * * * Versus: \ | reflected light \ | \|______ incoming light \ \ \ PS: This makes me wonder how nature does it. Is the fact that photons are (in a sense) "bigger" than atoms responsible for the fact that we can have shiny surfaces?
    - LoSboccacc 8y ago
      photons don't bounce, get absorbed and emitted from the materials at a specific frequency once the electron gets excited enough. metallic materials emit photon without absorbing much energy, while other material absorb more of the energy and radiate it later as infrared. the 'direction' of the emission depends on the interference with all the other incoming photons. that part is rooted in quantum mechanic and I've no idea how it works exactly.
      - simias 8y ago
        This is irrelevant to the way lighting is typically modeled in videogames.
red2awn 8y ago
Does anyone know any comprehensive article or tutorial on learning voxels?
deorder 8y ago
Why do people call a textured 3D cube on a grid a voxel (Minecraft), but do not call a textured 2D tile on a grid a pixel?
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  pixel was already used so they call it texel
  - deorder 8y ago
    A texel is a element of a texture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel_(graphics)
jzl 8y ago
Want to play with Minecraft-style voxels? There's a really wonderful freeware voxel editor called MagicaVoxel: https://ephtracy.github.io/ https://ephtracy.github.io/ Pretty incredible what you can do with it.
LouisCastle 8y ago
Fun! Yeah, wes stored our data as slices for space and restricted rotation to the Y axis. Both were optimization s since each frame of an animation was a full model there was no need to rotate them. The rendered could render them from any angle though so I still consider them voxels. More like voxels lite then voxel plus. We also used a lot of sprite cards with zdepth and a quick normal hack for lighting. You had to cut corners where you could back then!!
LouisCastle 8y ago
For Blade Runner.
DonHopkins 8y ago
Check out what some mad genius did with The Sims 1's original "2D sprite + z-buffer" artwork -- it's not perfect, but it's totally flabbergasting that it works as well as it does! The Sims 1 in 3D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5D7GPQDDUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5D7GPQDDUI Here's how The Sims 1 sprites work: Each object has a set of sprite bitmaps for four different rotations, at three different scales. Symmetrical objects can re-use and flip sprites for different rotations. Each set of sprite bitmaps includes a color bitmap, an alpha bitmap, and a z-buffer bitmap. The smaller scales can be derived by shrinking the largest scale, but Maxis renders them all directly in the 3D Studio Max sprite exporter, which looks nicer, and players can export and import them with Transmogrifier, and edit and touch them up with 2D tools like Photoshop or Gimp (or even program 3D tools like Blender to export them). Making a totally new object! By Bunny Wuffles. http://bwsost.woobsha.com/9firstnewobject/page1.html http://bwsost.woobsha.com/9firstnewobject/page1.html Transmogrifier walk-through: http://wiki.thesimsresource.com/images/5/54/Steve-Using_Tmog_A_Simple_WalkThrough.pdf http://wiki.thesimsresource.com/images/5/54/Steve-Using_Tmog...

159 points by mariuz 8y ago

Bizarro 8y ago

Atomontage demos are cool, but there's always been some controversy about what their tech can do in the "real-world".

anfilt 8y ago
Well demo video's don't tell you a lot. They claim to have some secret sauce. However, the demo video's makes you even question that they have a secret sauce at all. When you see them delete parts of the game world you see how thin the ground layer is when part of it is deleted. The are big problems with voxels. The simplest being space as the game world increases in size the amount vowels grows with the 3rd power. My big problem is no technical details have been published. They claim to have a pending patent on their site. However, that may not really tell us much. I have played with voxels myself and oct-trees and other algorithms related to voxels. The only real use voxels have seen is medical imaging. If they have figured something out they should be having a paper in a math journal. I doubt it though mainly since it would involve pushing thing to the limit or beyond the limits of information theory. The only other option for such small voxels is massive amount data storage or object with relative homogeneous structure at which point it's not much better than hollow polygons. Not only the main memory is limited, and while SSDs are getting better when playing with high density voxels with a pretty how amount entropy you can quickly exist main memory. So what I did instead was just request exposed/surface voxels and arrange the octree data structure to be linear from outside in to help with memory caches. Still all the really mattered was the exposed voxels, and that's not much different from a hollow polygon. Honestly, after having played with voxels myself I would say they are cool, but you not making a whole game out of them. If anything it's just tool to be used in some parts of a game. I will add an other thing that gives me doubt they have anything really new is the fact when they start destroying their models you see the same color in side the model for the most part. Even the brick wall that got destroyed is pretty homogeneous.
- Bizarro 8y ago
  Looks like they just formed a real company https://www.atomontage.com/blog/2018/4/5/atomontage-inc-launches-to-bring-unprecedented-voxel-technology-to-market-announces-initial-founding-team-and-advisors https://www.atomontage.com/blog/2018/4/5/atomontage-inc-laun.... One of their investors is an MD specializing in imaging. https://www.atomontage.com/#team-section https://www.atomontage.com/#team-section That'll be their bread and butter. I always wondering if the community picked up VoxelQuest https://www.voxelquest.com/ https://www.voxelquest.com/ and ran with it, but last I looked that wasn't the case. I'm too old to do serious graphics programming, but might be interested in a voxel engine written in C# with a good community.
  - echelon 8y ago
    > I'm too old to do serious graphics programming Too old? Maybe too busy, but never too old.
  - fesoliveira 8y ago
    The issue with VoxelQuest is that, while it was an astonishing piece of technology, it wasn't documented in any way a normal human can understand. I spent several hours trying to read it, and while I'm impressed with the results, the lack of design patterns and structured code (the code is separated in just about 10 files, and it is almost 50k lines long, if not more) makes it really difficult to work with. I dabbled in voxels myself, even wrote a Minecraft clone and all that, but VoxelQuest was the first real voxel engine I saw working in a really nice way. It had proper lighting, shadows and even nice effects such as reflections. It is kind of a bummer that the dev quit the project, so much potential wasted :(
    - gavanwoolery 8y ago
      I agree with you on the poor documentation - that stemmed from me almost never working with others professionally and either doing a lot of solo contract work or work where my code was mostly isolated from other systems. I've gotten a little bit better about standard practices after working for a company that uses them and team work is super-critical as small changes can potentially cost $10k+ in damage per hour, so understanding the code and making it testable is more important than producing new code. Over the past year I have been working on Voxel Quest silently, because progress is so incredibly slow that I still do not have much interesting to show (and I dove to the deepest depths of feature creep and tried to build a compiler/transpiler to address a lot of problems I was having with c++ and slow turnaround times). To be honest, over the past month or so I got frustrated with my slow progress and took a break to work on a simple 2D game, just to see if I had any ability to control what I consider my greatest weakness: failure to prioritize. So far that experiment is successful but now I'm asking myself if making a 2D game is a waste of my knowledge - maybe that is true or maybe its just shiny object syndrome. >_< Overall the biggest problem is my past two years have been almost entirely consumed by my work, renovating my house, raising a kid, and other stuff. I typically have less than 10 hours per week to concentrate on projects (more often 5), so I am working about 1/8 to 1/16 as fast as I was when working on VQ full time. Anyhow, it would be nice to work on it in greater capacity, or at least something similar, I just dont know where that money would come from. I am very hesitant to ask people for money at this point, given my track record, so I feel like my next thing has to be self-funded or funded by someone who can truly afford to lose the money. I could easily find people who would throw more money at VQ but I dont think that it would be a sufficient amount to survive off of, so it would be effectively wasted. Not sure what to do in the short term, to be honest, other than work at my current pace. :/ I'll share my current progress publicly once there is something interesting to show.
gavanwoolery 8y ago
I was lucky enough to play some of their demos in person recently. I was really surprised by the performance (even in VR). I feel like there are at least a few real-world applications that could benefit with regards to visualization. Particularly "organic" stuff - I noticed that voxels were able to capture details like skin wrinkles and anatomy really well (they demoed a beating heart captured from a CT scan).

kazinator 8y ago

This site does something weird, I haven't seen before. As you scroll around the page, not clicking on anything, it adds entries to your stack of visited pages! You then have to hit the back-button N times to get out. It's stealthily redirecting to itself or something like that. You can monitor this: stay on the page, and then every once in a while right click on the back-button in Firefox (or however it's done in your browser to pop up the forward/back list). See the growing number of repetitions of the page title in the list.

extrapickles 8y ago
With JS you can push things into the history. Handy for somethings in a single page application, but misused in this application.
andreareina 8y ago
One of the reasons I've disabled js on Medium.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Just another reason to not even visit medium. That site has become complete garbage.
ivanfon 8y ago
Weird... Is there any reason for them to do that or is it safe to assume it’s an error?
seandougall 8y ago
I’m not getting that on Safari mobile, but I do hit a ton of forced reloads due to repeated JS issues if I try to zoom in on the images. I wonder if that might be related in some way.
brobinson 8y ago
HTML5 history API abuse

hartror 8y ago

Waiting for one of these demos to include animated characters. Not holding my breath.

milesvp 8y ago
There's been a lot of work done in the last 5 years on animating voxel characters. You can probably do a google search and find some papers to your satisfaction. It is something of a challenge though, in that voxels used as an atomic unit can't deform. I can't remember what tricks are used, but I believe it requires pervertig the voxel engine to add exceptions/complexity to deal with animation.

acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago

Voxels always where the next big thing. The problem is they dont just demand ressources n^3 for all dimensions- they demand n^6, if you want to go into fine grained detail depending on closeness to the actor. Cube: Sauerbraten did go there, and it uses something like oct-trees to store these tesselated, refined voxels. And that is where the whole concept crawls on the shore to die - the tooling for this to work with all that has been invented before is just- not efficient- to sculpt in voxels, you basically send marching cubes through polygon models. Personally that was the point where i dropped it- because- when i have polys allready- and dont need the destructable physics (they ruin gameplay &performance anyway most of the time) - then why bother. Its one of those technical superior solutions which never seem to surpass the legacy solutions (like Rust and C). My assumption is, that one day, the polygon world will just eat the voxel world- having a .toVoxel.ApplyPhysicalModel(Sand).AfterPhysicsRestDo(ToPoly), and thats what will remain. Very small cubes of dust.

teraflop 8y ago
Where are you getting n^6 from? A hierarchical level-of-detail scheme (e.g. the one used in Sauerbraten) is still only n^3 in the worst case. If you store one full-resolution copy of your world, and then a copy with 1/2 the resolution, then 1/4 the resolution and so on, you get a geometric series that converted to only a constant-factor overhead.
- acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
  You are right, its been quite a while since i have dealt with the cube-engine. The Level of detail mechanism just adds a constant to the formula- basically speeding up the n^3 voxel growth as the player explores the world in detail and distance at the same time in the worst case. Looking at a ants-mandibles-mikro-biota, while observing a planet near the horizon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsjeiLklThY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsjeiLklThY
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  You need a way to anizotrophpic filter the voxels. This means the mipmap should be fully indexable. That is n^3 * m memory for mipmap and n^4 filtering... Isotopic filtering is easier, just 3*n. However, it will make surfaces look... unreal, as if physics didn't form them, at times. You cannot wing the quality as easily in 3D though. Continuity is paramount as is some degree of smoothness. Ringing is unacceptable.

matte_black 8y ago

Voxels will be key for further VR immersion. In a VR game, being able to look at things very close, and seeing smaller and smaller details almost infinitely, will help go a long way toward making things feel more real. Think taking a break in an FPS, and kneeling down to see the blades of grass, and then closer to see dirt and pebbles, and even closer to maybe seeing ants.

chupasaurus 8y ago
> being able to look at things very close, and seeing smaller and smaller details almost infinitely That is called tesselation and it's already there in games for more than a decade.
- veli_joza 8y ago
  There's so much misunderstanding and wrong terminology surrounding voxels. Voxels are a way to store world data in memory, basically 3d bitmaps. They won't give you infinite details, just the opposite - they can only give you single '3d resolution'. To actually get infinite details, you have to switch underlining world representation from static data (meshes, voxels) to mathematical (perlin noise, fractals). Here you make an important trade-off - mathematical representation is harder to make changes to, because each modification would increase complexity of math formula used to describe the world. You can see lot of deformations in voxel demos but they are global transformations (scale, shear). Minecraft uses hybrid approach. Inital world is described by math (called world generation) but it's then serialized (sampled) as data with specific voxel size, that you can easily manipulate. Edit: another, IMO far more impressive approach is Media Molecules' upcoming Dreams software that uses constructive solid geometry and sparse distance fields to describe and manipulate 3d geometry. Here's a detailed tech talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

firedev 8y ago

Hope they'll make it, always liked voxels.

lukewrightmain 8y ago

Can someone favorite this comment? Need 2 Karma for a proof verification! Thanks.

asdfnionio 8y ago

I don't think the recent surge in interest in voxels is from people with deep knowledge of the technology. For the vast majority of people voxels are just "that thing Minecraft uses." That's why every indie game made in the last five years is made of huge blocks with low-res textures.

erikb 8y ago
I was really surprised that this is the only comment mentioning the obvious. That will be 60% or more of the current revival. Additionally there are probably quite a few people who didn't know anything about Voxels, but transitioned the "pixelart" hype into the 3D world, coming to the same end point. I bet both these reasons together make 90% of the current interest.

strictnein 8y ago

I remember when Voxels were the "Next Big Thing", 20 years ago. Delta Force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game) Which used the Voxel Space engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space

hardwaresofton 8y ago
What was/is holding voxel back? the new programming model? computation density? I guess minecraft is an example of a voxel game (supposed a voxel game written in block style according to a random post on the internet[0]) that became really popular -- so I guess the answer could be "nothing", but it sure seems like voxels are still niche (and don't want to be). [0]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/voxel-games-vs-block-games.286747/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/voxel-games-vs-block-games.2...
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > What was/is holding voxel back? The fact that the domains they might be used in are also the domains people are guaranteed to have spent a lot of money on specialized polygon-pushing processors. Voxel techniques seemed to peak at about the time of the last hurrah of CPU-based rendering.
- s-macke 8y ago
  The „Voxel Space“ engine from the 90th has only very little to do with what we call voxel today. It it basically a raycasting engine for height maps [0]. It is very limited. You can‘t look up and down more than 20 degrees and you can‘t even render houses, cars or trees. [0] https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  The main problem is memory bandwidth at higher resolutions. Minecraft runs at a really low resolution. (Internally.) Occlusion handling is less efficient too because bounding and occlusion volumes are discrete and either very inaccurate or nearly as slow as rendering the voxels.

sergiotapia 8y ago

What happened to that australian company that had millions in funding for voxel tech? They seems quite skiddish and didn't want to show all their information in their demos. Did anything come of it? Euclideon - 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Animats 8y ago
2018 Euclideon video.[1] The big quadrillion-vowel worlds and planet-sized world claims seem to have disappeared, but now they can do small-scale voxel projects and handle deformation. No info as to how, and no products on their site for non-static voxel environments. Voxel systems are straightforward if everything is in memory, but how do they scale? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5JqYYye3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5JqYYye3w [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/content/basics-gpu-voxelization https://developer.nvidia.com/content/basics-gpu-voxelization
- toxicFork 8y ago
  The video you linked to in your [1] is of Automontage. Automontage and Euclideon are different teams. Euclideon's channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/EuclideonOfficial https://www.youtube.com/user/EuclideonOfficial I myself like Automontage better because they are waaay less "hype" and more "here's what I have".
  - toxicFork 8y ago
    Typo: It should be Atomontage
- mlvljr 8y ago
  They are now selling uber-fast (orderS of magnitude faster than the traditional competition, from some of the vids) LIDAR / etc visualizers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvmRgi0gZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvmRgi0gZQ

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cwyers 8y ago

I'm not sure what exactly that Playstation 2-looking tank in the video is supposed to do to convince me that voxels are the next big thing, but it's not doing it.

lawlessone 8y ago
you're looking at the wrong part.

tjpnz 8y ago

Despite all of the controversy I'm still in awe at what Hello Games were able to pull off using this technique in No Man's Sky.

5kyn3t 8y ago

Is there somewhere a "hello World" code about how to create such a voxel in same sense as this article suggests? Are they just creating "boxes" or "cubes" for each voxel?

garmaine 8y ago
Ray tracing is one oft used method. Store voxels in a kd tree and do a directed search to find the first intersection (first “filled” cube intersecting with the ray).

shultays 8y ago

Here is a very old voxel project that still amazes me http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm It has pretty cool looking visuals, dynamic objects and some basic physics as well. I think the most impressive part the developer was able to run this on ~10-15 years old computers.

Nition 8y ago
For those that don't know, Ken Silverman also created the Build engine that runs Duke Nukem 3D and others.

alkonaut 8y ago

So voxels makes some things easier than with polygons. What is HARD with voxels? Animation? shadow rendering?

erikb 8y ago
Without some tricks, the number of calculations increases drastically.

audunw 8y ago

I think the trojan horse for voxel engines is lighting systems. There are already game engines that voxelizes the world to a very rough voxel representation to efficiently calculate indirect light propagation. I think more and more lighting and physics simulations will be implemented in a rough voxel representation of the game world. Then, to improve accuracy and detail this representation will become finer and finer, until it makes more sense to render this voxel representation directly, rather than rendering the polygons. What's missing is perhaps hardware support for rasterization of polygons to voxels. It's hard to compete against the super efficient hardware rasterization of polygons to pixels otherwise. I think character models will be polygon based for a long time still, since it's much more suited for character animation.

blackrack 8y ago
You can use the GPU's harware rasterizer to voxelize a scene. http://www.alexandre-pestana.com/voxelization-using-gpu-hardware-rasterizer/ http://www.alexandre-pestana.com/voxelization-using-gpu-hard... This approach is used in most commercial games that support voxel-based global illumination.

noway421 8y ago

Lighting, shadows and global illumination are still incredibly hard with voxels. And this is true for both Atomontage and Euclideon. Their demos look like really over HDR'ed.

caffeineviking 8y ago
Not really, in fact it's the other way around. While rendering triangle meshes using rasterization (the "classic" way) is fast (because modern hardware is built for this), doing real-time light transport is a pain-in-the-ass, and involves a lot of inelegant (but very smart!) tricks (e.g. shadow mapping). On the other hand, we have ray tracing on triangle meshes, which is elegant, but really doesn't perform as well as rasterization, because you need a lot of rays to converge to a non-noisy result. The state-of-the-art global illumination renderers all use a hybrid approach. Either they reduce the triangle mesh so real-time Radiosity becomes viable (like in the Frostbite 2 engine), but these suffer from not being able to simulate specular surfaces as good. While the other approach is to discretize the mesh to a voxel representation and do Voxel Cone Tracing (VCT) (which is the same as ray tracing, but instead of shooting rays, you shoot "thick" rays, and get the incoming importance over an area), which produces non-noisy results, and can be done really fast. There is a reason why engines like Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot have started to implement VCT, and why a lot of research is being geared toward finding efficient ways to do scene voxelization (just look at the DICE/SEED thesis work proposals and you'll see that this is indeed true). The advantage of having an engine that only deals with voxels is that the techniques I've shown above can be done naturally, you can use a "pure" voxel approach instead of a hybrid. There is no need to convert triangle mesh scene to a voxel representation. My main worries with the method shown in the article is that doing animation (those not generated procedurally) using voxels is very hard. Also, the amount of memory needed to store a voxel scene is several orders of magnitude larger than a triangle mesh, even if you compress it, and worst of all, you need to store the animation as well, and depending on how that's done, can be a absolute nightmare (but I'm not up-to-date with the latest reserach there, maybe there are some fancy techniques that solve this problem).
Assossa 8y ago
Not at all. Lighting and shadows can be calculated the exact same way as polygons. As for GI, voxels are superior to polygons. If you look at all the real-time GI technologies, they are mostly voxel based. Ex: Nvidia VXGI

timavr 8y ago

The more different approaches the better. It is always worth trying, even if it takes a while.

amelius 8y ago

Perhaps someone here can answer this: if a voxel is an aligned cube in a rectangular grid, how could one represent a mirror (or shiny surface) that's oriented at (say) 45 degrees w.r.t. the grid?

Ygg2 8y ago
If all pixels are squares in a grid, how could one represent a curved line? Answer is similar - approximation, and lots of tiny squares/cubes/voxels. E.g. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa5ba4b55b02ca2a2f3b593/t/5aa72daf9140b794ec5e990f/1520905671050/voxbun2.gif?format=500w https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa5ba4b55b02ca2a2f3b...
- amelius 8y ago
  The problem is that no matter how small you make the voxels, the reflection will never converge to something accurate. You have this situation: * * * **** * <=== incoming light * ====> reflected light **** * * * Versus: \ | reflected light \ | \|______ incoming light \ \ \ PS: This makes me wonder how nature does it. Is the fact that photons are (in a sense) "bigger" than atoms responsible for the fact that we can have shiny surfaces?
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    photons don't bounce, get absorbed and emitted from the materials at a specific frequency once the electron gets excited enough. metallic materials emit photon without absorbing much energy, while other material absorb more of the energy and radiate it later as infrared. the 'direction' of the emission depends on the interference with all the other incoming photons. that part is rooted in quantum mechanic and I've no idea how it works exactly.
    - simias 8y ago
      This is irrelevant to the way lighting is typically modeled in videogames.

red2awn 8y ago

Does anyone know any comprehensive article or tutorial on learning voxels?

deorder 8y ago

Why do people call a textured 3D cube on a grid a voxel (Minecraft), but do not call a textured 2D tile on a grid a pixel?

LoSboccacc 8y ago
pixel was already used so they call it texel
- deorder 8y ago
  A texel is a element of a texture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel_(graphics)

jzl 8y ago

Want to play with Minecraft-style voxels? There's a really wonderful freeware voxel editor called MagicaVoxel: https://ephtracy.github.io/ https://ephtracy.github.io/ Pretty incredible what you can do with it.

LouisCastle 8y ago

Fun! Yeah, wes stored our data as slices for space and restricted rotation to the Y axis. Both were optimization s since each frame of an animation was a full model there was no need to rotate them. The rendered could render them from any angle though so I still consider them voxels. More like voxels lite then voxel plus. We also used a lot of sprite cards with zdepth and a quick normal hack for lighting. You had to cut corners where you could back then!!

LouisCastle 8y ago

For Blade Runner.

DonHopkins 8y ago

Check out what some mad genius did with The Sims 1's original "2D sprite + z-buffer" artwork -- it's not perfect, but it's totally flabbergasting that it works as well as it does! The Sims 1 in 3D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5D7GPQDDUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5D7GPQDDUI Here's how The Sims 1 sprites work: Each object has a set of sprite bitmaps for four different rotations, at three different scales. Symmetrical objects can re-use and flip sprites for different rotations. Each set of sprite bitmaps includes a color bitmap, an alpha bitmap, and a z-buffer bitmap. The smaller scales can be derived by shrinking the largest scale, but Maxis renders them all directly in the 3D Studio Max sprite exporter, which looks nicer, and players can export and import them with Transmogrifier, and edit and touch them up with 2D tools like Photoshop or Gimp (or even program 3D tools like Blender to export them). Making a totally new object! By Bunny Wuffles. http://bwsost.woobsha.com/9firstnewobject/page1.html http://bwsost.woobsha.com/9firstnewobject/page1.html Transmogrifier walk-through: http://wiki.thesimsresource.com/images/5/54/Steve-Using_Tmog_A_Simple_WalkThrough.pdf http://wiki.thesimsresource.com/images/5/54/Steve-Using_Tmog...