High Performance Voxel Engine (2021)

High Performance Voxel Engine (2021)(nickmcd.me)

66 points by bibanez 2 years ago | 20 comments

I'm not a professional graphics programmer, but I dabble in it occasionally and hang out in GP communities. It's fascinating to see the wealth of voxel engines being written. Minecraft really had a massive cultural impact on the tech scene. Or maybe it's just that voxels are a particularly good target for various optimization techniques. Interesting either way!

For the author: Any particular reason you don't seem to be using DSA in your OpenGL code? ie glNamedBufferData() and friends. I found it the single thing that transforms OpenGL into something very user-friendly.

phero_cnstrcts 2 years ago | |

Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly engine based on marching cubes.

SkeuomorphicBee 2 years ago | | |

Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.

badpun 2 years ago | | |

If you want to use rasterization part of your GPU, you're going to have to eventually convert the voxel data into triangles.

bun_terminator 2 years ago | | |

Minecraft is just polygons sure, but it has a "voxely" look, that's what I was getting at.

paholg 2 years ago | | |

I think voxel has grown to have two meanings. One is as you describe, another is systems like Minecraft.

rzzzt 2 years ago | | |

I'm also thinking Novalogic games and Voxlap: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

paulddraper 2 years ago | | |

If you're familiar with pixels, you might be familiar with "pixel art", even though you every image on a screen has pixels

Jasper_ 2 years ago | | |

Huh? What about it uses marching cubes?

bibanez 2 years ago |

A showcase of the techniques explained in the article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFUj53VwYvU

https://douglasdwyer.github.io/octo-release/ (online demo)

Lately I've been addicted to watching (micro) voxel engine videos on youtube. I need to resist my urge to write one (not that I think I would do a particularly good job). I've also found the voxel engine by John Lin to be particularly impressive.

Duanemclemore 2 years ago |

Thank you, OP and everyone else who's commented. This is super helpful to see. It's great to learn about Nick's work specifically and as an introduction to the those working in this field - and to see the other helpful links everyone has posted.

I wrote a library to implement (most of) the Space Groups in the visual programming environment Grasshopper, which is inside 3d modeling software Rhino3d. This was to get architects working with 3d symmetries, not just 2d; and to get architecture students learning the spatial symmetries in more rigorous and complete ways. The scope and aim are completely different than these engines. But I'm hoping to rewrite it into a standalone program soon, so it's very helpful and timely to get this influx of information I hadn't sought out before!

ricardobeat 2 years ago |

This brought back memories of Atomontage, a voxel engine which seemed to be way ahead of its time 10 years ago, but was never released, and became some kind of cloud platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw

https://client.atomontage.app/view?m=5C1RGKu4vT67qEBLO4gqh

pixelpoet 2 years ago |

I'd rather just directly raycast against a nicely compressed hierarchical representation than create horrendous amounts of triangle geometry and rasterise that. The code would be absolutely tiny, and not mostly a bunch of calls into someone else's code.

But, you know, gotta do the OpenGL / DirectX / whatever vanilla API thing... that's what graphics programming is, isn't it...

eddd-ddde 2 years ago | |

Would you happen to have a sample / example of this technique? I'd like to explore it.

pixelpoet 2 years ago | | |

It's just normal old raycasting through a voxel grid a la Amanatides and Woo: http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~amana/research/grid.pdf https://github.com/cgyurgyik/fast-voxel-traversal-algorithm/...

Casting the rays from the camera will be nice and coherent, plus you probably get much better and easier shadowing using ray casts compared to shadow maps.

pton_xd 2 years ago | |

That's the future but raycasting currently has some major drawbacks... namely that everything looks like a noisy mess when you look around.

Curious if anyone has plotted GPU compute increases against display resolution + update frequency increases? When do the two lines cross?

zooi 2 years ago | | |

I'm fairly certain that pixelpoet is referring to direct raycasting, not raytracing (light transport simulations). These aren't noisy.