GigaVoxels : High Quality Realtime Sparse Voxel Octree Ray-Casting

[kit3bus]

Argh. I can't post links here. Please look at my profile if you're interested in the iOS voxel renderer.

[kit3bus]

Very interesting! Any chance I can try the models with my iOS renderer?

[danielfacco]

VOXEL=MINECRAFT BASED THING

[MorreskiBear]

2:15 is like a maze in hell.

[avielMenter]

I think tesselation has eliminated the need for LOD Voxel rendering techniques for a while. I can scale level of detail on basically anything as much as I want using tesselation

[FPRobber]

This looks much more advanced than "Unlimited Detail"'s voxel engine.

[Kapryagos]

Åh, it's beautiful! :D

... but that last example was truly gross! @~@

[Evi1M4chine]

Aspect ratio FAIL.

[oneupadvanced]

I would love to see a game like Portal with this technology. Simply epic

[khainguyen98]

we don't need no polygon!

[MetrotomX5]

It's funny - we started with raycasting and voxels, then migrated away... but raycasting and voxels are superior!

[killer6468]

@MetrotomX5 We moved away because we didn't have the computer power to run games with voxels, THATS WHY!!! Imagine a whole game like this, 0.00000000000000000001FPS at best!

[Bruce777999]

wow

[Rudmin]

What about very thin opaque objects at a distance? Something like a big sail cloth. As I understand it, the SVO would generate transparent voxels because most of the volume is empty. However, the sail, although mostly empty space, should still be opaque. Maybe I am misunderstanding how the octree is rendered at higher and higher levels.

[nalcuc]

Great work!, congratulations!

[Tableuraz]

Wow, purple artefacts! That's what we call over-heating ;-)

[FischKopfD]

this technology will be used in games in a few years look for "atomontage engine".

[FirewallAndFlush]

if you google unlimited detail ( or youtube it for that matter you will find the exact same system ) so, copyright it quick ?

[JekaZMD]

ho-ly-shit!!! that is fkin awesome! It's like looking at molecular structure of an object!

[morepl0x]

when people talk about rasterization all i can think about is people jammin'

[WorldsOfDigital]

that..is Awesome o.o

[TheDarkSagan]

Bad assssss.

[TiagoTiagoT]

awesome, i hope game developers put this to good use

[Pyroney]

These are called Menger Sponges!

[krux02]

voxel will never be in videogames again. But they will be usful in Medical Programms, because, they store volumetric Data.

[luccaskunk]

@krux02 never is a very... very long time...

[tsuihark]

@krux02 It's been used in games many times already, it was popular for a while in the nineties before 3D acceleration really took off.

[super6plx]

What the FUUUUUUUUUCK lol!!!

you're a feisty one, aren't you? what was that for anyway? I've said more offensive stuff on a video about PUPPIES! What could possibly lead you to want me to literally end my own life?

Holy shit man

[super6plx]

Is there a way to use this program? I really want to do what they're doing in this video, I love exploring virtual things like this! xD

[TheVisceral89]

@super6plx

Zbrush or a 3d scanner is the only things that produce Voxels. Its not like you can just jump in the application and do amazing stuff.

[super6plx]

I mean do exactly, like literally exactly what they were doing in the video, nothing incredible or amazing like you seem to be suggesting.. they seemed to be able to go through a voxel anyway, I don't really see what you WOULDN'T be able to do in this... "you can't go around shooting things in it" duh, I didn't say that.. "you can't go editing the voxels and creating your own" well that's more realistic, but again, I didn't say that did I?

[super6plx]

(by the way those things in the quotation marks, I wasn't imitating you or something, I was using those as examples.. I had to say this because I knew if I didn't you would think I was trying to put words in your mouth or something)

[super6plx]

anyway, I forgot to actually think about your comment.. is Zbrush a real program you can get that does something similar to this? and can you make really complex voxels on it like this, to the level that you can actually explore them?

[cecreohm]

32GB of data? Great work, amazing.

[kunATTENTAT]

I made an own ray casting engine

/watch?v=hFJvdGzC9zk

if you want to see it =)

[walter0bz]

voxels worry me r.e. animation, but i'm sure they'll have good uses.. i gather for multiplayer online enviroments they're experimenting with generating voxels on a server and sending multiple views to viewers... that sort of thing

[conradhw]

im not a fan of voxels, but i am a fan of octrees.. octrees are the future of game engines: texturing (or lack thereof), infinite worlds, renderer within a renderer, bitmapping surfaces, octree radius to texture/bitmap, depth refresh per-cube (far distance rendering, requires less update)... What I'm not sure of yet is how/if it could work with maze/dungeon generators, as these voxel/octrees example are repetitive/patternous in nature. I also like the voxelled cavernous effects (looks like alge)

[conradhw]

I like the octree principle as a sort of a basis for a renderer (think a large spaceship, and a subdivision for the inner-rooms/corridors). But those voxel looking dragons/characters don't work for me, traditional polies work better. Octrees are cubic in nature, be possible to warp/curvaturize (per surface parralel),while retaining octree data?.. I see revolution here, textures, detail alge, octree-cube occlusion, procedural (recursive) corridor generation (retaining exit/entry points) etc..

[conradhw]

Large world level design/world objects that are of scale (f.i. large spaceships) have most potential. Object based octrees within octree engine. Esp. spacegames could use more precision. Main potential is the 2x exponent factor.. guaranteed fit whatever you're doing (kind of like lego principle). If you define objects that are cubic in nature/fit in cube metric, and/or use predifined blocks (curved/angles/hexs etc) you could maybe transform a 3dmax object in octree with close approx. of data.

[rutgerhaase]

whut is voxel - what is octrees ??? im confused ive never heard of that

[philnolan3d]

Voxel is short for "volumetric pixel". Each one is a point in space with a blob around it.

[rutgerhaase]

aha and does it save gpu power ?

or does it better grafik quality?

[alex190291]

there is a videogame based on voxels.... its called outcast and its from 1997 AFAIK^^

[seniorxduck]

Voxels are amazing. I wish that someone could come out with a voxel-based videogame. It wouldn't even have to be something complex, I'm sure something along the lines of a three-dimensional voxel Super Mario Bros. could be possible right now.

[jeremysart]

just a few more years.

[YourPreciousOne]

Mightily impressive visuals, indeed, but everything shown here is static models and environments. Putting all this into a dynamic virtual world would require some extra massive computational resource, as all tree-bounded structures out there. And the memory requirements for hi-detailed definition are quite pressing, too.

But Voxel have a big advantage -- a truly "natural" LOD scaling system for both shape and surface detail, as they are a single defined structure, unlike triangle rasterization.

[DanFrederiksen]

nah the LOD advantage seems exaggerated. there is no inherent way in the voxel premise of representing a voxel topology as a single voxel given material qualities and lighting conditions. it doesn't have a magic way of getting it right with just a single sample. it might be possible to implement a clever LOD scheme but it's not given. in practice it has no LOD advantage, even has a significant disadvantage. it's like doing PDF as bitmap because we can do mipmapping. not really better..

[CodyRicheson]

@YourPreciousOne, I don't think it will be long before they can become as easily animated as polygonal models. It seems that we're on the cusp of figuring that out.

[1776Phoenix1986]

@YourPreciousOne

If you search for animated sparse voxels you'll find a guy radulphi who seems to have an interesting animation solution. I think "extra massive computational resource" is maybe an exaggeration, Fully dynamic octrees already exist.

[FrankDodd]

@YourPreciousOne I completely agree with you, and well done GigVoxel a lovely piece of tech your showing here.

With respect to the voxel nemesis that is animation Dennis Bautembach has done work on animated sparse voxel octrees there is a significant performance hit but the work is still very impressive. In the short term perhaps we will see a hybrid engine with voxel based static geometry and polygon based animation as we saw with doom which used sprites and polygons.

[Pyroney]

is there a demo for this??

[rouncer81]

And this is realtime? Where are all the games using it, must be too hard to code for the average programmer...

[cyborgtroy]

No, it's because it takes ridiculous hardware to get this level of detail, and because it doesn't fit into normal modelling techniques at all.

If it were a matter of skill, the game developers could simply hire smarter programmers.

[Kargoneth]

Why do the smaller blobs of voxels have fuzzy edges?

[narcoti]

because voxels are boxes..., and YAY FOR ARTIFACTING you might want to check the temp of your gfx card there mate.

[4K4K1K0]

Do voxels need to be made out of cubes? What about truncated octahedrons or rhombic dodecahedrons?

[shoak]

they're volumetric pixels, pixels are squares, volumetric squares are cubes.

[4K4K1K0]

Hm... okay, so how about having hexagons as pixels? :D

[J0RDSKI]

can someone explain, i have pretty good understanding of computers but not fully, whats the difference between voxels and polygons? also how much memory/ processor e.t.c did this take it looks amazing, also why is this not used in games or is it? Can someone please explain this like message me or something because I am very intrigued.

[cyborgtroy]

Polygons are triangles. They can be placed anywhere, and you cando pretty much anything with them.

Voxels are like little cubes, and they are placed in a 3D grid. So, voxels don't really animate as well, and the 3D grid will take a lot of memory to store if you don't use the right tricks.

Also, current GPUs only process polygons. Rendering voxels requires some serious shader effort or a difficult conversion into polygons.

Voxels aren't really well-suited for games.

[niniodelpunk]

cyborgtroy was quite right in all his explanations except the last, voxels are making up a stand against tessellation now included in the DX11 API. Id Softwares ID TECH 5 features Sparse Voxel Octrees for static objects and Poly's for animated objects, so the whole terrain is Sparse Voxel Octree... search it up, you'll be amazed, there's some other demonstrations by ATI about a year ago, they're on my recent favorites so you can look in there also

[Nival39]

No with current systems (but simple translation or rotation of the whole model).

So for full static environnement only (technology used in the video-game Outcast, in 1999 in fact). Work very well in this case (authorize detailed and no-edge environnement, and great advanced lightning).

[CodyRicheson]

But what about ANIMATING these data sets? How will we do that feasibly?

[rouncer81]

the 2d version of this is virtual texturing, where they stream in texture data in a similar way, its coming out for the new id software game, rage... the game must take up 10 dvds tho when you install it. :)

[nos676]

nah just use blu-ray discs, i know that i got a blu-ray reader and a blu-ray writer in my computer

[JezzaParker]

It's on 2 DVDs. Also, ETQW already sues megatextures.

[cyborgtroy]

Voxels seem to be taking over for static stuff like terrain and certain props, but they're nearly impossible to animate.

Polygons will be used for anything that moves in the foreseeable future.

[speedaddict2008]

Try to get VoxelStein 3d. It's a game similar to Wolfenstein 3d, but it uses a graphical engine based on voxels. Google it up , it's free. You'll see that it has dynamic , moveable , destructible envirornment. And the enemies are voxel-based too, and are easily animated, they even turn into ragdolls when dead. The game even has real-time illumination, with shadows casted from the flashlight. You'll see.

[cyborgtroy]

I dunno... I'll double-check the video, but it seems to me that voxels can't be animated smoothly and parametrically like polygons, and they certainly shouldn't be able to ragdoll.

I'll take another look at the video. Maybe they use some sort of poly->voxel conversion...

[20eric07]

disregard that I didn't see the responses ¯\(°_o)/¯

[ecreif]

maybe some kind of hierarchical structure of voxel will be animatable.. you have a root object with certain voxel data applied then attached to that another object with voxel data.. if you wanna rotate the second object you just have to calculate the eyevector into the transformation space of the second object... i think that would be a way to have animated object even with voxels

[ecreif]

of course you are limited to "skeletal" animation without smooth moving skin around a joint :(

maybe you have to fall back to a polygon technique for that kind of problem..

[20eric07]

Not really, they suit ragdolls well. See Voxelstein 3D.

[SodanKerjuu]

I really hope that hardware creators step forwards and help the migration or just support for this kind of technology.

Atomic models such as voxels will ultimately surpass the surface ones. As will raycast replace the rasterization methods.

[vapourmile]

@SodanKerjuu Yup. Pretty soon something will have to come along to replace polygons: We've been living in worlds of photo-backed cardboard cut-outs for long enough! It's about time polyhedra came with interiors.

[delosombres]

Yeah. Let's put an end to polygons.

[turducken321]

Holy crap!

I hope so

[CyrilCrassin]

These kind of voxel representation will be used in video games in a few years for sure, but manly for particular effects, or to display highly detailed surfaces, yes :-)

[thetubeaccount]

wow u are a genius!

[piroulette]

I'm more concerned about getting that in sculpting software, (like 3DCoat, Zbrush or Mudbox).

Free us from Polygons :)

But it needs to handle real time modification, maybe that will cut the total voxel count displayed.

Even if Billions of Voxel is more than enough.

Great Job!

[piipposeta]

3D Coat has voxel support coming in 3.0 version :)

[Pyroney]

Is there a demo for the cube? I'm dying to have it o_o

[myid9876543]

@CyrilCrassin its used for the ground in crysis :-)

[CptSherpa]

@CyrilCrassin You should take a look at Id's Rage Demo. If I'm not mistaken the level/world geometry is composed entirely of voxels.

[PierrotTheGreat]

@CptSherpa

Yes, Rage is pretty impressive. The uncompressed build supposedly takes up 1 TB. id's pushing the limit, as they always do. If my friends don't buy the game next year, looks like i'll have to buy it for them xD.

[TheSleazySaint]

@CptSherpa you sure about that?

[CptSherpa]

@TheSleazySaint After looking into it again, I'm pretty sure I was wrong. If anything, it looks like Carmack is considering voxel terrains for Id Tech 6, but not 5. Considering that both aren't released yet, I didn't realize the distinction at the time. Either way, it looks like Carmack is enamored with the idea of infinite geometry and has been toying with the idea for a long time.

[nielzdg]

@CyrilCrassin

What...? You can't combine voxels with polygons. :/

It's either all voxels or all polygons...

[masterxilo]

@nielzdg Sure you can combine them. Some nvidia demonstrations use bounded volumes with physically interactive smoke or the like inside. The volume is essentially represented with a simple box model which has a surface shader applied that performs the raytracing.

[MrSplademan]

@nielzdg

Pretty sure Crytek would have something to say about that...

[WizHard]

@nielzdg Not exactly true. Using shaders it's possible to combine rasterization and raycasting.

That's much easier than it may seem. The process just adds one pass : a raycasting pass using a full screen shader in which we writes the raycasted depth of each pixel. Just doing so fits perfectly with the actual pipelines, but the drawback is that you can't take advantage of raytracing's easy reflexions/refractions or anything like, as it treated by a rasterizer.

[Starioshka]

@CyrilCrassin what is voxel? Wikipedia says something like alternative to pixel, but the screen won't just change from 2d squares to 3d cubes?

[hildegain]

@Starioshka Voxels are rendered cubes, it doesn't have anything to do with your screen as such. If you're using voxels it means you are rendering an image without polygons and are using small blocks to build a picture, there are other methods for rendering such as point mapping but it seems that graphics are heading in the way of voxels right now.

[jawamachines]

@CyrilCrassin I'd love to see all future blockbuster games have lush, malleable high-voxel terrain+vegetation with nice polygonal characters and set pieces.

[Andermetal1]

@CyrilCrassin Search for Blade Runner's PC game version , you will get shocked when you saw the graphic's quality for a Pentium 133

[Govadina]

you think they'll be making games with these in 5-6 years? or it'll be polys to the end?

[theamusementmachine]

well done.