Voxel Engine Demo using CUDA

[MrBlu3HoMi3]

were can i download it and can i make a mining game with it

[UnaicoWorld]

Check Outcast and Delta Force 1 ,

voxels have been around since forever ,

and they are harmfull for video cards manufacturers because you only need your CPU,

and not some high end 500 dollars video card

[tjpld]

Looks kinde 2D from up close.

[pufixas]

This is awesome engine

[archon808]

Why do you have 1 model rendered a million times? Oh yeah because your out of memory !!! Voxels are so stupid!!!!

[BlackPyro1]

@archon808 Let me guess, you are copying from Notch even through he is a novice coder, and you have not looked into it yourself.

[archon808]

@BlackPyro1 Ive been programming for 30 years. Ive worked with voxels on several occasions. Voxels are a waste of memory, processing power, and peoples time. You will never beat rasterized triangles.

[DifferentKev]

Dev Info says "640x360" and 720p on YouTube available. That Quality.

[OmegaArbinator]

What the hell happened to the green hills zone?

[10Misterfister]

shit engine

[nejisdeath]

this looks like shit. Euclideons engine is far better

[kwang1imsa]

@nejisdeath except it's fake

[nejisdeath]

@kwang1imsa

cant fake results, so its obviously real. just because a programmer who makes a game that has the crappiest graphics of the generation says it isnt real doesnt make him right.

[kwang1imsa]

@nejisdeath I called it fake even before notch did. If you had any concept of computer graphics you would understand, and if you had ears to listen to how scammy and vague his description of the Euclideon engine is, then you would know. This engine is very impressive, considering it's one guy who made a WIP voxel engine in his spare time. Take a look at atomontage engine, which is incredible.

[blingdog15]

@kwang1imsa notch didnt say he thought it was fake, he said he wasnt sure about it and he doubted it but say potential of it.

[kwang1imsa]

@blingdog15

His whole blog post was an argument about how unfeasible it is. Of course he's calling it fake.

[blingdog15]

@kwang1imsa than he made a response to that post saying that it has potential and that animation is actually possible. He said that they may not have all the features they are saying but in the future there is potential for that. the base of what they are showing are real but not all of the promises are reality YET they can be but CPU power is the issue atm.

[kwang1imsa]

@blingdog15 I think you misread his post or misremember what he said. Reread it again and come back to me.

[Malharhak1]

Notch sent me here.

[troy1002x]

I would be even more amazed if this would have PHYSICS.

[ThegodisAbraxas]

this is amazing i <3 voxels

[Zachism]

Looks like NiGHTS Into Dreams

[fdfafadfafad]

it looks like spqr

[hatestew]

Amazing! It's like all of the voxels have some kind of LOD system with BLF. Some of the best voxels I've ever seen. Well done.

[1994alexS]

minecraft is still the best game of this genre!

;)

[jdsony]

@1994alexS What genre?

[1994alexS]

@jdsony indie game :) like blocks building, etc

[ytbluetoolbox]

DEM PUMPKINS MAYNE, THEY'RE EVERYWHERE

or oranges? I'll never know

[suckots]

reminds me of spore

[WhiteRussianBC]

~30 fps on a 640x360 resolution is not fast

[PhrackTheLord]

So what the graphics card used for this? Show off if you want, but give the freakin specs alright.

[jdsony]

@PhrackTheLord This is likely done in software mode by the CPU, video card is irrelevant. Video cards aren't designed for voxels.

[PhrackTheLord]

@jdsony Well most of it will be the graphics card, since its done with CUDA. CUDA doesnt support CPU, OpenCL does however. GPGPU makes this possible, CPU could never account for such an insane amount of voxels/levelsize.

[DifferentKev]

"Screen 640x360" and the Video is 720p. Massive Quality.

[Hackin4me]

dude when you record something with fraps how do you upload it to youtube???

[MaxRideWizardLord]

This must take ears to make this O_o

[aznboy3213]

unlimited detail is better

[opliik]

@aznboy3213

Unlimited detail is a hoax, and you are an idiot.

[aznboy3213]

@opliik where did it say that

[opliik]

@aznboy3213

Well, investment hoaxes usually works by NOT saying it's a hoax to potential investors. Also, they ran of with about 100k worth of investment money. Which shows two things:

1. You can cheat just about anyone out of money as long as you have an english accent.

2. People know shit about computers and CGI.

But even a novice computer scientist would know that just traversing the lookup tree they were proposing for voxels, would eat up your CPU power even before rendering a single pixel.

[TorraKex]

That's alot of oranges

[Tableuraz]

Spore+Sonic The Hedgehog! XD

[jarblewarble]

@Tableuraz More like Sonic the Hedgehog + Spore + Minecraft.

[darkside267r]

where i get this demo?

[waltibaba]

@Swittor The funny thing is, no it wouldn't. Depending on the rendering technology of the voxels, the processor on your Nokia 3310 could render this (on its own screen of course). As long as you only render the voxels visible at your screen resolution and at your current viewing position, you should have no problems (unless you're running a voodoo3 on 2560x1600 lol).

[Kadda67]

High Definiton Minecraft

[jarblewarble]

@Kadda67 but does it have a random terrain generator? We ought to find this out.

[soupouscous]

It misses a blue hedgehog jumping between platforms. Sonic first zone, anyone ?

[SuperShadow]

23FPS... I am impress.

[DonOfTheInternet]

@SuperShadow And that's *with* fraps running!

Son, I am impress!

[DonOfTheInternet]

Woah, how many voxels are that?

[SquareDanceSteve]

awesome work dude.

[TheRetroZombie]

So this is unlimited detail? Where there is no polygons, just points?

[jimjamgumbob]

@TheRetroZombie no. This is voxels. An alternative to polygons (made of squares/cubes as opposed to triangles, I believe)

[DonOfTheInternet]

@jimjamgumbob

voxel = volumetric pixel.

It's a 3D pixel. :)

[nopushbutton]

whoa

my eyes are not used to seeing voxels

[3D8n52DmV37EI6oHeX]

how many RAM did it take?

[thapizzakillr]

Good from far but far from good

[sv3nni]

@thapizzakillr : You should also take a look at Efficient "Sparse Voxel Octrees" and the Atomontage Engine. Voxels have quite potential.

[Mike9042]

@sv3nni

Well if they didn't then there is no way John Carmack would be planning on using them in id software's upcoming id tech 6 engine.

[sv3nni]

@Mike9042 you mean they wouldnt use if there is no animation? the voxels are only used for the static environmen i guess. animations are done with polygons i assume.

[Mike9042]

@sv3nni Well that is not what Jon Olick's Sparse Voxel octree video seems to suggest. Also Voxelstein3d appears to have models that are render with voxels instead of polygons. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that they do use animated voxels, but that is what I got the impression of. You should watch those videos if you haven't, well mainly the Sparce Voxel Octree one, as that character model looks amazing.

[sv3nni]

@Mike9042: I saw Olick's video 3 yrs ago, right after their release. Also I have implemented a sparse voxel raycasting algorithm as well as the voxelstein raycasting algorithm myself - i know what i am talking about. Still my opinion is the same that the voxel structure is very rigid and not good for animation. the animated characters in voxelstein are done by splatting. the main problems with splatting skinned characters are holes and overdraw. I think its better to think about meshcompression

[Mike9042]

@sv3nni Well you may have done work with voxel's, but if you had followed what John Carmack was saying you would have heard, how he mentioned that the current technology isn't designed for a engine based entirely around voxels, and that his current goal is to try and show a demo of a world that gets at least 10fps in 320x240, and that way companies may design technology that would take full advantages of that. I don't doubt you know what you are talking about, but I do think John knows more.

[Mike9042]

@sv3nni To continue my previous message these are Carmack's exact words

"If I can make something that renders a small window at a modest frame rate and we can run around some geometrically intricate sparse voxel octree world and make a 320x240 window at 10 fps and realize that on next-generation hardware that’s optimized more for doing this we can go ahead and get 1080p 60 Hz on there. "

So yes current animating isn't very effective, but that has never stopped John in the past.

[QUATR00]

@sv3nni Voxels CAN be animated.

[Sethris134]

@sv3nni I agree, i think more companies should implement voxel usage in their video games.

[h8s2]

It would be way faster with 2.5D planes. What's with the cube rendering and antialiasing? One of the benefits of voxel graphics is that it runs quickly.

[sv3nni]

@h8s2 : how should the 2.5D planes work ? any reference? At the moment its using appr. 1 plane per x-coord, which means like 1024 planes for 1024x768.

[h8s2]

@sv3nni By planes I am referring to primitive boxes, as in a BOX() or drawPolygon() method. I don't know much about voxel rendering, as I have primarily worked with graphics libraries that provide 3D functions (polygonal), but I'm trying to build up a voxel engine myself. For speed purposes, you probably want to use "splatting", or if you must use hardware acceleration, then a camera-facing plane for each voxel. What you're doing requires over 3 times the processing power in any situation.

[sv3nni]

@h8s2 : I doubt that rendering basic polygons/primitives or splatting will be faster than the current technology for complex scenes - simply as you get a lot of overdraw. You wont have efficient culling as with raycasting.

[h8s2]

@sv3nni Nonono, you can do the calculations with any method you want, but each voxel should be represented by an extremely simple shape, like a single rectangle. That greatly reduces lag, as it's a simple matter of one for-next loop nested in another to draw the shape.

[sv3nni]

@h8s2 if you render one quad as 2 triangles, you are limited by the max triangle throughput of the gpu - about 350 untextured mpoly/s on my gtx285. with raycasting there is no such limit. a good paper for octree raycasting is "Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees" - it even comes with source. splatting can also be efficient, but then you need to include culling. a good example is far voxels, siggraph 2005. but as i remember, there you could see lots of popping artifacts.

[h8s2]

@sv3nni I'm afraid I don't quite understand. It looks to me like you're rendering cubes, but is that just an optical illusion? I haven't gotten my raycaster to work yet, so I'm not sure exactly what it should look like, but to me it looks like you're rendering a little more than you need to. Especially if you pause at 0:10

[sv3nni]

@h8s2 :it's not really cubes. for each vertical line on the screen, I cast one ray. the algorithm then rasterizes the RLE elements from front to back in a top-down order. Each RLE element is rasterized as a vertical textured bar, often consisting of many voxels. Also integrated is the floating horizon algorithm - meaning that there is a min and max offset for each column on the screen to accelerate rendering.

[h8s2]

@sv3nni And is this faster than back-to-front non-rasterized splatting?

[jhtrico1850]

This looks like Rayman.

[DallasCZ]

you can also watch "ATOMONTAGE VOXEL ENGINE" it is far behind this...

[sv3nni]

@DallasCZ :ATOMONTAGE has collision detection and physics - a thing that the other voxel engines are all missing.

[derZiegeuner]

Minecraft should really be looking into this.

[DJPuckiP]

can somebody tell me what (a) voxel is?

[SpeeBeta1]

check out Ken Silverman's Voxel code... Runs very good on many PCs... purely CPU based though ...

[sv3nni]

@SpeeBeta1: Its the same algorithm here, just on the GPU with some improvements. Of course do I know Ken Silvermans Voxel Code.

[metabog]

I like the filtering/smoothing between voxels, it reminds me of back when linear /bilinear filtering first came out.

[jabahpureza]

COOL!!!

please, do you know any device to do voxel modeling/sculpting using our own fingers directly?

I've done one called vitalino (search voxel vitalino on youtube) in an initial development state using two webcams and I would like to see similar technologies.

Anybody can list some technologies for that?

thank you!

[sv3nni]

@jabahpureza  if you look for sculpting check out coat 3d

[jabahpureza]

@sv3nni thank you! I saw this software. its really great. but i'm talking about hardware device. with which you could sculpt with your fingers movements. without touch. like this I'm doing, please check it out my channel first video. thank you for your time.

[sv3nni]

@jabahpureza you should look for other research papers in this area

[zezba9000]

Are you using octrees?

How are you skipping large empty areas so fast?

Ive made a simple PS_3.0 voxel ray caster with 3D_Textures, but want to do more with voxels when I get a directX 11 card... so I can use directCompute.

Very cool btw.

[sv3nni]

This one is using and RLE based method, no octrees. The method is very similar to the voxel forward projection algorithm, an '91 paper. For landscape type of scenes its 1.5-2x as fast as octrees by using 2xAA. I recently also started experimenting with octrees - octrees have the advantage to handle memory more efficient.

[zezba9000]

So is there any good documentation on this RLE method?

I have an idea of some concepts if might use, but am at a loss on exactly how skipping large empty area's works.

Do you have source code to any of your examples? Although im a Direct3D guy, havint used OpenGL since like High School.

[sv3nni]

The Voxlap voxel-engine has about the same algorithm - there, source code is available. As for the original paper, the authors and title are: John R. Wright, Julia C. L. Hsieh: "A Voxel-Based, Forward Projection Algorithm for Rendering Surface and Volumetric Data"

[speedaddict2008]

W O W Where can I get the executable?

[sv3nni]

Thank you for the comments.

You can find the demo here:

voxels . blogspot  . com

[messiahandrw]

excellent work!