Realtime voxel raytracing

The Stanford terracotta bunny raytraced on a HD4890 at 240 FPS.

The main work is done by a GLSL shader that uses a raymarching/interpolation technique to provide a smooth surface even at close-up shots. Normals are approximated using the central difference method.

More information and the demo available here: http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=89584

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• realtime
• voxel
• raytracing
• blitzmax
• glsl

[AKAIMAX1]

@alvarg You don't know any of that. For one thing, all their objects are repetitions of eachother. They have the elephant, palm tree, cactus, 1 grass model, grain of dirt model, vine model and the floor model. Thats really not a lot. For another thing, every single game uses a search algorithm. Its just a fancy word for getting objects in 3d space onto the screen. Ray tracing does not suck with animations. Voxels suck with animations as you can't stretch them the same way you stretch polygons.

[alvarg]

@AKAIMAX1 yea but euclideon use a more advantage method of point cloud data or voxels which has never been done before, like they said on there video, polygon engine is fast high quality low memory limited geometry,

raytracing full 3d aswell but slow and animations are crap, voxel engines full rounded 3d unlimited geometry but its slow and takes up lots of space, there engine which is a hybrid voxel/search algorithm is fast unlimted geometry and doesn't take up much space either.

[AKAIMAX1]

@nils4545 If you ever looked up what point cloud data is, its atoms. Voxels are atoms, in your engine they are the smallest point the game can render (in most cases). There's no difference between them when you laser scan something you get point cloud data aka voxels (medicine and so on). Look it up.

[nils4545]

Eucledeon is not voxels, it's point cloud data. Whatever that is we don't know yet, but hopefully we will know more about it soon :P. They say it's an unlimited tech.

[PhilipWitte]

@TheRealNici I agree Eucledeon is atypical, especially with word choice; but innovation can come from anywhere, and i'm not going to overlook a potentially promising tech just because the creator is a bit over-the-top. I agree his claims and attitude are really annoying though.

John Carmack is a brilliant man, and i agree with his statements on hardware and voxels. No raytraced voxel games just yet, but hopefully not to far away. First someone needs to get skinned animations working properly.

[TheRealNici]

@PhilipWitte At the QuakeCon Keynote when people went to ask questions, Carmack was asked about Voxels. As far as I remember, he said he wrote 4-5 voxel engines in his time but technology just isn't ready for complex voxel games yet.

And Eucledeon is imho just bashing polygons without really telling something about their engine. :/ Very unprofessional

[PhilipWitte]

@TheRealNici

wikipedia . org/wiki/Id_Tech_6

He's been saying it for a long time. Although recently he was interviewed and gave his opinion on raytracing, which apparently he's not quite sure weather voxels or polygons will be the future of real-time raytracing.

Raytracing is the future, it solves many of rasterisations problems. A voxel-like algorithum will probably reign champion eventually. Euclideon's (and Atomatage's) engines looks promising, even if the presentation is lacking.

[TheRealNici]

@PhilipWitte source? He didn't say that at quakecon as far as I know

[lesleyhenriquez]

@SaschaHeylik On a shite reso and very few lights.

[lesleyhenriquez]

@McGravier On a single bunny with one light.

Now try it on a full scene with 200 lights, radiosity and detailed, accurate physics ruining your framerate.

Raytracing is already possible but you need some serious hardware, doing it on voxels is even more taxing, not even considering the insane amount of ram you need, or bleeding fast storage if you want to stream it from disk.(OpenCL/CUDA can be a big big help here.)

Its gonna be a few years.