Animated Sparse Voxel Octrees: In-depth pt1/3

Part 1/3 of the in-depth explanation of Animated SVOs. Contents:
- What are Voxels?
- Why are they so cool?

The keynote contains scenes from the atomontage engine:
- youtube.com/atomontageengine
- atomontage.com

more info at: http://bautembach.de/wordpress/?page_id=7

Interesting links:
- watch?v=M04SMNkTx9E

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• voxel
• sparse voxel octree
• rendering
• raytracing
• rasterizer
• 3d
• graphics
• animation
• opengl
• cuda
• engine

[2mustange]

Can you mix voxels and polygons in creating a game? cause i know if you work with some stuff you cant work with another at the same time. I wondering if this is the case also or if they are capable of being worked together

[radulphi]

@2mustange Using "Deferred Shading" you can very easily render voxel and polygon content side by side (and even let them interact with each other visually (like cast shadows on one another)).

[archon808]

Voxels are not memory efficient. Obviously it would take less memory to store the star as 8 triangles. The same LOD quadtree method can be applied to triangles, so LOD is not a advantage of voxels. And streaming has nothing to do with voxels vs triangles. Voxels are a waste of memeory, and time.

[radulphi]

@archon808 The star is just an example to illustrate how SVOs work. Voxels are more memory efficient than triangles when used to represent objects with great mesostructural detail (when the pixel : triangle-ratio approaches 1 : 1) which the star is not. When it comes to representing objects with low mesotructural detail (like flat surfaces, when the pixel : triangle - ratio is very high), triangles are more memory efficient than voxels.

[ObeseRacoon]

Wow thanks for making this very informative.

I was wondering what you think of hardware tessellation + rasterization?

[radulphi]

@ObeseRacoon I love rasterization, especially screen space techniques, which rasterization kind of favors. Tessellation makes it possible to add non-height field mesostructural details to geometry which is cool, but costly. In general, I use the right tool for the job and considering how elaborated polygon graphics are, alternative technologies have a hard time competing with them. But I think that voxels still have some things to offer which polygons don't, so I research them further.

[themacguffinman]

Thank you for your articulate explanation! You really helped me understand how and why octrees are used for voxels.

[Nexfluts]

These videos are great thank you very much for taking the time to make them. Best explanation on the internet.

[m44ever]

I am really interesting in voxels. Voxels have tons of possibilities. :) I love it.

[CodyRicheson]

Thanks so much for making the effort to articulate your words. There are plenty of native English speakers who just slur their words together. Anyway, cool stuff, I love voxels.

[zproxy]

Demoguy needs a better mic!

[sepidar666]

Thank u very much for this video. It was very educational for me.

[Dummweltschutz]

"cubes alone aren't THAT exciting" - i was just like "whaaa..?" never played minecraft? ;) oh, and i discovered ur channel by my own "investigation", so pls dont count me to the shitload of ppl that just come from notch's blog ;)