[HN Gopher] The Perfect Voxel Engine (2021)
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The Perfect Voxel Engine (2021)
Author : helloplanets
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-05-26 05:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (voxely.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (voxely.net)
| bun_terminator wrote:
| This might profit from some context: This is written by "John
| Lin", who is famous for his impressive voxel videos on social
| Media. He became a hallmark name in voxel discussions. See for
| example his youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM2RhfMLoLqG24e_DYgTQeA
| actionfromafar wrote:
| As far as I can tell, he got famous for the voxel demos, then
| decided to not do voxels, based on feedback from fans.
|
| Edit: I misunderstood.
| bun_terminator wrote:
| Huh, interesting. Even today when there's a voxel discussion
| on graphics programming communities - john lin comes but all
| the time
| TheRoque wrote:
| From what I've read (the pinned comment in the aforementioned
| video), he just decided to ditch high resolution voxels for
| lower resolution ones, as the feedbacks said they preferred a
| more pixelated art style. But still voxels. But looking at
| his latest blog post, it seems that he's not focused on
| voxels at the moment yet. Or maybe got hired and can't talk
| about it, who knows -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Crestwave wrote:
| Hm, do you have a source for that? It's possible that you're
| mixing it up with his decision to shelf "micro-voxels" in
| favor of the traditional, chunkier voxel art style.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=8ptH79R53c0 (see pinned comment)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Thank you, I think you are right.
| truckerbill wrote:
| It's a shame he disappeared for some reason, his stuff was crazy
| TheRoque wrote:
| His latest blog post/tweet was less than a year ago
| https://voxely.net/blog/using-a-rnn-for-2d-tile-map-synthesi...
| ganzuul wrote:
| It would be interesting to have some interpretability to how the
| YouTube algorithm suddenly picks out these 'old' gems.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| ML directed A/B testing to see what sticks, is my uneducated
| guess.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I'm really hoping for a more human-centric version of
| 'interpretability'.
|
| That might be how the algo picks up what to trend but it
| doesn't tell us what sparked it.
| OtomotO wrote:
| For anyone interested, these days there are multiple people
| working on impressive stuff, sometimes it's even open source:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@GabeRundlett (open source engine in C++
| with e.g. Rust bindings via C)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@DouglasDwyer (proprietary, using Rust
| and WGPU but interesting videos)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@xima1 (afaik proprietary, using WebGPU
| and typescript)
|
| Open source stuff:
|
| https://github.com/ria8651/alex (Rust)
| https://github.com/davids91/shocovox (Rust)
|
| There is a myriad more, many discords...
| sambeau wrote:
| The Minecraft team at 4J have just announced a new voxel-based
| crafting game platform.
|
| https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/dundee/4988656/4j-studi...
| longor1996 wrote:
| With the help of the voxelgamedev community, I'm maintaining a
| relatively large listing of such projects over at
| https://voxel.wiki/wiki/projects/.
|
| Sadly, a lot of projects get abandoned.... :(
| einpoklum wrote:
| While I got a nice grade in my Computer Graphics intro course
| back in the day - I have not done any CG since. I have a dumb
| question:
|
| Why is it better render small cubes, then to render triangles (or
| polygons)? I mean, a cube is, eventually, 6 squares, or 12
| triangles, in a certain formation, right? So is the entire
| benefit captured by this 1/12 ratio? Or is there a deeper
| motivation for this pseudo-rasterization?
| hoseja wrote:
| Not sure I'm fully understanding your question but the primary
| reason for the voxel engines is interactibility. They're trying
| to be Minecraft 2, not Crysis 5.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Most voxel engines end up rendering triangles. The voxels are
| used to represent the world to allow for cool physics, in
| particular destruction.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Unlike general meshes, the low-level triangles used to
| represent voxel surfaces can be easily computed in a shader
| rather than stored explicitly, and even per-voxel data can
| sometimes be recomputed on the fly because of procedural
| generation.
| qingcharles wrote:
| All of these demos are surely using the same rendering engine
| underneath as a classic mesh 3D, but voxels let you smash stuff
| up easier than trying to figure out where to make breaks in
| meshes and close the holes.
|
| As Lin says "Universe = voxels" .. insinuating that atoms are
| essentially voxels.
| jak6jak wrote:
| Are voxels the goto method for easy mesh manipulation without
| worrying about vertices? I've been trying to research ways to 3d
| model without worrying about topology. So far all I've found is
| CSG and voxels.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| Can you even call voxel objects a mesh?
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| There's also SDF (Signed Distance Fields) modeling, such as
| present in multiple modeling tools like Adobe Substance 3D
| Modeler [0] or WOMP [1].
|
| I suppose this is similar to voxels in that the data is stored
| in a uniform grid, but the way it gets rendered is different.
|
| [0]
| https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d/apps/modeler.html
|
| [1] https://womp.com/
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| SDFs don't inherently have a grid, right? You can use
| marching cubes to sample them along a grid, but you can also
| do ray marching
| skykooler wrote:
| It depends on the representation. SDFs can be pure
| mathematical functions, in which case there is no grid, or
| they can be a grid of values representing distances to the
| implicit surface, in which case they do use a grid. The
| latter representation, to my knowledge, is rarely used in
| 3d, but it is used in 2d for SDF fonts for example.
| Jarmsy wrote:
| A grid of values can be a _sampling_ of an SDF, but it
| cannot be a true SDF itself.
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| From what I can find this depends on the definition, as
| there is a difference between a Signed Distance Function
| [0], and a Signed Distance Field, where the latter does
| get defined as a grid of values:
|
| > A signed distance field is represented as a grid
| sampling of the closest distance to the surface of an
| object represented as a polygonal model. [1]
|
| and
|
| > Signed Distance Fields (SDF) are 3D textures where each
| texel stores the distance from the surface of an object.
| By convention, this distance is negative inside the
| object and positive outside. [2]
|
| But that grid of values gets generated from either
| mathematical formulas, e.g. spheres, or from another
| representation of geometry such as a mesh or a vector
| shape.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_distance_function
|
| [1] https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-v-
| physics...
|
| [2] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeff
| ectgrap...
| rscho wrote:
| Hijacking the thread: I'm looking to compute sciency stuff on a
| grid of truncated octahedrons, and rendering that to voxels. Does
| anyone know a good way to do that??
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