Better ways to go are Image Based Rendering..

If you want some information on Voxel Texturing ( free direction voxel heightmapping ) I did my master''s thesis on it, but the algorithm does not produce perspective correct voxel lines.


~ Mad Keith ~
**SoftwareMode**

BOSJOH : Ehm, no, you can''t do it that way, because then you wouldn''t have the nice effects you normally get with voxels, because then you can''t shoot through a wall and see what''s inside. If you wanna do it this way, polygons are the way to go, but don''t waste time for using voxels for stuff like this.

CU

Graphix Coding @
Skullpture Entertainment
http://www.skullpture.de

OUTCAST! It''s is 100% voxels, and it kick''s ASS!! Love that game, it''s REALLY well made. And really fun to play

Just checked out the Outcast site, and it doesn''t look much like voxels to me. I don''t know anything about the engine though, it could be some form or other.

There are many ways of compressing voxel data, you shouldn''t write the technique off too quickly. Specially wavelets and such.

NuFan - it''s kindof short-sighted to say that voxels are useless if you don''t do actual volume rendering. Voxel surface models are still highly useful and can be fast due to their regular grid arrangement. There are specific advantages/disadvantages, and some corners have to be cut for compression.

However, I''ve been doing a lot of work on semi-voxels ( heightmap rendering and such ), and come to the conclusion that there are more interesting things to do. My current target is writing an evolution of my voxel texturing engine that will do real-time polygon displacement mapping, and after that I''m moving on to image based rendering, a very promising field indeed.

For those who are interested, my Master''s thesis on voxel texturing is on my site at
http://student.luc.ac.be/~9511797 , a link next to the image map.


~ Mad Keith ~
**SoftwareMode**

Mad Keith : But at the moment it is senseless to use real voxels if you need only on layer and no volumetric objects since polygons are accelerated and as good as voxels for these purposes.

Voxel modelling is still a problem and creating the stored voxel-data for such a cube would take much more time than for a polygonal cube, even if it''s built out of hundreds of polygons.

So, IMO polygons are the way to go for those things. Maybe I didn''t get all the advantages, but you could tell me the other ones since I didn''t implement real voxels yet.

CU

Graphix Coding @
Skullpture Entertainment
http://www.skullpture.de

Mindwipe : No, Outcast is no voxel, it is a pseudo-voxel polygon mix (I know for sure).

CU

Graphix Coding @
Skullpture Entertainment
http://www.skullpture.de

NuFan: You''re close, but not quite.
As a RENDERING structure, indeed, voxels offer no immediate advantage over polygons, specially not in the speed department. But as a DATA structure, they sure do.

A nice example is the "voxel terrains" that have been mentioned here. They aren''t real voxels, and the really fast engines draw the strips as polygons, utilizing the hardware, but the structure remains one that is based on spatial enumeration rather than connected dots.


~ Mad Keith ~
**SoftwareMode**