I am working on programming something like that. Instead of voxels to render the volume, I render the surface. I record the heights of the last line and fill between the old line and new line with polygons.

I have a neat working demo if you would like to see it, email me.

[This message has been edited by LeeIsMe (edited September 06, 1999).]

writing directly to the zbuffer isn't possible with the current 3d-accel-cards. if it works with d3d it's software emulated.

Ok all, I've been thinking about writing a 3D voxel engine. The thing thats been holding me back though, is that I also wanted to mix it with Direct3D so that I could render polygons for the models, and use voxels for the landscape. Anyway, I got to thinking about a couple of ways to do it, so here are my ideas:

1) render voxels as you normally would (as lines), but also write the appropriate values into the hardwares Z-Buffer. Now you can render polygons as you normally would, and they should render correctly. The problem here is that im not sure you can write directly into the hardwares z-buffer. Anyone know if you can? Also, it seems like it would be slow.

2) Render voxels as quads (triangle strips, to be more exact). This wouldn't take much fussing around, and would probably be the fastest solution.

Thoughts? Ideas?

--TheGoop

The only way to write into the z-buffer is to send polygons to the card. That would leave you with option 2 automatically.

Greetz,

---------
Eddy Akman
E-mersion Project
www.connectii.net/emersion