Mittwoch, 30. April 2014

Polygon Rendering vs. Voxel Raycasting

Since I started the project I have always wondered if it wouldnt be better to use polygons/triangles rather than voxels. To verify this decision, I created a reasonably complex test scene from multiple instances of the same block, and rendered the scene once with triangles using Display Lists & LOD and second using voxel raycasting (LOD inherently). The triangle block is created by exporting the voxels as polygon mesh, and then using Meshlab to reduce the triangles and create multiple LOD levels.

It turns out that triangles are much faster for a small to a medium number of instances (its about equal for 10x10x10 = 1000 instances) - but when having a large amount of 8000 instances (32 Million Triangles), 40x5x40 blocks, voxel raycasting is significantly faster ( 40 vs 13 fps ).

For triangles, I havent used any sophisticated occlusion culling. It would therefore be interesting to see how much more performance could be achieved using the voxel based umbra or the software based rasterization presented by intel.

For the ones of you that would like to experiment with occlusion culling, the source & data of the polygon benchmark can be downloaded [here].

Raycasting Outside
Raycasting inside

Triangles Outside
Triangles inside


Sonntag, 27. April 2014

Minecraft Style

Here a test how a 100% block landscape would look - basically like Minecraft.

Samstag, 26. April 2014

NVIDIA GTX580M vs ATI Radeon R9 270x @1920x1024

Today I tried to run the demo on a newer ATI 270x card of a friend. The result was better than expected as the ATI card achieved greater 100 fps for most of the time. On the GTX580M, the framerate was around 40 outside and ~30 indoors.

New features in this version: FXAA & loading / saving of level data.

ATI Radeon R9 270x
NVIDIA GTX 580M

Dienstag, 22. April 2014

Collision Detection

The next important feature is mostly working now : Collision Detection. I played a bit around to create a castle in the sky.

Samstag, 12. April 2014

New Sandbox Features

The editor now has a shelf and add/delete function for block setting as well as a box to indicate where to set a block. Further (2nd video), the new version features sound driven light effects that can be chosen when voxel sculpting.


Sonntag, 6. April 2014

Turrican Style Retro Look

Today some new experiments to get a retro look.Shading and background is changed accordingly.


Mittwoch, 2. April 2014

Minecraft-Style Sandbox Editing and Voxel Cube Crafting

Today I am posting a video that shows how the entire process from creation a voxel cube to using the voxel cube(s) for sandbox style world editing. It is captured in real-time, so feel free to zap if you feel bored at any point.


Dienstag, 1. April 2014

Merging with correct ZBuffer and Light

Merging triangle data with voxels now works also for the depth buffer. Shading is also unified.