I want to write a voxel engine now!

Voxels with "antialiasing" would be pretty cool for making organic surfaces.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out a way to use voxels with modern hardware acceleration(that won't kill framerates) instead of having to build a software renderer.

My idea is to create a texture map from the voxel model using the 6 views and then transform any connected faces into triangles/quads. The texture map would elimate the need to check each voxels color while making the connections, plus you could use it to check for occluded faces. It would only work for "hollow" models, but it would speed things up while maintaining the "voxel vomit" look.

Another problem though is that modelling large animated characters would be extremely tedious, if not impossible. In this case it would be better to just build one frame using voxels and then convert it to a "proper" smooth triangle mesh and use bone animation and the have a mesh->voxel converter to convert the animations back to voxels.

I dunno if a voxel engine is really amenable to easy parallelism, but if it is we could probably do most of it on the GPU.

What I meant was that you could add interpolated voxels to smooth out the scene, so stuff doesn't look all pixelly and rough up close, and you could collapse the voxel bundle when far away. Pretty much an LOD scheme, but it seems really simple to do with voxels, so I'm wondering why it hasn't been done (other than that you'd have to have a really fine voxel size).

I know what you meant, but I consider smoothing out voxels to be heresy.

Very cool Scet. I'm glad I'm not the only voxaholic around here. [grin]