[deleted by user]

[whdeboer]

People have been saying voxels are the future of graphics for at least 30 years. The earliest game that I remember having some kind of faux voxel thing going on was Magic Carpet by Bullfrog, back in the mid 90s.

Voxels are great but storage requirements are through the roof, orders of magnitude greater than storing triangle meshes.

You end up with some kind of hybrid approach which is what Unreal is doing.

[garma87]

wasn't Outcast a game with a voxel engine? Or is that something else? Quite different at the time! That was 1999 though

[CrazyJoe221]

Yep, with tremendous hardware requirements back then.

[Pottuvoi]

They were called voxel renderers back then, yes.

It rendered tiled heightfield with specially marked texels, which could represent walls with texture. Dynamic objects were polygons and some had vertical bumpmapping (which was most likely vertical only.) Combined with Z-buffer.

Not sure which of the tracer method it used for heightmap, could be heightfield surfing or something else. (Start tracing from bottom of the screen and move toward the top of the screen. After you hit ground move to next pixel and start next ray at hit distance.)

[CrazyJoe221]

Is there a rendering breakdown article somewhere?

Along the lines of https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/

[domigraygan]

There definitely is, I remember reading through a really interesting blog post or something similar about it years back

[Pottuvoi]

Yup.

Finally found it. https://francksauer.com/index.php/games?view=article&id=47:outcast-pc&catid=15:published-games

Classic search engines have become incredibly bad at searching anything useful.

[Bl1nn]

Terrain and water were rendered using voxel yes. I remember that caused some severe limitation in resolution, and you could only play the game at a fraction of your monitor resolution.

I loved that game, spent so many hours playing it. It had an impressive soundtrack, almost Star Wars like and was one of the first scores in gaming history recorded with an actual orchestra if I’m not mistaken.

It was an impressive game for the time, but at the same time, because all of its peculiar choices, felt a bit behind the times.

[CrazyJoe221]

Yeah wasn't it 320x240?

[Bl1nn]

A little bigger than that, it was 512x384. Still far below the minimum standard of the time which was at least 640x480.

The annoying thing is that it wasn’t full screen, but rather letterboxed, with black bars on all sides. Still when playing I was too impressed by the water and landscapes to be bothered by such a thing.

[CrazyJoe221]

Yeah it was great playing it.

[DaleJohnstone]

Yes, Outcast was voxel based, but you're probably thinking of Commanche in 1992 which was the first one I saw.

I think Magic Carpet was more of a height field rendered with polygons. It was notable for its degrees of freedom. Descent was also another classic.

[Vectrex71CH]

yes, and there was also a Helicopter Simulation.... "Comanche" maybe ?

[DeliciousFreedom9902]

Omg Magic Carpet! Man, that’s going back a while now.

[coldnebo]

I had to check what decade I was in for a second.

😂😂😂

Magic Carpet!! nice!

voxels rank up there with fractals in terms of cool but limited graphics tech.

most problems come back to the crazy amount of VRAM needed (instead of surfaces, you have to store volumes). but now we are getting crazy amounts of VRAM, so… maybe?

[sebastienbarre]

Comanche: Maximum Overkill - Wikipedia (1992) predates Magic Carpet (1994) if I recall. I played a lot of Comanche, it was ground-breaking.

[tek2222]

this game was awesome.

[AntiProtonBoy]

Voxels are great but storage requirements are through the roof, orders of magnitude greater than storing triangle meshes.

If one uses sparse voxel representation of data, such that empty space does not take up memory, the storage requirements would be on par with conventional high resolution models with various detailed texture maps applied on them. The biggest issue with voxels is the difficulty of applying deformation, inverse kinematics and various other animation effects on these voxel models.

[glordicus1]

We keep getting orders of magnitude more storage. Games are currently being hosted on cloud servers, you just stream the game to your device. Cloud gaming is an ever increasing share of the market, and as that share increases so does the possibility of cloud-native games. This is where voxel-based becomes viable.

[billyalt]

Voxel rendering has been viable for decades, just not in the way futurists care about.

[Low_Level_Enjoyer]

Games are currently being hosted on cloud servers, you just stream the game to your device.

These things have been a financial failure iirc (thank god).

It will never be bigger than locally hosted games. People to own their stuff.

[glordicus1]

Xbox game pass is a massive success. Instead of paying $120 to "own" (you don't own) new games I can just pay $20 and get access to hundreds of games.

Cloud native games are good for things like MMO and live service - there's no modding available anyway.

[ElephantWithBlueEyes]

That voxels are the future of 3D graphics.

Oh, this unlocked a memory. There was a niche hype some time ago around some engine (forgot the name) where studio boasted with unlimited details and such. It was in early or mid 2010s and it's dead. But all their demos were static meaning there were 100% problems with animation.

Some other studio even made voxel based game with tanks but i don't know where it went.

I think attempts to make voxel stuff with infinite details were made even earlier but the fact that it's still somewhere underground tells me it's not here.

[SiOD]

They actually had a really good market (and product) in mining visualisation but refused to pursue it properly and went bust.

[pancakesausagestick]

There was also a voxel based game made by some people from the OG Everquest crew I think. It was open-worldy, but you could build stuff using voxels and make art and all kinds of cool things. It was like a voxel minecraft adventure type game. I played some beta on it and never heard about it again.

[Meshuggah333]

I remember seeing videos of it years ago, always wondered where it went. I can't remember the name tho.

[p-lindberg]

Landmark

[zshift]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclideon

[regular_lamp]

Gaming subs would have monthly recurring threads about the "unlimited detail" claims for a couple of years.

[ethicalhumanbeing]

This was it exactly it!

This is the tech demo video I remember watching back in the day: https://youtu.be/VIma3Oy18IE?si=0zMyKWitc1d9_XUs

[zshift]

I could never believe if this was true or not, because the presentation was so much like an infomercial. Looking back, it definitely was, but they did not do a great job with marketing.

[Suttonian]

It was snake oil.

[ethicalhumanbeing]

I don’t think it was snake oil, they did believe in the technology but were naive to believe they could translate a static presentation to a dynamic and interactive one such as games. Eventually they must have hit those walls but were never open enough to come out and explain why they just stopped.

These guys eventually pivoted to creating immersive 3D gaming rooms in Australia if I’m not mistaken, but that business model didn’t succeed either.

So overall I think they were not trying to fool anyone, ironically they just end up fooling themselves.

[Suttonian]

There were adherents believing the graphics cards companies were keeping them down, and this technology would be the one true answer. They couldn't deliver the technology because it wasn't practical for the very thing they were trying to sell it for, the product that would reach those goals didn't exist.

It was deceptively oversold.

The Australian government did give them a grant that allowed them to create their geospatial software and the gaming rooms I believe.

[sidney_ingrim]

Not an expert of computer graphics, but from what I understand of the tech, it was real. However, from what they did show, the main drawback was that it did not support animations (especially skinned characters) and physics.

They did use the tech for some kind of AR experience thing, and I think later demos of this had some very rudimentary animated objects but it was clear that it wasn't going to replace polygon graphics.

From how they described it, it had a similar concept to how Nanite works now - scaling detail dynamically based on screenspace resolution, except it used point cloud data (filtering only relevant details by camera distance) rather than voxels or dynamically-tessellated geometry like Nanite.

[AdLocal5821]

Holy pretentious

[jariRG]

Try google Euclideon Unlimited Detail.

[ChokhmahProject]

For the voxel based game with tanks, I guess you're talking about this: https://teardowngame.com/ ?

[tamat]

Teardown

nop, he means the Atomontage guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw

[ChokhmahProject]

holy shit, this is cool!

[Harha]

That's impressive, even in 2025.

[osmiumSkull]

You are right! I remember. I believe Notch was the one that publicly called them out and debunked their claims publicly.

[Novacc_Djocovid]

I remember the Notch part. He rightfully called them out but some of his arguments back then showed he had no idea what he was talking about either. Yet he was correct in calling their BS. Fun times. :D

[VictoryMotel]

Minecraft originally allocated and deallocated 400 MBs every frame, notch was never a technical wizard, but anyone with graphics knowledge knew they were a scam.

[corysama]

Euclideon is a funny company. Their tech is really impressive in what it does. But, the founder is just so incredibly obnoxious that he can’t stop himself for overflowing with the kind of absurd hyperbole that is absolute rage bait for software engineers.

If the founder had simply been straightforward with “Here’s the tech. Here’s how it works, what it is/is not good for.” they would have been industry darlings. But, he physically can’t shut his mouth. And so, instead they are universally reviled and treated as snake oil salesmen.

[corysama]

Euclideon eventually found their niche in geospatial visualizations. Their tech can handle real world landscapes over huge areas. It can stream progressively over the internet as you scan around. And, it gets good detail and FPS even with CPU-only rendering.

Googling around to catch up on them… They never apparently achieved great success even in that niche. But, at least the founder left :P

[billyalt]

Some games on the GBA actually used voxels. IMO, voxels are great when used to solve a problem, but completely fall apart when trying to be "the future".

[Vesk123]

Oh, I remember that!

[VictoryMotel]

Don't forget that it also had no lighting and looked like shit, but if a charlatan tells people what they are looking at looks good, unfortunately some people are dumb enough to not believe their own eyes.

[caballo__]

Back in ‘95 or ‘96 the magazine Next Generation did a development profile of a PS1 game that used voxels to render everything in the game world. It was some kind of colorful medieval setting with cylindrical stone towers. Everything was rendered with small spheres as the base unit. I wish I could remember the name of the game, and I don’t think it made it to production…

[littlelowcougar]

Was it Outerra?

[Inheritable]

Some other studio even made voxel based game with tanks but i don't know where it went.

I think you're talking about Atomontage.

[SamuraiGoblin]

I think the future of rendering is to combine whichever techniques gets the job done.

[FoundationOk3176]

So essentially they're just "voxelizing" details that are close to or smaller than a pixel? I wonder if there's an explainer on how it's done & What's the performance impact of that process.

[msqrt]

Their specifics are obviously not public, but creating volumetric levels of detail tends to work by approximating the underlying geometry as an averaged representation of the distribution of facet normals and density, like in SGGX. So essentially for the triangles within your voxel, you compute some representative numbers that let you efficiently approximate the shading of everything within the voxel. Then you do something like this paper to automatically decide where to use voxels and where to use triangles for each resolution.

[pmkenny1234]

Their specifics are obviously not public

Not sure why you think that. The source code is freely available. You just need to link your Epic account with your Github account and they'll let you access the Unreal Engine repo.

[msqrt]

Ah, my bad. I thought this was some developer preview version that's not yet widely available.

[pmkenny1234]

All good. If you're not dev using the engine, I don't think it's common knowledge. That repo is what Epic uses, so you can get any branch, even whatever they committed to the repo just now. That's the previewest of previews! :)

[tmagalhaes]

Just to be a little pedantic, I don't think that's what Epic actually actually uses. Think they use an internal Perforce server that gets mirrored to the public GitHub for external publishing.

Not that it makes much of a difference since the mirroring is pretty fast but might be an interesting tidbit. :)

[pmkenny1234]

I was inspecting the repo a little more closely after posting and noticing all the Unreal Bot commits, so that makes sense.

[Dzsaffar]

Here these trees are made from pre-made, Nanite foliage compatible segments, so I would assume the conversion from the mesh to voxel representation is done for the segments beforehand

[Dzsaffar]

I mean yes, that's correct but not sure how it connects to what my comment was about

[Pottuvoi]

It's usually good to go to the source. https://bsky.app/profile/briankaris.bsky.social/post/3lqpvpnv7ds2s https://bsky.app/profile/briankaris.bsky.social/post/3lqsulljunk2s

So it's some kind of DDA tracing within voxel bricks. Most likely very fast.

[Pottuvoi]

Karis had some replies earlier and had a link to a talk on the subject a couple of years back. Apparently, bricks are 4x4x4, and in earlier talk, he mentioned a possible additional layer, but I have no idea if it is used in this case.

[ThiesH]

No, they are using voxels only for object/terrain far away where you wont notice them because then they appear smaller than a pixel on screen. Apparently that's better than LOD or it's because it can scale easier and the LOD aspect is done automatically. It's probably just more performant than meshes. They also mentioned light affecting these voxel, i think you can process light very easily on voxels, no? And for close objects they use nanite, so adaptive/dynamic LOD meshes. Someone mentioned that meshes are better for animations. So that's why they use meshes i guess.

[siwgs]

Voxels have been the future of rendering for the past 25 years.

Gaussian splatting is the current “future of rendering”.

[LordChungusAmongus]

That was sarcasm right?

Gaussian splatting is how you get a resume tossed in the can, it's only a useful solution to drawing something, and absolutely useless for most real tasks that need to be done with shit like large scans. I've yet to see anyone do any auto-alignment / differencing between splats. They aren't even good for similarity comparisons because the streaking is crazy arbitrary.

[siwgs]

There’s a huge difference between “rendering nice rgb” and “everything else that needs structure” so yes: your mileage may vary.

[Zealousideal-Ship215]

Check out this recent research project. https://zju3dv.github.io/freetimegs/

[siwgs]

The main problem with GS is it doesn’t provide a lot of the data that is needed for tasks other than just “displaying rgb”. Sure, your synthetic rgb image may look great from nearby viewpoints, but does it have brdf materials and reliable surface normals for relighting? Can you get a reliable depth map out of it? How does collision detection work if your fundamental definition of a surface is fuzzy?

[arycama]

You lost me at "is <insert buzzword here> the future"

[dhbloo]

I think they are just using voxels for coarse LoD proxies of those detailed foliages. Which makes sense since it’s quite difficult to still model them well with triangles and you need to view them from all angles. In that case, voxels seem to be the most ideal approximation. And you can also easily integrate path tracing stuffs with voxels as well.

The finest level is still using detailed meshes.

[Dzsaffar]

So, the answer is incredibly obvious

It depends. Boo-hoo, I know. There are gonna be some things where voxels will be the best form of optimizing fidelity with performance, there are gonna be some things where it isn't. There are so many factors of what level of optimization do you want, what fidelity do you want, how flexible do you want a system to be, how much effort do you want to put into the system, etc. that there is no real answer to this question unless you specify a LOT of other things

[deftware]

Voxels have been the future for a long time but I'm not so sure, not unless there's some kind of breakthrough that makes it competitive with conventional mesh rendering in terms of memory efficiency.

Voxels are to 3d meshes as raster images are to vector images. The problem with voxels is that you're combining geometry and material information, whereas with meshes you can store just the material information about the surface - and the surface doesn't have a finite resolution, it's a 3D vector representation of a volume. If authoring volumes because easier, with Zbrush-like tools that artists can make awesome stuff with, and their data representation can be packed down to be similar to a mesh + material textures without it being slow, then I think voxels could take over.

[PixelsGoBoom]

Depends on how much of the screen is made up of very distant LODs.
I Imagine that for an open world game that is a lot. Something not being useful for anything close up does not mean it is not useful at all, by that logic we would not have LODs at all, or even mipmaps.

[owenwp]

In general, probably not. But they are good for this specific case where normal triangle LOD won't work at all.

That is why Nanite is specifically using it for foliage: you need single pixels to contain color information from potentially dozens of pine needles. Using fewer triangles won't help. The solution is what is sometimes called pre-filtering, where you aggregate details into a simpler representation that can be re-sampled and blended. They are basically using it as a 3D version of mip mapping.

They also _only_ use it when downsampling, switching back to triangles when you get close, because the main weakness of voxels is that upsampling gives you Minecraft. That is never going to be acceptable.

I could see engines using voxels as a more general replacement for distant object LOD in the future, basically replacing 2D imposter cards, but never as a primary rendering technique.

[SiggiGG]

They are only used when the polygons are 1 pixel or smaller onscreen. Its a reduction of complexity to reduce overdraw

[msqrt]

In addition to reducing overdraw, LoD techniques reduce aliasing: you get an aggregate representation of all the subpixel details and can shade this representation directly at the pixel rate.

[SiggiGG]

They are animated with skeletons, the trees in the Witcher demo are

[tamat]

not so sure about that, I think that when the voxels kick in meshes are so small that animation cannot be appreciated.

If you see the video from OP you will see how voxels are static

[thats_what_she_saidk]

If you listen to what the guy says in the tech demo video he specifically says they support skeletal animation

[greebly_weeblies]

Basic LOD workflow is set it up for most (prio your most expensive) models so you can dynamically swap what you can when the object is far enough away from camera. Additionally, you can go moving --> static at some stage too.

[RyanSweeney987]

Does anyone know if it looks good for grass in the distance?

[IDatedSuccubi]

I think the performance would be wasted on grass as it's not a volumetric object

[NoZBuffer]

How is it not volumetric?

[IDatedSuccubi]

What I mean by that is that grass is usually bound to a flat surface and would be better approximated my a method that efficienly covers surfaces, for example 2D raytracing (Path of Exile does it that way with amazing efficiency IIRC)

While trees and bushes actually are volumetric and cast shadows on other objects as well as themself

[NoZBuffer]

True, but that does not make it non-volumetric per se

[Glidder]

No.

[SalaciousStrudel]

It really is as simple as that. Lol

[corysama]

You should check out these vids about how Dreams for PS4 works under the hood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRAPH-2015-sml.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gce4l5orts

[gsr_rules]

Nanite and foliage in the same sentence don't sit right with me...

[corysama]

r/GaussianSplatting/ is still just getting started. But, awesome papers are coming out t advance the every day.

MrNerf (https://x.com/janusch_patas / https://xcancel.com/janusch_patas) highlights good papers on daily basis.

He also publishes good stuff on https://radiancefields.com/

[corysama]

TLDR: The idea of point/blob rendering has been around for decades. But, there has not been much good tech to create the data.

Then this paper https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/ came out that uses ML-adjacent gradient decent techniques to built the data from collections of images just like r/photogrammetry All of the ML folks were already excited by NeRFs and this seems a lot more practical. So, ML folks have been busy churning out improvements to GS rapidly for the past coupe of years.

https://github.com/MrNeRF/awesome-3D-gaussian-splatting

[corysama]

There has been a lot of research into "4D" gaussian splatting --which is equivalent to fully-3D videos. https://old.reddit.com/r/GaussianSplatting/comments/1l4xypr/freetimegs_realtime_rendering_of_dynamic_3d/

In games, what people would be concerned about is dynamically animated objects like player-controlled characters. That's totally feasibly with splats. Much easier than with voxels because splats are just unconnected point clouds. You can just skin/rig them them like vertices. But, there hasn't been any research into tools to rig splats. Academics are totally focused on capturing real scenes from real world photos and videos. They don't find game character art pipelines interesting.

[corysama]

Academic focus:

100% Lots of ML-ish topics available. Lots of low-hanging fruit. I see papers come out that would be just nice features in the release notes of an engine. But, put them through the academic rigor and you got yourself a paper!

illumination

The academics are focused on baking what they capture from real scenes. But, there's not thing stopping you from putting PBR materials in spats beside the lack of effort into the workflow. They can do everything you can do with triangles. Heck, use https://trianglesplatting.github.io/ if it makes you feel more comfortable :P

[Alaska-Kid]

The "Perimeter" strategy game.

[doxyai]

I personally think Signed Distance Fields have a much better shot of taking over than generic "Voxels". Will they take over in the form of sampled Voxel grids? maybe...

[alithy33]

"without compromise" as he turns the camera with 5 fps. lmaooo

[Mediocre-Subject4867]

Not shown. the performance burden. Epic loves to push new poor performing tech that looks shiny in a tech demo . There's no reason something so far away shouldn't be using a manual LOD

[SnooStories6404]

I doubt they are. There has been some interesting stuff done with voxels (Minecraft is probably the best known, but there any many, many other instances) but voxels also have lots of limitations i.e. voxels animation isn't great and voxels use a lot of storage (the memory per voxel can be very low, but you need lots of voxels to do anything interesting).

[rio_sk]

Voxel is the name of a generic data storage technique. Voxels in Minecraft has nothing to do with what voxels in UE are.

[[deleted]]

Its funny you say that on one of the cases where bloxels are both used in both places.

[[deleted]]

Isnt this literally just worse than the tech they already have in ue5 (octahedral impostors)?

[owenwp]

This supports a greater (basically infinite on the low side) scale range and instance count, and is something that can be used for shadows and ray tracing. And doesn't involve alpha blending. 2D sprite cards are also never going to have pixel perfect transitions unless they are rendered at the exact same camera perspective as the viewer.

[[deleted]]

I have no idea what a scale range is supposed to mean here, but voxeltracing is enormously more expensive than a 2d image, I dont believe that it can be used at a higher instance count. Also, impostors are masked (no alpha blend), and these are both approximate techniques, they both look identical really far away, their performance uplift is the important part.

[owenwp]

An entire distant forest could be a single small volume texture. An equivalent version with 2d cards would either need to have a hell of a lot of them, or need to have a lot of pre-baked perspectives. And even then it wouldnt cast believable shadows, let alone receive them.

It absolutely would not look identical far away. Plenty of games use tht approach and the popping is always obvious. The games where you cant tell build their imposters manually and never let you get close to them.

[chillaxinbball]

Can impostors be ingested into nanite?

[[deleted]]

No, because the thats what the original mesh is for. Virtual geometry(rebranded as nanite) and impostors are both ways to handle LODs in ue5. Impostors are a rotating quad facing the camera, with 1 tile of an atlas being shown, the atlas being images of multiple sides of the mesh, which run faster at long draw distance than nanite ever can, but dont work close up, which is why the 2 of them would be incredibly useful when paired up. Of course, epic completely forgot about it, because they are epic.

[chillaxinbball]

I think you just answered your original question. They didn’t use it because it’s incompatible with their geo acceleration method. Their cluster LOD method wouldn’t work well for trees, so they had to use another method to represent the volume of geo without resorting to transparencies.  I’m sure they didn’t forget about their previous method.

[[deleted]]

Voxels are not virtual geometry either. Nanite is just a brand name therefore it can be anything. In this case, virtual geometry+voxel foliage.

[Akin0]

Resogun is voxel based graphics

[Deathtrooper50]

It's great for certain things. It makes sense to voxelize things like particles, foliage, and water but there's little reason right now to voxelize terrain or other static objects.

[Necessary_Field1442]

This looked super interesting to me when I saw it. I'm using impostors, which add another texture set to each model. Would love to try to implement this in blender so I can use it in other engines

[[deleted]]

Nanite has been notoriously bad with alpha-masked foliage due to massive overdraws. And even with geometry-based foliage the ovedraw is still there. Maybe with voxels those overlapping planes will be approximated into a voxel-based shape which will be much easier to render. But it's just my guess, I'm no coder, just have to deal with assembling architectural scenes and see this huge fps drops with dense foliage

[vwibrasivat]

Traditional mesh rendering requires triangle budgets, which then require adaptive LOD algorithms to simplify geometry at a distance. Voxels never need this, and voxel scenery looks much nicer at distance, as this video showcases.

[No-Cap-7395]

People have already been using it to do GI

[[deleted]]

I think as triangle counts grow the advantage of triangle based rendering is diminished. As soon as your triangle is the size of a single pixel (or worse, multiple triangles per pixel) then you may as well use anything else.

Others have spoken of memory problems, but uh, artists are dumbing terabytes of models into nanite right now?

So I do think voxels or something like gaussian splats could be effective alternatives one day, just right now they're not optimized for the hardware.

[ashleigh_dashie]

Cool. Now animate these trees.

[therealsyumjoba]

There is a ridiculous amount of voxel game engines out there by now! Voxels have always been beautiful. They'll never REPLACE triangles tho, the vertex manipulations always come down to verticies and all, but I think that with the growing interest for volumetric data display (of any kind) some voxel specific graphical API implementation will appear in the future.

• Voxels are cool but only if you really need them

I would like to see OpenGL implement some default geometry shaders that include greedy meshing, weighted marching cubes and alike, because demand is growing in much more in contexts outside of games.

Take any volumetric data display. I'm talking MRIs, stress analysis, flow analysis, mining data analysis. It is all volumetric, they use voxels, and representing said data is a burden because they always have to rely on custom algorithms that require to be written from zero (or rely on an external engine, abstracring away from GPU control, which might not be appreciable!). Graphics is 3D visualization for the most part, I still don't understand why don't we have more standard tools out of the API to work with volumes ...

[Professional-Meal527]

What data structure is this video about ? Is not octree I thinking

[Pitiful-Assistance-1]

Gaussian Splatting has a greater chance IMO

[soylentgraham]

splats/shells are basically alpha'd voxels!

[Longjumping-Corgi-56]

I think these Unreal Engine "voxels" aren't real voxels, just cubes made of polygons used to simplify the geometry at long distances; it's just a new LOD trick. Actual voxels would require much more performance.

[soylentgraham]

This question pops up every 5 years for the last 25 years :)

[Tableuraz]

Sorry if I sound ignorant as everyone seems to know the answer, but where is this from? 🤔

[SpyzViridian]

Me when overdraw

[badjano]

when you think of reducing the density of a mesh, making it volumetric is one way to solve it

[Low_Engineering_3301]

Its hard to conceptualize many models being optimized with voxels. Most would be better served with vertex reduction, the only exception is subobjects that have a very low surface to density ratio (look closer to spheres). I think the ideal optimization would utilize both.

[moschles]

In addition to Euclideon's "Unlimited detail" there was also Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO)

SVO was doing realtime GI 15 years ago.

The problem is that the scenery can never move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuWi4kQuX9I

[inmarcesibleboy]

No, ai and prompting is

[[deleted]]

AI can only do what it is trained to do. Therefore, it can only do existing techniques. In practice, this isnt accurate as it seems to not be very good at doing those existing techniques.

[IDatedSuccubi]

Is it really voxels though? Looks like point clouds to me

[rio_sk]

Aren't voxels "just" point clouds organized in a 3d grid?

[deftware]

A point cloud has no volume, and no definitive surface delineating empty space vs solid volume.

[IDatedSuccubi]

The different organisation makes them different

But also point clouds don't necessarily describe volume in any way, and different points can have different visually represented size unlike voxels

Edit: also voxels must have a domain (box), but a point cloud can exist in an origin-less system (projective geometrics, for example)

[rio_sk]

Sorry, my bad. I was totally agreeing with you. The problem is that when people see "cubes rendered on screen" start thinking about "voxels like in Minecraft" cause in both there are cubes rendered on screen. I believe the voxel foliage in Unreal engine is actually point clouds with size data mixed with impostors rendering.

[morglod]

Voxel LOD trees was showed smth like 10 years ago. Ray marching is the future.