Voxel Ray Tracing

References:

Animations were created using open-source software:

[skyrx]

its crazy that voxel technology has gotten so far that you were able to create an entire real life dog out of them

[antonpieper]

I would like to know more about how teardown rasterizes its voxels! This is very interesting and well presented👍

[Finding_Fortune]

Whats nutty is Teardown is made in opengl 3.3, so it doesn't have any compute shaders! Teardown is a contender for the most innovative engine out there, its still mostly over my head

[ForeverZer]

Using ray-tracing is for this is actually pretty clever, and up until recent advancements in GPU's, I would have never imagined possible. On a standard laptop monitor, that is still 2073600 ray-trace ops per frame, so still going to require decent hardware to keep up, but going forward as hardware continues to get beefier, that become a standard way of doing it.

Until then I am just going to continue packing as much data as I can into integers with bit-shifting/masking and keep the payload as small as possible, as well as employ every technique I know to cull vertices that won't be visible.

[Pope_]

Its videos like this that i really love, you arent trying to explain every different algorithm and optimization method and such, you simply explain the concept behind how it is done and some basic ideas behind how it might be optomized. I dont nessicaraly need to know every detail as to how something like this is done, knowing the basics makes me confident that with enough time i could figure out how to set a system up like this for myself. Just enough detail to teach me what it is without so much that it trys to teach me how it is done. Major props, you have earned a subscription.

[MINIMAN]

You started so basic that I didn't think I'd learn anything and then around half way in you started dropping some modern tricks, honestly wasn't expecting signed distance fields being used for raytracing optimization that's pretty cool.

[gandeldalf]

I needed such a channel, just explaining how the concept works and showing some ideas makes it so much better to understand than someone trying to teach me how it is done with every information that I will forget the next day. I hope you succeed growing on YouTube so I can watch more videos of yours

[rrs]

Amazing video, if there were more on this subject in detail (voxels: SDFs, smoothing algorithms, physics, lighting, etc.) it'd be an amazing resource.

[jal]

Octrees are a pretty old space partition trick. It's one of the primary space partition techniques used for collision detection.

[hellomynameisrodney]

I always liked Trove for the size of its blocks. I wondered how it could do what it does and be less of a data hog as Minecraft can be. Trove had light blocks, glow blocks, semi-transparent blocks etc etc and "shiny" blocks. It had a lot of visuals that I wished Minecraft had. Even with some of the mods that come out, they don't do it as well--and then the worry is if they'll continue updating that mod when a new release comes out. Even then, the size of the blocks stay the same. I think the block ratio is about 5 blocks on Trove is 3 blocks on Minecraft. For a long time, I'd prefer making my voxel art in Trove even though I really, really liked the idea of using Minecraft because of things like World Edit and use of shaders. I am a creative player, I have dabbled in survival but while I've beaten the dragon, surveyed the End, creative mode is where my heart is. Trove... it's more or less collecting resources to build your worlds and build your many classes (I was a Gunslinger and Candy Barbarian but dabbled in Ninja and Shadow Hunter-my first was Chloromancer.)

I would build massive structures in people's worlds and get in-game currency for it. I did what I loved and got paid for it. It was great. I tried Creativerse and other voxel games but I still would wish that a really good game, Minecraft, could implement just a smidge of Trove.

I love learning how these games orchestrate code into visible results. Fascinating, really.

[BitsPerByte]

Thank you all for all the views, likes and comments! More videos are coming soon, especially after such a huge support from all of you! I really appreciate it!

I would also want to address all the future comments regarding "there is actually a ray tracing in Minecraft bedrock". Thank you for pointing this out, I think at this point there are enough comments about this :) The phrasing in the video is indeed inaccurate, I agree. But I think it does not change the main idea of the video - rendering voxel worlds as meshes (triangles) VS rendering voxel worlds using direct ray tracing on voxel grid. Yes indeed you can add ray tracing to a game with mesh rendering, but in my opinion it does not change the core principle of how its graphics work and how objects are presented for the GPU, in contrast to a Teardown where graphics works in a completely different way.

[vezzolter]

Вражений якістю Вашого відео - на дуже високому рівні! Був би радий дивитись Ваші відео =)

[nocultist]

Voxelstein 3D is much older and has much smaller voxels.

[King-Julien]

I love how you linked your video sources in the description, most people don't do this nowadays.

[abdullaheta]

Wow u got this much views and subs with just 1 video? Great video and good luck on rest of ur youtube journey. Subbed btw 👍

[midorifox]

That bit with the tank at 1:34 reminds me of the Ken Silverman's voxel engine. The one that was used in the original Ace of Spades.
There also was another old game that has smaller voxels called Voxatron and Neverdaunt 8Bit. I wonder what happened to those games.

[thecookiejoe]

As an old person, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear voxels is Outcast. In 1999 a game named Outcast was released and it was (arguably) the first major use of voxels in a game. And for a long time after. The game certainly looked different in 1999s than other games released that year. System Shock 2 and the original Unreal Tournament for example used polygons. I guess voxels still do a good job in a niche. But polygons are what most developers use and I guess there are good reasons for that. The quare meter price alone is 3 times as high for voxels than for polygons.

[JinKee]

This man drops a banger and disappears

[SoimulX]

Btw, for things like procedural terrain generation, using something like marching cubes is probably better than generating crazy-high density voxels.

[Pixels...]

I just started the video but, in the thumbnail, it looked like Minecraft's HUGE voxels were improved to smaller voxels however while Minecraft looks like blocks, they are polygons in the shape of a cube not voxels. There are some ways to the inside of a few blocks, and they have no texture from the inside meaning you can see through them from the inside if Minecraft was voxel based it would have texture inside as voxels are 3 dimensional. (What I mean by 3 dimensional is that they aren't just flat textures with no depth)

Edit: I just fixed a parenthesis