Ogre Forums

Just curious if anyone has read about or played with "Gigavoxels". I read about it while searching for "mandelbulb" implementations and I was impressed. Apparently he gave a presentation at the last SIGGRAPH 2009, but I missed the paper back then somehow.

The main researcher's page is at: http://www.icare3d.org/

It's a cool name - definitely better than MegaTextures.

Once my holidays start I was planning on experimenting a bit with a gigavoxel style technique, but in a software renderer. I checked up on Unlimited Detail the other day, and it put me in the mood for some octreed voxels.
http://www.udt8.com

The main problem with all these voxel techniques is that they can't really animate. Ok, you can add and remove stuff and do animated effects like cloud formation and fire, but they can't do things like swaying tree branches, wind blowing grass blades, etc. There's no soft body deformation.
Maybe Alec's FastLSM soft body physics system would work with voxels to make them bendy. Traversing an octree with deformed nodes is going to be less efficient though.

My guess is that for animated geometry in real time graphics we will end up with something like micropolygons in REYES.