If you’ve looked at some computer graphics literature before, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of models are used over and over again, like the Utah Teapot. Last days, I’ve been working on import functions which allow me to load the Stanford standard benchmark models in and render them, voxelized. …
I got tired of the dark, somewhat depressing look of this blog, so I’m trying out new WordPress themes. It’s always a bit of a hit-and-miss, because some themes require different tags/posts variables. I’m using Esplanada 1.0.4 (that sounds a lot more cheerful, aye?) now. I like the way how posts …
When reading about volume rendering on the internet, I discovered an irritating fact: there is no consistent definition of what a ‘voxel’ is. Most certainly when it comes to various rendering engines, everything that renders something which contains cubes/blocky elements gets the voxel renderer tag hastily slapped on. A good …
First rough video of my current Voxel Renderer implementation. It’s nothing too exciting, just showing that the Proof Of Concept actually works in real-time. The flyby is on the edge of the voxel field, since inside it’s just … trippy. This is a 512x512x512 field with 8 bytes per datapoint …
Since I’m developing my PhD renderer for multiple target systems (Win32, x64, LInux, …) I started using the excellent freeGlut project for simple OpenGL windowed output. So after finding the Windows binaries compiled (and maintained) by Max Martin Payne, I look at the contents of the zip file. I was …
During the last days, I’ve been testing just how much my current renderer implementation can take. My implementation was started from scratch, based on raycasting (eg … interpolating distinct values along a line) in a huge data grid. At the moment it is without any optimization for quick free-space skipping, …
I’ve implemented a stable version of the Amanatides and Woo algorithm for fast traversal of voxel grids and added some optimisations and support for non-square voxels. After reading up on OpenMP, I couldn’t stand having a renderer which ran an inherently parallel algorithm on just one CPU. Every ray shot …
I’ve been busy implementing the Fast Voxel Traversal algorithm by Amanatides & Woo (PDF). The base algorithm is pretty straightforward, but getting it to give the correct results for all feasible edge cases I can come up with is hard. I don’t want to stuff the code with more and …
I’m going to run out of voxel-based titles and puns real soon. Until then, have some more flying cubes! The sparseness factor influences render time a lot, since there is no efficient skipping of empty space inside the voxel grid. So denser grids render at interactive framerates (>30 fps), because the …
Once the basic stuff was in place, it was fairly easy (half a day’s work) to implement a renderer which supports sparse voxel fields. Next step is opacity. Generating one image at 600×600 with 64x64x64 voxels in place renders at 15 fps, but that’s without any optimization. For example, there’s …