This video is not mine, but I wanted to know how they are doing that and if its possible with Jmonkey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9-lJzFZ72I
-Greg
That is definitely not voxel-based. You can see it clearly when he’s digging through that earth. Its basically a mesh which is deformed and vertices and polygons added. Plus some cartoon filter
Well, he says it’s voxel based so unless he has a really odd definition of “voxel based” my guess is that the voxels are just small and can be partially filled. Which may be the reason we don’t see any distant vistas (and may never) in this game. Lots and lots of data in a tight area.
Well it looks like something I’ve been thinking about for a while, using a 3D matrix (voxels) and some small, local marching cube techniques to update meshes, I think it is doable. A bit difficult for a beginner tho.
A voxel is basically a 3D pixel, to answer the threads name. Instead of a flat plane with pixels, one has a virtual space with voxels all over it, equally spaced from eachother. If this thing is voxel based, you are not looking at the voxels but at the result of creating a mesh from a dataset containing voxels.
Imagine keeping a set of small 3D matrices containing values about their texture and an intensity value, then, on updating the mesh belonging to it, one uses this information and marching cubes to create a mesh from it and displays this mesh in the game world. I think with proper programming, it can be done in real time if you do not have to run the whole algorithm over the whole world but only on a small piece instead, the one that is changed of course.
This isn’t voxels, more like isosurfaces. The difference is that per X,Y,Z coordinate you don’t have a boolean specifying whether there’s a block in that location, but a floating point value specifying “influence” or similar.This is what creates the smooth surfaces
I had a decent look into this for my last JME project (hex based boxel game that never made it past early dev), I found this chapter from GPU Gems 3 to be most insightful, hope it helps.
@thetoucher, that’s a great read (thus far)… thanks for posting it
Hi Greg, and everyone else. I here’s a post I posted (redundant, much?) awhile back: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/free-announcements/forum/topic/voxel-terrain/ So yeah… That has a couple links to some tuts on this type of voxel terrain and stuff. There’s a whole dissertation on how to do it ^^ just read the descriptions and stuff of the videos of that post and there’ll be more links. Hope that helped!
-NomNom