Voxelstein

Here a scene from Voxelstein
Surprisingly, the rendering is very quick :-)

Download Demo (Cuda 1.1)

It's an alphaversion,
so not expect anything ;-)

First Color for the new Version

Today the scene gots a bit more colored.

Benchmarks so far:
1024x1024, 1024 rays : 40ms / 25 fps avg.
1024x768 , 1024 rays : 39ms / 25 fps avg.
1024x768 , 512 rays : 36ms / 27 fps avg.
1024x768 , 256 rays : 36ms / 27 fps avg.
512x512 , 512 rays : 21ms / 47 fps avg.
512x512 , 256 rays : 21ms / 47 fps avg.
512x512 , 128 rays : 21ms / 47 fps avg.

So far I couldnt figure out why less rays not increase the framerate significantly - the computation cost proportional to the number of rays.

Texture-mapping Works !

Here an actual screenshot
25 fps@1024x768 :-)
View distance: 40.000 voxels
(with mip-mapping)

New Download

Here you can download the Demos below.
Its still the old version, so rendering at 1024x768 is not fast yet.

Required: Cuda 1.1
Filesize: 22MB

VoxelDemos.zip

Progress

Mapping seems to work now - next step is to compute the rays accurately.

Performance

Today I measured the performance of the actual implementation. The result: The scene on the right has about 8.0M RLE elements in the view frustum, out of which 4.7M are not culled and 280k are visible, rendered as 450k pixels. This, at a frame-rate of about 25 means the renderer processes about 117M RLE elements/second. 

My graphic cards maximum untextured triangle performance is 280M/s in case the triangles share vertices, and about 133M/s in case the triangles have independent vertices. Maximal vertex transform rate is about 400M/s.

This means, if the landscape would be visualized using splats, each rendered as single triangle, then at least 8M triangles would be required. Without any culling, this would lead to a performance of about 133/8=16 fps. Here, perhaps the geometry shader might be used to accelerate the rendering. It would be possible to send only one vertex from which the geometry shader generates a quad or triangle.

I case we would visualize each voxel inside the landscape using conventional polygons, we would have to use at least 2 triangles for each to create a quad. This means, taking shared vertices into account, We would have to render at least 16M quads, resulting in a theorethic frame rate of 280/16=17.5.

Common technologies to render Voxels

1.) Heightmap based Voxel-Terrain. Ref

2.) Voxlap Technology. Ref1 Ref2

3.) Splatting / Rendering voxels as sprites. Ref1 Ref2

4.) Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO) Raycasting. Ref

5.) Mixed Octree / Regular Grid Raycasting. Ref

6.) Mixed Polygon / Voxel (Splatting) rendering Ref

7.) Rendering Voxels as Polygons.Ref