Voxels (are they the future?)

[Ghostpilot]

DaniJ, you had a better explenation than me, thanks.

[Ghostpilot]

Work in progress picture of the "Big Cell"

[Mordeth]

Ghostpilot said:
*waits patiently*

I *still* don't have access to my own damn site.

Anyway, I did make some screengrabs from voxel models in ShadowWarrior: a health box (2 shots) and an a-symmetrical uzi (3 views).

[Mordeth]

Ok, it took a while but I can finally update my site again. Sorry for the delay, but here are the promised screenies:

Health kit, front and side. Uzi, from three different angles.

[Tormentor667]

I really have to say, that I like this voxel stuff and it really looks great in those old-school games :) A very enjoyable replacement for 3D models ;)

[cycloid]

urgh, pcx's or something, i cant see them!? p.s. the rest look great!!

[iori]

Guys, the voxels looks awesome, they really do. It's a shame however that they wont be in doom any time soon. :/
I have yet to experiment with slab6 (or whatever its called) because I really dont have the motivation to create something that just sits there collecting dust.

I wonder if Ken has released his voxel tool sources? It would be interesting to see how he implimented them into the build engine, but since they were only in Blood and SW (who's sources arent available IIRC) I dont know if that would be possible.

If they were in a port however, especially a GL one, then I guess voxels could be set to have no filtering, as blurring a single voxel would essentially "sphereify" it and fade it out right? It would look stupid having these models in game look like a stack of spherical objects, the corners where they dont meet being see-through and all...

Either that, or I dont know what the hell im talking about (as per usual).

[Mordeth]

Ghostpilot said:
But as the tests with Slapspri.exe showed, the rotations need to be "perfect" for it to work propperly.

I think (well, hope) you misunderstood that. Those pictures of that uzi clearly showed that voxel models can be asymmetrical. I think "perfect rotations" means creating your voxel model from perfect angles (0, 45, 90, ..., 315) of a 8-view sprite..? The sprite itself does not need to be symmetrical at all.

[EDIT] Ok, something dawned on me. The rotations of a frame ought to be consistent in their geometry. Obviously of course, but it does mean you cannot just use the existing Doom sprites to make voxel models. For example: extract TROOA1 and TROOA5 (front and back of walking imp) and compare. You'll notice immediately that TROOA5 is much smaller in height than TROOA1. This is inconsistent, and you can't make a proper voxel model out of this.

[toxicfluff]

iori said:

I wonder if Ken has released his voxel tool sources? It would be interesting to see how he implimented them into the build engine, but since they were only in Blood and SW (who's sources arent available IIRC) I dont know if that would be possible.

Nonconformations. Colourless' Duke3d port has working voxels. I don't know what good it'd be to us non-coders though.

[iori]

Nonconformations Tox.

Mordeth:
The irregular, asymmetrical voxels were'nt made with the method of rotation, which is just one method (an admittedly lazy one). Its hard to believe they were created voxel by voxel too. Before Slab6 there must have been a way to import 3ds/dxf files or whatnot that Ken didnt know about. (I guess any coder familiar with that could've, Ken did explain the structure of the voxels in one of the Shadow Warrior text files).

I dont know if this has been mentioned before, but this page has a run down of how they were used in Tiberian Sun.

[Ghostpilot]

Mordeth said:

Ok, it took a while but I can finally update my site again. Sorry for the delay, but here are the promised screenies:

Health kit, front and side. Uzi, from three different angles.

Thank you.
Those images were most helpful.
Now I know that the size I set for my DooM voxels isn't too unproportional compared to SW.

[Naked Snake]

Check this out

[Grimm]

So uh . . . what;s the point of voxels again?

[LexiMax]

BBG said:

Check this out

* AlexMax Orgasms

Wow....that could actually be REALLY fucking cool.

[Reisal]

Grimm said:

So uh . . . what;s the point of voxels again?

3d models >>> voxels

[Mordeth]

Mr. Chris said:
3d models >>> voxels

Not for non-accelerated 2.5D games.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Mordeth said:

Not for non-accelerated 2.5D games.

When I compare Quake against Shadow Warrior, both in software mode using the same resolution of course, I like the voxels in Shadow Warrior much more.

Comparing them 3dfx accellerated is a completely different thing, as Shadow Warrior has no voxel support, no true mouse look and pretty ugly one dimensional texture filtering then, so I immediately switched back to software mode. In contrary to that, I would always pefer Quake 3d accellerated.

[toxicfluff]

LogicDeLuxe said:

When I compare Quake against Shadow Warrior, both in software mode using the same resolution of course, I like the voxels in Shadow Warrior much more.

Comparing them 3dfx accellerated is a completely different thing, as Shadow Warrior has no voxel support, no true mouse look and pretty ugly one dimensional texture filtering then, so I immediately switched back to software mode. In contrary to that, I would always pefer Quake 3d accellerated.

I agree. Visual consistency between things is important.

[Ghostpilot]

ToXiCFLUFF said:

Visual consistency between things is important.

And that's why IMO voxels will suit DooM better than 3D models.

[LexiMax]

Whats wrong with possibly supporting both?

[Ghostpilot]

AlexMax said:

Whats wrong with possibly supporting both?

It's nothing wrong with that, it's just that I hardly know anything about 3D models.
So I'll leave 3D model support to someone else to figure out.

[Ghostpilot]

The program that I use to make the voxels I post images of here is called Voxel3D and is made by a company called Everygraph. Their voxel editor is BY FAR the best true voxel editor out there.
By true voxel editor I mean an editor that makes voxels from scratch and not just convert 3D models.

I emailed their support section and asked if the had any plans to support the fileformats .VOX and .KVX.
This is the email I got as answer:

Jason of Everygraph said:
Thank you very much for your information.
Yes, we are planning to support the .vox file format.
However we cannot find any information about the .kvx file format.
It will be great if you can provide more information.
Thanks a lot.
Yours sincerely,
Jason
____________________________________________________
Everygraph - Graphics for Everyone

This is great news for the not yet started DooM Re-Voxeling Project.
If they add support for the .VOX and .KVX formats I won't have to do the conversion manually.
It will save me lots of time and headpounding.
I have allready emailed Ken Silverman and asking for information on the .KVX format to send back to Jason on Everygraph.

I'm so happy right now that I can make the *happy dance*!

[Mordeth]

Great news :) Keep us informed!

[Ghostpilot]

Wow... All I can say is wow.
Ken must have a symbiotic relationship with the inbox of his email account.
I have never in my life experienced such a swift and fast answer.

Ken Silverman wrote:
I haven't written any other
documentation about my .KVX format except for what's included with SLAB6.ZIP
and the sample code that you can find in my Build Engine sources.
I've designed 4 voxel formats over the last 10 years.
Just to make things less confusing, here's a complete list of them and what they are:
    VOX: simple uncompressed 8-bit voxel model format (used only for easy format exchange)
    KVX: RLE-compressed 8-bit voxel model format (used in Build engine games)
    KV6: RLE-compressed 32-bit voxel model format (next generation KVX - used in Voxlap)
    VXL: RLE-compressed Voxlap world format
-Ken S.

I guess the .KVX fileformat will be good enough to be used in DooM.

[Ghostpilot]

I also got permission from Ken to pressent the .KVX file format to Jason on everygraph.com]everygraph.
Even though Jasons product Voxel3D is a rival to Ken's own voxel editor Slab6.

Now I guess it's just a matter of time before I can export my testvoxels to .KVX format and test them
in a build engine to see how they look like in a game enviroment. I was thinking of increasing the
resolution, but I don't really know if that's a good idea. I want to keep the "DooM feeling".

[Ghostpilot]

Jason of Everygraph said:

Thank you for email.
Yes we are planning to support the .KVX and .VOX file formats in the future.
We also know that Voxel3D can't handle a big voxel model at this moment,
and we would like to know how big our user would like to create with Voxel3D.
If you can provide such an information, it would be very helpful.
Thanks again.

Yours sincerely,
Jason
____________________________________________________
Everygraph - Graphics for Everyone
http://www.everygraph.com

I did provide him with the changes I wanted to the program, and I hope that
he will try to fix the problem with crashes during creation of big voxels.
If he make those changes I can test my voxels for real.
I'll keep you posted on any changes and/or updates.

I am also diving into Ken Silverman's build engine code to try
to figure out how to implement voxel support into a DooM port.

I'm not dead... I'm have just been very very silent.

[l3xu5]

I've just been reading this thread and it's quite intresting.

Basically it looks like we will need an happy medeum here. Monsters and any other large animated sprite will not look good as Voxels and they would be rather impractical (due to size). I mean, I was thinking that you would only need to do one rotation of each frame (because the voxel is full 3D) and you can put mondo amounts of detail in the death frames without loads of polygons (something that always got me about 3D polygonal models). That's something to think about.

Seccondly, the ammo and weapons on the floor would look great as voxels. They are simple and straight to the point. If Voxels for monsters is too much, there is nothing wrong with Voxels for pickus and decorations :). The shell box looks really good :).

I was thinking... maybe if you didn't create the voxels but instead a thing was programmed into the engine. I am by no means an expert on this, but if you could program something that would make a fully 3D monster just from the sprires present in a wad (basically using voxel technology) then you would just make your sprites, and providing that they were fairly accurate, every sprite could be made into a 3D model automatically by the engine. This would be a large feat and pritty damn impressive, but it's an intresting thought if you catch my drift ;).

Finally, the post about using voxels for room over room is really good, why was it dismissed as a 'load of crap'? It's logical, create a 3D voxel that looks like a floor and you have 3D floors with no harsh hacks or self refrencing sectors (although Zdooms trransfer heights special and invisible bridge things work well, but they have harsh limitations...). You could also make better versions of the ROTT lifts and platforms ;).

That's me done for now :D.

[Ghostpilot]

l3xu5 said:

Monsters and any other large animated sprite will not look good as Voxels and they would be rather impractical (due to size). I mean, I was thinking that you would only need to do one rotation of each frame (because the voxel is full 3D) and you can put mondo amounts of detail in the death frames without loads of polygons (something that always got me about 3D polygonal models). That's something to think about.

I don't think size is a matter here.
Voxeldata is pure text (put simply).
So if I manage to add a voxel renderer into a DooM port,
I can feed it with voxeldata in pure text with coords for the corner points and such.

I don't follow how you think when you say that large sprites and monsters will not look good as voxels.
Why?

The thing I have discovered while working with my textvoxels is that you can reduce the amount of detail
in a voxel and it will still look good compared to a sprite reduced in detail in the same way.
So I'm not worried about loss of detail.

l3xu5 also said:Seccondly, the ammo and weapons on the floor would look great as voxels.

Yes, I know...
That's why I'm trying to implement a voxel engine. :)

l3xu5 said:The shell box looks really good :).

Thank you.

l3xu5 also said:I was thinking... maybe if you didn't create the voxels but instead a thing was programmed into the engine. ...you could program something that would make a fully 3D monster just from the sprires present in a wad... ...This would be a large feat and pritty damn impressive, but it's an intresting thought if you catch my drift ;).

If you go through this thread from beginning to end, you'll
notice that this idea has been brougt up allready.
It is indeed a good idea... In theory that is.
You just mentioned the problem yourself:

l3xu5 also said:...providing that they were fairly accurate, every sprite could be made into a 3D model automatically by the engine.

That's the problem with the DooM monster/actor sprites.
They are made by hand and not angels from the same model.
Because the angels are not accurate, the end result will be bad... Very bad.

Ken Silverman's "slapSpri" program works this way.
It basicly makes a solid block made of voxels and then uses
the different angle sprites to cut voxels where there shouldn't be any.

l3xu5 also said:Finally, the post about using voxels for room over room is really good, why was it dismissed as a 'load of crap'? It's logical, create a 3D voxel that looks like a floor and you have 3D floors with no harsh hacks or self refrencing sectors (although Zdooms trransfer heights special and invisible bridge things work well, but they have harsh limitations...). You could also make better versions of the ROTT lifts and platforms ;).

It could probably work. But I'm not sure if the endresult would be pleasing enough to the human eye.
No matter HOW you look at this idea, it's still a "hack".
Why not wait for real room over room in the engine instead?
IMO it's not that far away.

[Ghostpilot]

I have updated the WIP section of this post with another WIP shot.
This time it's the "health vial" or "health bottle" (you know the blue bottle)
that has been voxelized. You can find the link at the very beginning of this thread.

It's very late (or very early depending on how you look at it) so I'm
not even going to try to write something clever...
Just look at the WIP picture and tell me if it does the original any justice.

/Tony

[wildweasel]

Whoa, thanks for bumping this, I've been looking for it. The stuff you've done looks pretty neat so far and I'd love to see it come to completion.