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Ghostpilot

Voxels (are they the future?)

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That looks excellent, just like the original. Keep it up, I can't wait to see this stuff in game.

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Heh, I like this idea so much that I downloaded Voxel3D and started work on the small plasma cell.

*updated* (now finished)

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Holy crap, this thread is active again. Cool. I may try my hand at making some voxels just in the event that support *might* get coded into one of the ports someday.

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DooMAD said:

Heh, I like this idea so much that I downloaded Voxel3D and started work on the small plasma cell.

That's looking good. Keep up the good work!

I noticed that my WIP-shots are getting too many, and fast ontop of that.
I'm throwing together a very basic webpage to host all WIP shots in a nice table.

I'm basicly putting all my eggs in one basket on this...
Currently Voxel 3D can't output the voxelmodel fileformat I need.
But I'm counting on mister Jason on Everygraph to fix that sooner or later.

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Linguica said:

So... what do you plan on doing with these voxels anyway?

Why did DaVinci paint paintings? He he he.

If I can't reverse engineer Ken Silverman's voxel support in
the Build engine, I will at least have some cool images, right?

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I dled Voxel3D but had a problem. When I tried importing a gif for reference image, it crashed saying i was missing a dll called libungif.dll. I downloaded it and placed it in the V3D directory but it still wouldnt let me import gifs. I use WinXP SP2. Anyone have any ideas? BTW those models are awesome :) I hope that eventually support is added for them in Doom :)

Also saving doesnt seem to work :( It has no errors but no file is outputted either

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Call me a facist heretic if you like but why didn't you double the "resolution" of your voxel models from the outset? I don't mean make them hires looking (you could use four voxels to represent one pixel) but it would have allowed you to create much smoother surfaces for the rounded objects. IMO the health potion sprite in particular looks better than the voxel version.

Also I don't know what you plan to do with the spheres (soul, invis etc) unless you can have semi transparent voxels you've got a problem.

The others do look good though and suitably match the look of the lowres sprites very well.

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DaniJ said:

Also I don't know what you plan to do with the spheres (soul, invis etc) unless you can have semi transparent voxels you've got a problem.

I don't think that will be a problem.
However the spheres will not be transparent.
It's a tradeoff with 3D to transparacy.

I didn't increase the resolution because of three reasons.
1. These voxels are just textvoxels I make for fun.
2. I don't want to recalculate proportions.
3. I thought that increased resolution contra "4 pixel represent 1"
would increase the blockyness.

It depends on how you look at it.
A nicer geometry with blocky texture or a blocky gemometry
with nicer (well not less nice at least) texture. If I will
make voxels with higher resolution in the future I will most
likely paint them with a high-res sprite as reference.
But that's not needed in the testphase of the project.

It's still very unsertain if I will ever move forward from the
test phase... the future will tell.

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2. I don't want to recalculate proportions.

You wouldn't need to, all you'd have to do would be to double along each axis.

3. I thought that increased resolution contra "4 pixel represent 1"
would increase the blockyness.

No they would look exactly the same but would allow you more fidelity for the rounder objects and you could "bevel" where suitable rather than have straight edges.

Your WIP of the soulsphere is exactly what I was refering to when I meant you would have a problem. Either you have no detail on the back/sides or you have two/four faces painted onto the surface like a balloon. I think that it would look strange either way. I personaly would prefer to use the sprites rather than the voxel versions for items like the soulsphere, health potion etc because the voxel versions don't add anything beyond the sprites and IMO look worse.

The other more angular objects such as the item pickups do look good as voxels.

One thing to bare in mind is that there is no possible hardware acceleration (with current hardware) for voxels and a lot of data will need to be handled for each frame of an animated voxel object and naturally there is not really much opportunity for interpolation (which means even more frame data to look good). It is one of the reasons that voxels have failed to make an impact on the 'industry accepted' polygon method. As much as I love the concept behind voxels I think they are doomed other than as a "volumetric fill" for dynamic boolean opperations on a poly mesh or nurbs surface.

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DaniJ said:

Your WIP of the soulsphere is exactly what I was refering to when I meant you would have a problem. Either you have no detail on the back/sides or you have two/four faces painted onto the surface like a balloon.

I won't draw the soulsphere face on all sides of the model.
I will make some sort of a back side also.
The front was mush faster to paint since I could just transfer the colours.

I'm not sure this is what you meant, but to be honest I don't quite grasp what problem you refer to.

I do understand that increased resolution gives more room for detail.
If I'm keeping the resolution for the "paintjob" equal to the sprite
I use for referense, It will be a smooth surface with a blocky "texture".
I'm not sure that will be more pleasing to the eye.
But I am aware of the detail problem when using voxels.
I became especially aware of that when I tried to map out the sphere.
I thought it would take like 5 minutes... It didn't.

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Enough detail or not, the sphere was a really tough one to draw in 3D.
All I had was the dimention of 25x25x25 and the round shape of the sprite.
As DaniJ pointed out, the detail is suffering in low resolutions.

Here are the two test spheres I made.

The left one has completely regular shape. (The one I'm currently using for the soulsphere.
The regular shape was very hard to accolplish.
The right one is a test I made totally from scratch.
It has irregularities in the gemometry...
But they appear in a somewhat regular pattern.

Which one looks best, left or right?

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I'm not sure this is what you meant, but to be honest I don't quite grasp what problem you refer to.

What I'm refering to is that none of the spheres are solid objects with the faces/eye whatever on the surface. Creating them as you are doing will result in a face stretched over a sphere rather than a head inside an orb.

The one on the right looks better (it could be due to the reduced contrast in the image between the two playing tricks on the eyes though) but is too squarish.

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It's the best I can do with a voxel canvas of only 3125 voxels.
That's an area of 25x25x25 (X,Y,Z axis).

Making a spherical shape from scratch was [color=red]MUCH[/color] harder than I though it would be.

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It's just a silly idea, but would it be possible to make lets say
the soul sphere out of a dotcloud of particles?
How small particles can ZDooM handle?

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Ghostpilot said:

Making a spherical shape from scratch was [color=red]MUCH[/color] harder than I though it would be.

Yeah, it's really difficult. Making a sphere out of blocks used to be one of the challenges for professional lego builders.

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Here's a complete set of all the stuff I have so far.



@Ghostpilot:
Feel free to add those to your site if you want.

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Ultraviolet said:

The answer you've all been waiting for: No, voxels are not the future.



I think that has been said before in this thread.

Anyway, how can something be 'the future' if it requires obsolete technology (i.e. a software renderer) to work...

Furthermore, I don't see the slightest interest by any source port author.

The objects look nice though. Too bad it is most likely for naught.

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@GrafZahl - Why not? In my eyes it is a great alternative concerning real 3D Models, because this voxel stuff is pretty "retroish" at all and would fit into the universe of Doom very well (if you play on a software port like ZDoom)

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Voxels would be awesome because they would preserve the style and artistic quality in Doom while getting rid of the flatness problem with sprites.

This is in contrast with the third-party models, which get rid of the flatness problem but invariably look like crap (with the exception of a few ammo boxes).

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