Category Archives: Voxels

A level of detail method for blocky voxels

Posted on March 3, 2018 by

Large voxel terrains may contain millions of polygons.  Rendering such terrains at a uniform scale is both inefficient and can lead to aliasing of distant objects.  As a result, many game engines choose to implement some form of level of … Continue reading →

Posted in Geometry, Programming, Voxels | 2 Comments

Voxel lighting

Posted on February 21, 2018 by

Been a long time since I’ve written anything here.  Lately I’ve been working on a new multiplayer WebGL voxel engine for codemao (an educational platform to teach kids programming via games).  It’s not live yet, but a bunch of neat ideas … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Voxels | 2 Comments

Ambient occlusion for Minecraft-like worlds

Posted on July 3, 2013 by

It has been a while since I’ve written about Minecraft-like games, and so today I figured I’d take a moment to discuss something which seems to come up a lot in online discussions, specifically how to implement ambient occlusion in … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Voxels | 15 Comments

Turning 8-Bit Sprites into Printable 3D Models

Posted on September 18, 2012 by

Continuing in the recreational spirit of this blog, this week I want to write about something purely fun.  In particular, I’m going to tell you how to convert retro 16 x 16 sprites into 3D miniatures: This project was motivated … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 34 Comments

Simplifying Isosurfaces (Part 2)

Posted on August 20, 2012 by

To briefly recap, our goal is to render large volumetric environments.  For the sake of both efficiency and image quality, we want to introduce some form of level of detail simplification for distant geometry.  Last time, we discussed two general … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 13 Comments

Simplifying Isosurfaces (Part 1)

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

I just got back to the US after spending 3 months in Berlin, and I’ve now got plenty of ideas kicking around that I need to get on to paper.   Recall that lately I’ve been blogging about solid modeling and … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 3 Comments

Smooth Voxel Terrain (Part 2)

Posted on July 12, 2012 by

Last time we formulated the problem of isosurface extraction and discussed some general approaches at a high level.  Today, we’re going to get very specific and look at meshing in particular. For the sake of concreteness, let us suppose that … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 27 Comments

Smooth Voxel Terrain (Part 1)

Posted on July 10, 2012 by

My god…  I’ve now written three blog posts about Minecraft.  If you are at all like me, you may be getting just a bit tired of all those cubes.  To avoid fatigue, I think now is a good time to change … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Voxels | Leave a comment

Meshing in a Minecraft Game (Part 2)

Posted on July 7, 2012 by

Last time, I wrote about how to generate meshes in a Minecraft-style voxel engine.  I got a lot of interesting feedback, and so today I’m going to do a follow up highlighting some of the points that came up in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 30 Comments

Meshing in a Minecraft Game

Posted on June 30, 2012 by

The last post I wrote on Minecraft-like engines got a lot of attention, and so I figured it might be interesting to write a follow up.  This time I’ll try to tackle a different problem: Meshing One of the main … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Programming, Voxels | 44 Comments