So I’m doing some research and wondering:
Has anyone ever done anything with Voxels in Unity3D?
The closest thing I’ve seen was a parallax shader (moved pixels around based on depth, for more impressive bump-mapping), but it was pretty slow and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since.
Doesn’t Unity come with a normal-mapped parallax shader?
And, their are some meta balls and marching squares on the wiki. Not exactly the same, but similar concept I believe.
to my knowledge there has not been much work with voxels.
its for one no trivial topic
but much worse its a very memory intense thing if you do it in full 3d for modern hardware (every voxel stores dozens of bytes for materials, colors etc and you need tens to hundreds of thousand to form something meaningfull like a terrain).
also you can’t really unleash it as you have no SM4 support and the sm3 support might bite you depending on what you do
ah I see, and I was under the impression Voxels were a low-performance technology. Thanks for the help.
if you do them at low quality as done back in comanche etc, then yes its kind of a low quality.
But today you can do much more with it but it also has much higher requirements.
C4 and Crytek show that in action, their terrain is voxel technology for example
you can search for marching cubes in the showcase section for what has already been done. Here are 2 links that come up:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=23452
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=6673
just keep in mind that you can’t use marching cubes in games unless you intend to pay for usage of the patent (yeah like most stuff someone patented it and from what I recall it has not run out yet)
from wikipedia:
Sweet 
Though do you have any other source for that aside the wikipedia? As it is one of the worst possible places for any kind of important information as it has nearly as much incorrect information as CNN
Especially 17 years
Patents to my knowledge are 25 years, not 17, unless something special applies to it in this case.
Regarding the more old skool voxel definition, I still like this one…
That Cavedemo was awesome.
Reminded me of the fun I had in Red Faction 1 digging tunnels etc.
It could probably be turned into a really cool 3d Liero type of game.
I’ve recently been using Voxel sculpting in 3Dcoat to create a normal map (and Occulusion map), then apply the normal (et al)to the low poly mesh in Unity. That seems to be working out for me.
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Galen
The only good example I can remember: http://starfruitgames.com/blog/?p=74
are these really voxels? it’s textured as it were voxels, but looks like regular 3d to me
On a completely different note, it’s Unity, not Unity3D.
??? :0
As far as I know, they’re voxels. If my memory serves, when the game is actually in motion, it’s more apparent that it’s not just textured, blocky meshes. Dock has referred to them as voxels, as well. I could be completely wrong, of course. If they actually are, I’d love to hear how he implemented them. He’s a semi-active member of the forums, so someone could PM him to check out this thread and give some input. I’d do it myself, but I really need to get back to work.
There is actually a different proprietary game engine called Unity3D. So that’s mainly why I don’t like seeing the mix up.
Though I suppose it doesn’t help that the Unity game engine is located in the Unity3D.com domain.
Oh the confusion!
But back to topic… voxels… yeah. I’m not familiar with any advanced use of voxels in Unity.
Novalogic’s Delta Force and Comanche series used it for large terrains. If it was used for far terrains in Unity, that would be pretty cool. Have the closer terrain be geo, and the futher terrain be voxels.
There is a wish list item for voxel terrain which has a good deal of support. Vote away.