Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly engine based on marching cubes.
Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.
Comments
Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly engine based on marching cubes.
Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.
If you want to use rasterization part of your GPU, you're going to have to eventually convert the voxel data into triangles.
Minecraft is just polygons sure, but it has a "voxely" look, that's what I was getting at.
I think voxel has grown to have two meanings. One is as you describe, another is systems like Minecraft.
As an example, a more modern and higher resolution implementation of this style can be seen in "Teardown"
I'm also thinking Novalogic games and Voxlap: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm
If you're familiar with pixels, you might be familiar with "pixel art", even though you every image on a screen has pixels
Huh? What about it uses marching cubes?