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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

I have known two of the guys involved for a while now (Dan and Bran). Both of them strike me as honest people who are legitimately passionate about graphics tech, so I don't think they are running a scam (only mentioning this because of other comments). I myself, having delved into the voxel world, have my own doubts about voxels in general, as a silver bullet for everything, but there are many areas worth pursuing (particularly within medical, which they are). From an aesthetics standpoint alone voxels are great for games (voxel art now has a serious following on Twitter). Anyhow, I've been amazed with Siles' work over the years. I am curious to see what they cook up. :)

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Volume amd voxel rendering are essential for medical visualizations. But there should already be a lot of competition in that area.

Voxel graphics for games is mostly restricted to non-deforming bodies. Games like Comanche and Outcast made use of an optimized variant of voxel rendering for their terrains with great results in the 90s. But I have yet to see an animated face in realtime rendered using voxels or points. I would love to see that done, but this is a hard problem.

Wow. It's been quite some time since I last thought about Comanche. Thank's for the throwback.

You may find this interesting:

https://comanche3d.com/

Nice, but this implementation should extend the voxels down to the lowest neighbor. This would close the gaps in the steep hillsides.

If you're doing it in a pure software implementation and with no tilted camera, you could optimize this heavily. You start at the bottom of the screen and for each vertical row of pixels you march along the heightmap in 2D and project the texels to the screen. You also remember the current hightest Y coordinate that you've drawn. If the new texel is projected higher than that, you draw another vertical line to that position with the texel color and remember that position. So you're filling up your screen from bottom to top in an extremely efficient way.

The video in this article shows an animated face and body, unless you mean something else. Jon Olick did some work with deformation/animation of voxels, IIRC. But agreed, it is still a challenging and not very well solved problem.

I must have missed this video then. I'll have another look.

edit: found the video (I find myself skipping the teaser quite often these days). They show recordings, not animations. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it's not. An animated rig of some kind can be adjusted through parameters that are entered by an animator to create or alter the movement. This is also the basis for technology like animation blending and inverse kinematics which (in a nutshell) are some of the techniques that make movement in current games so plausible. If this is just a static stream of volumes that is played back like a flipbook, then no easy adjustments are possible.

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