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Here's a paper experimenting with some ways of doing that: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/papers/voxel-pcg.pdf

The Minecraft voxels are decorated by textures that are designed to fit the cube form. A devoxalization is going to look like crap.

I think he means disregarding all that and looking at the raw voxels then applying a modified version of this algorithm, similar to marching cubes.

I know. But when displaying the Minecraft landscape afterwards you either have to leave the disregarded textures out, which looks like crap, or apply them stretched, which looks like total crap, or apply a smoothed gradient, which also looks like crap compared to the original landscape. :-)

Given that he suggested Minecraft terrains, I opined on how Minecraft would look with such an algorithm applied.

Pixels map quite nicely to voxels, assuming you're looking for a 3D extrusion of 2D pixel art.