Hello all, I havent had much time to go looking through all the posts here, to see if the information I'm after is available.
I would like to know how to use the polygon to voxel conversion tool, what cmd lines to use etc. I also cant view voxels in the voxel viewer, I can load them but they do not show up.
I have some models that i would like to convert to voxels for some testing, the models you can see on the website are quite low poly and are not the models i wish to convert. These models all have high detailed versions that i wish to convert.
We have some polygon limitations on the DS so perhaps voxels could help us.
Please pop by the site and have a look around.
Thanks,
Defect.
Awesoken at
If you run POLY2VOX.EXE at the command prompt with no options, it'll list all the command-line options, including several examples.
Sometimes converted models are pure black and camouflage with the background. This can happen if the source model has no color information or POLY2VOX doesn't recognize the texture format. If you want to see if this is the case, try changing the background color in SLAB6 by moving the mouse cursor to the bottom-right corner and pressing 'B' over a non-black color in the palette.
Edited at
Anonymous at
Hey thanks for the reply. I got the conversion done, but still had trouble viewing the models. I couldnt even get the included models to show.
I tried running Slab6 from the cmd prompt and it loaded the models properly.
The model looks great, it has no skin but it looks alot better then I imagined.
I will work on some color then post some pics.
Thanks again.
Defect at
I'm really enjoying these voxels, they look really nice and would allow for some very nice effects. The Cave demo was just fantastic, a multiplayer Decent clone in that engine would be awesome.
On a performance scale, how do voxels compare to polygons?
If for example a polygon scene consisted of 400 polygons, with a 250 polygon character standing in the middle and the scene rendered at 40 fps, how fast would the same scene render using a voxel based character instead?
Is there much data on the speed of voxels over polygons?
We would be interested in using Voxels for level objects and characters, but retain polygons for the world.
Thanks.
Awesoken at
It depends on what you're modelling and the kind of hardware you're running it on. I can't give you a definitive answer on whether it's worthwhile to use voxels or not for your application. A texture-mapped cube will always render faster with polygons. A bumpy tree might render faster with voxels. One nice thing about voxels is it's easy to lower the resolution without requiring any extra work for the artist.
You might want to consider a hybrid algorithm. For example: render polygons when close and voxels when far. There are many ways to render voxels. The fastest and simplest method is to plot a single pixel per voxel. Obviously, you'll have gaps when viewing up close, but if you only need to render voxel objects when far away, this method might be sufficient.
Defect at
One thing we're considering, is using 3D models for close up and switching to sprites at a pre set distance. The only problem is that we are faced with a 2048 polygon limit per frame @ 60fps locked.
There would be times when the player would lure several monsters into another area and exceed the polygon limit when they are close, this would mean that the engine would have to replace any model that exceeds the 2048 limit no matter how close they are, to avoid overdraw.
Voxels would be a great sprite replacement as they would not be very noticable on the small Nintendo DS screen, so even if the player was surrounded by 4 polygon enemies and 4 voxel enemies, it wouldnt be as noticable as sprites.
Polygons need to be converted to voxels and i'm assuming this is not something that can be done on the fly. So there would need to be polygon and voxel versions of each enemie. This would take up the already limited memory the DS has.
Defect at
I've created a DoomDS Barrel with Voxels and the results are quite nice.
http://dual-soft.com/doomds/files/barrel.kvx
Character models may come at a later date.
Feel free to use the model, but give credit where it is due.
Thanks.
Dune at
Awesoken said
It depends on what you're modelling and the kind of hardware you're running it on. I can't give you a definitive answer on whether it's worthwhile to use voxels or not for your application. A texture-mapped cube will always render faster with polygons. A bumpy tree might render faster with voxels. One nice thing about voxels is it's easy to lower the resolution without requiring any extra work for the artist.
You might want to consider a hybrid algorithm. For example: render polygons when close and voxels when far. There are many ways to render voxels. The fastest and simplest method is to plot a single pixel per voxel. Obviously, you'll have gaps when viewing up close, but if you only need to render voxel objects when far away, this method might be sufficient.
Why does it matter to not render voxals up close? If you're close should the FPS be fine with all voxals or is that a, I forgot what the technique is called to make voxals sharper, issue?