Voxel Engine MRI Image
Make sure you press and hold down the mouse button:
We are displaying every fifth slice from this MRI image or so to keep the head proportional. (otherwise the head would be super wide):
_Posted in R&D, Voxel Engine
Archive for February, 2010
February 23, 2010
by Mikko
February 18, 2010
by Mikko
Voxel Engine Based Audio Driven Animation
This experiment shows off a “particlized” voxel model:
Music by Massive Attack-Paradise Circus
_Posted in R&D, Voxel Engine
February 9, 2010
by Nick
HTML5 3D Canvas, no way!
Well, not really, but i figured with all the HTML5 and Canvas hype i might as well give it a go. So i decided to port the pseudo 3D application i wrote for www.stemcellcharter.org. Turns out canvas is pretty cool, and it runs pretty well to boot, well, at least on webkit browsers. It runs pretty well on Firefox too, but you can see it stutter every once in a while.
If you want to see the actual page, Click here to get a taste.
I will definitely be looking into the canvas a bit more, but like Mikko said, i don’t think this is the “Flash Killer” just yet. But hey, I’ve got no problem experimenting with it. Its a nice break from Flash anyways.
What to build next…
February 4, 2010
by Mikko
HTML5 Canvas Version of the Voxel Engine
Last night I decided it was time to take a break from the Voxel Engine and work on the Voxel Engine. HEH…
I know that makes no sense but basically I started thinking with all this hype around HTML5 and Canvas I better try to build something in HTML5 and Canvas in order to know what it’s all about. With HTML5 and Canvas being touted as the “Flash Killer” I decided to try and see if it was possible to build the Voxel Engine using Javascript and the Canvas tag.
Here is a short video of the Javascript Canvas based Voxel Engine running in Safari:
You can see it in action by clicking below.
However we recommend that you use Safari or Google Chrome:
Click Here To See It in Action
This was an interesting experiment but from this I can say that right now HTML5 and Canvas is NOT yet the “Flash Killer” it’s being touted as. The performance on this experiment is quite a bit lower than what Flash can produce. I mean it doesn’t even run in Firefox, and this is the core of the problem with HTML and Javascript for years, browsers just aren’t built the same.
_Posted in Canvas, HTML5, R&D, Radiohead, Voxel Engine
February 1, 2010
by Mikko
Voxels?!? Sounds magical
Well in my previous post I stated that during my research period I would be working on our
Voxel Engine and then I posted this fancy video underneath without explaining anything else.
I guess that wasn’t quite fair.
So in this post I want to explain a bit more about our “Voxel Engine”, what it is and what it does.
Before we can get into the meat of the Voxel Engine I want to try to explain what voxels are (or at least how I’ve understood it).
Check out this video it’s sort of a visual representation of what Voxels are:
A Voxel is a “Volumetric Pixel” essentially a 3d pixel. A regular 2d pixel has an x and y co-ordinate and a colour where as a Voxel has a x, y, and z co-ordinate and possibly a colour.
So essentially the voxel engine is just a different type of 3d engine. You might be asking why would you want to use Voxels over vertices and triangles to draw 3d models? In theory with Voxels you can have a greater level of detail than you could get with triangles. This is why most medical imagery is made up of Voxels and not triangles.
You may have noticed above I stated “in theory with voxels you can have a greater level of detail”. Well you definately can get a higher level of detail with voxels however you definately need hardware accelaration in order to get to this level of detail and obviously we do not have hardware accelaration in Flash.
Here are two very cool videos of Voxels being rendered using hardware accelaration:
High resolution medical imagery:
Animated Voxels (particlized):
So why build a voxel engine in Flash at all?
Well we can still get quite a high level of detail using voxels in Flash however if we take these Voxels and start moving them around we essentially have a 3d particle engine that is based off voxels. I call this process “Particlization”. Just like the Voxel Fluid Driven Particles video above, this is where the cool stuff happens.
Our Voxel engine will support the following:
- Parsing different Voxel file formats
- Rendering voxel models (duh)
- Different rendering modes (setPixel, copyPixel, fillRect)
- Particlizing voxel models (my own term for turning Voxels into particles)
- Etc. (which means anything else that we can think of)
Check out these other resources on Voxels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel <- Wikipedia entry on Voxels
http://www.volumegraphics.com/solutions/voxels.html <- Nice explanation from a medical imagery site
http://www.3d-coat.com/voxel-sculpting/ <- Interesting Voxel modeling app
_Posted in R&D, Voxel Engine