Parts Of The Voxel Engine: LookMaps

In this post I want to look in detail at LookMaps.

Click on the example below to see how look maps work:

Since some Voxel models can have 10,000+ voxels (or 3d pixels) it could be very intensive to for example tint every single voxel.

To put it into perspective imagine looping through 10,000+ colours and calculating their new colour every single frame, and then along with that also calculating new positions for 10,000+ particles. Traditionally this is how things would be done each particle contains it’s own colour.

Instead what I’ve done with the Voxel Engine is create a separate look map. A look map is essentially an array of colours and then each voxel (or 3d pixel) has an index that points to a colour in a look map.

Think of an image on the internet most likely every single pixel in the image is not going to be a completely different colour but instead colours are repeated. This is the basic idea behind the “look map” to have a colour pallette to create an image.

In the above example you may have noticed that when you were clicking on different colour swatches you would see the colours in the voxel model also change. We were essentially changing colour values in the look map without changing the index at which each voxel is pointing at.

Look Maps Do More

Ok so every single Voxel Model has a LookMap. During the rendering process what actually happens is that when the renderer is rendering a model it will grab that models look map and tell it to render “something” at a specific 2d position.

So what that means is that the LookMap actually performs the physical rendering. This allows us to do some amazing things…

For instance in the above example you can see small squares not pixels being rendered. What’s actually happening is that this models look map is a “FillRectLookMap”. Essentially instead of rendering pixels (PixelLookMap) it’s rendering rectangles or squares.

Of course there is also a “BitmapLookMap”. Check out the example below where instead of drawing pixels or rectangles we are drawing bitmaps:

Again since we are using lookmaps we can quickly and easily change which bitmap is being rendered for which voxel. Another note is that because we only have 10 bitmaps to render and entire model we are using a lot less memory than each Voxel having it’s own BitmapData that would be rendered.

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Voxel Engine Self-Portrait

At this point in the development cycle for the Voxel Engine I find it’s a good time to just play around with the engine. This way the engine gets debugged and I also get to see what works and what doesn’t work from a coding perspective.

Adrian and Pablo really wanted me to make a drawing app. So the recording above is what I’ve got so far. It’s not perfect but I think you can get some pretty nice results using it.

I’d also like to mention that my nose isn’t that crazy and I have quite a bit more facial hair.

_Posted in R&D, Voxel Engine

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Parts of the Voxel Engine

I thought it was time to talk about the Voxel Engine and how it all works.

Below is a diagram describing the different pieces of the voxel engine:

There are four major parts to the Voxel Engine:

• VoxContainers
• Lookmaps
• Renderers
• Z-Sorters

(more…)

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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):

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Voxel Engine Based Audio Driven Animation

This experiment shows off a “particlized” voxel model:

Music by Massive Attack-Paradise Circus

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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

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Look ma I’m on R&D!

Coinciding with the start of the Jam3 labs blog I’ll be going into a Jam3 Research and Development period. So watch out for quite a few posts coming from me in the next few months.

During my research period I’ve decided to heavily focus on my Voxel Engine. Of course there maybe some other small projects here and there but my major focus will be on the Voxel engine. I’ve actually started working on my Voxel Engine previously but now we’ll be taking it to the next level.

You can see some previous progress of the Voxel Engine here on my blog:
http://www.mikkoh.com/blog/

Here is a small preview of what’s to come:

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