What are some good resources for building a voxel engine?

Question

What are some good resources (tutorials, code, papers, etc.) for learning about voxel rendering?

Answer 1

I recently did some experimentation with voxels for rendering terrain, with support for overhangs. I pretty much used these articles to build my prototype:

• This GPU gems 3 chapter on generating procedural terrain on the GPU. Even though my solution was CPU based (I work with shader model 3, so I couldn't reuse any of their shaders). There's a lot of good information buried in here!
• The wikipedia entry on the marching cubes algorithm. Great set of references, such as to this site that has a good pictorial overview on how things work.
• For any procedural work, you're going to need a good noise library like Lib noise (also has a c# version).

Something to look out for, I could never get normal generation to work correctly once I had generated a mesh from my voxels. If anyone can give any pointers for this, I'd be grateful.

Answer 2

Here is a 10 year old tutorial that goes pretty deep into Voxel rendering as a technology. It's still a good read.

Answer 3

This paper by Jon Olick is pretty interesting: http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/olick-current-and-next-generation-parallelism-in-games.pdf

And those two forum threads about it: http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=904

and: https://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=551

It gives you a nice overview about how things could be done in a modern voxel engine.

Answer 4

I'm also developing a renderer based on voxel raycasting: http://www.forceflow.be/category/phd/

Answer 5

I work on an open-source voxel library called PolyVox which has some good documentation for the technology. Also linked at the bottom of our documentation page is a chapter of 'Game Engine Gems Volume 1' on volumetric representations in games via Google Books.