How Voxels Became ‘The Next Big Thing’

We’ve talked with the amazing guys behind Atomontage, trying to figure out if the voxels can actually return and take down the polygons.

Voxel development

Branislav: I used to compete in the demoscene in Europe between 2000 and 2002. I wrote a few 256-bytes demos (also called intros) under the nickname Silique/Bizzare Devs (see “Njufnjuf”, “Oxlpka”, “I like ya, Tweety” and “Comatose”), where each of the intros generated real-time voxel or point cloud graphics. Both voxels and point clouds are examples of sampled geometry.

The intros did their job with about 100 CPU instructions like ADD, MUL, STOSB, PUSH and similar. However, due to the nature of these type of programs, tens of instructions were actually used just for setting up things, not for generating the actual graphics. Still, those 50+ instructions, which are basically elementary mathematical and memory operations, were enough to generate pretty neat moving 3D graphics at real-time speeds. All these 256B intros won the 1st to 3rd prize and that made me realize that when such 3D graphics are so easy to create without polygons, it could also be possible to achieve much more in games and beyond, by doing the same there: using sampled geometry instead of polygon meshes. Simplicity is the key. I saw that the then-dominant paradigm based on complicated and fundamentally limited (non-volumetric) representation was going to hit a complexity ceiling, so the timing was right to try this “new“ and simpler paradigm: volumetric sampled geometry.

Dan: While still in high school in Sweden, I started programming a 2D sidescrolling engine, which I eventually built an indie game called “Cortex Command” with. It was like “Worms” or “Liero”, but with real-time gameplay and RTS elements, and more detailed in its simulation of various materials for each pixel of the terrain. Through an “ant farm”-like cross-section view, your characters could dig for gold in the soft dirt and build defensive bunkers with hard concrete and metal material walls. Cortex Command won Technical Excellence and Audience awards at the Independent Games Festival in 2009. Ever since then, I have been wanting to make a fully 3D version of the game — something that could only be done with volumetric simulation and graphics.

About six years ago, I was looking at all the voxel solutions out there, and found Branislav’s work through his website and videos, where he talked about this inevitable shift away from polygonal 3D graphics to something that resembled what I was doing in 2D in my game: simulating the whole virtual world as small atomic blocks with material properties. Not only did his thesis ring true for me, but his tech also seemed to be the best and most convincing around, based solely on his simple but impressive videos. I started donating to his project through his website and struck up a conversation with him, which eventually led to a friendship over the years, and now us co-founding this company. It’s exciting to be part of this pivotal period in such an epic project, where the result of so many years of R&D is finally about to be put into everyone’s hands to revolutionize the creation and consumption of 3D content!

Increasing interest

We believe that many big players have realized that polygon technologies have been hitting a complexity ceiling over a decade ago. This problem manifests itself in all kinds of friction: complex toolchains, complex hacks to make destructive interaction and simulation possible, complex geometry representation (polygon surface model + collision models + other models for representing the internal structure, if any), complex and over-engineered approaches to volumetric video, hacks and large code-bases, etc. All this friction makes progress rely almost solely on the increasing horsepower of GPUs — and some things are simply not feasible at all. It‘s a battle that can not be won. So, it‘s likely part of the nature of large companies: Often, they don‘t even try to spend so much time and resources on developing these risky and game-changing solutions; instead, their strategy seems to be to try to acquire the small companies who successfully do.

Technology

There are a bunch of techniques people typically consider being voxel-based. The oldest ones used in games were height-map based where the renderer interpreted a 2D map of height values to calculate boundary between the air and the ground in the scene. That‘s not truly a voxel-based approach as there‘s no volumetric data set in use (ie in Delta Force 1, Comanche, Outcast, and others).

Some engines and games use large blocks that themselves have internal structures and make up the virtual world (ie Minecraft). These blocks are typically rendered using polygons, so the smallest elements of them are triangles and texels — not really voxels. That geometry is simply organized into a grid of larger blocks, but that doesn’t make them voxels, strictly speaking.