Pages tagged Rendering

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• Rendering
  

  While rendering voxels appears easy at a glance ("they're just cubes!"), there are actually many, many, trade-offs one has to take into account, mainly depending on the intended visual style and scale of the individual voxels.

• OpenGL API
  

  Classic hardware accelerated rendering API.

• Level Of Detail
  

  Replacement of geometry that is too small with lower detail geometry.

• Back Face Culling
  

  Removal of geometry not facing the camera.

• Vulkan API
  

  Modern hardware accelerated rendering API.

• Vertex Pulling
  

  Manual vertex streaming for improved memory usage and bandwidth.

• Multidraw
  

  A method for rendering massive amounts of geometry, with a single drawcall.

• Cluster Culling
  

  Efficiently culling small clusters of geometry.

• Planets
  

  Just as with the problem of map projection, creating planets shows a fundamental fact with voxels: As they are regular grids, shaping the actual grid into a planet, without distortions or discontinuities, is mathematically impossible. As such, we need to employ different methods depending on what we ultimately want to achieve.

• Vertex Packing
  

  Manually bit-packing data into vertices for improved memory usage and bandwidth.

• Occlusion Culling
  

  Removal of geometry that is fully hidden behind other geometry.

• Face Pulling
  

  Taking vertex pulling to it's conclusion by streaming ONLY face-data.

• Interior Culling
  

  Removal of geometry hidden within geometry.

• Surface Extraction
  

  Turning voxels into geometry.

• Portal Culling
  

  Removal of geometry that is not in the same 'room'.

• Rendering: Culling
  

  In general, (visibility-) culling is the process of limiting the amount of things rendered (both geometry and drawcalls) to manageable levels, so the GPU doesn't go up in flames.

• Distance Culling
  

  Removal of geometry that is too far away.

• Raytracing
  

  Rendering images via raycasting, be it on the CPU or GPU, is a powerful method, especially when it comes to voxels.

• Frustum Culling
  

  Removal of geometry that is outside the cameras view region.