Canonical Hello World

This is the first post of my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Overview

This blog is mainly going to be documenting my journey in writing a voxel-based graphics engine (called shiny). This isn’t my first trip to the rodeo, but it is the first time I’ve done anything with voxels. My first goal is to replicate Cyril Crassin et al.’s thesis Gigavoxels, in DirectX 11. I currently have a Sparse Voxel Octree… viewer thing. It correctly displays a non-mip-mapped 3D texture (the bricks) by navigating an octree, stored in a buffer, in the fragment shader. Using Shader Model 5, of course. So, that’s nice. Next will be writing a voxelization tool to voxelize polygonal models, and then completing the Gigavoxels implementation. After that… who knows.

I will probably also write about C++ stuff in general. Like how sweet lambdas are.

Voxelization

There are several recent publications regarding voxelization, most notably Baert, Lagae, and Dutrè’s Out-of-Core Construction of Sparse Voxel Octrees, Crassin and Green’s Sparse Voxelization, and Rauwendaal and Bailey’s Hybrid Computational Voxeization Using the Graphics Pipeline. I’m currently just trying to wrap my head around how easy it will be to merge their approaches to get an out-of-core voxelisation tool that utilizes the graphics pipeline for serious throughput. My gut feeling is: totally doable.

Gigavoxels

The step afterwards requires writing the interface for the atomic buffer operations, after which I can begin to implement the remainder of Gigavoxels. I don’t even understand the buffer read/write mechanism described in the thesis, about loading data asychronously on-demand. But that’s a while away. I intend to document the architecture of the engine in this blog. I’ll also probably write out my (re-)discoveries about voxels along the way, mainly to solidify my understanding.