What are Voxels and why are they so cool?

Channel:

No Cap Gaming

Subscribers:

106,000

Published on May 31, 2021 5:13:47 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWU8t0CpNQA

Game:

Minecraft (2011)

Duration: 8:08

736,489 views

46,966

John Lin's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM2RhfMLoLqG24e_DYgTQeA

Voxel graphics use a completely different way of modeling and rendering objects in games than we're used to seeing in modern AAA games. A huge majority of video games use Polygons to render the visuals. These are millions of tiny triangles connected together to form surfaces. Voxels, or volumetric pixels, don't use any triangles but are instead tiny cubes (3D pixels) grouped together to form objects that have actual volume. Voxels were mostly used in the 90s with games such as Outcast, but have barely evolved since, unlike Polygons which continue to push boundaries with projects like Unreal Engine 5. The only notable example of a recent Voxel based game is Teardown, but John Lin's ray traced procedurally generated sandbox physics based voxel game looks promising.

Other Statistics