Voxels Library - Library for Voxel manipulation and polygonization
Official Voxels website: http://stoyannk.wordpress.com/voxels-library/
General Notes
Voxels is a library for manipulating voxel grids and triangulating them to triangle soups. The library supports grid compression and fast polygonization using the TransVoxel algorithm.
Voxels is in alpha. Unfortunately I don't have enough time to dedicate it and at this point there are no plans to update the library. No significant changes were applied to the library since the first public release in 2014. The library depends on my dx11-framework for some utilities - nothing that can't be easily ported. When building make sure you have also downloaded the dx11-framework files. The gist of the library is the "TransVoxelImpl.cpp" file that implements the Transvoxel algorithm along with the LOD levels and the vertex transitions. The Grids can be sompressed and saved/loaded to disk - take a look at the "VoxelGrid.cpp" file.
Major features
- Polygonization based on the TransVoxel algorithm
- Level of detail
- Dynamic Material support
- Dynamic manipulation
- Voxel grid compression
- Scalable implementation
- Pluggable grid generation
Voxels advantages
Voxel-based surfaces allow for more freedom than usual polygon-based ones. The major advantages of such a representation can be summarized as follows:
- Freedom of form - You can create virtually any surface configuration. Gives much more possibilities than heightmaps for terrains for instance. With usual heightmaps you can't have caves or overhangs as part of the terrain mesh.
- Destructibility/constructibility - The voxel surface can be trivially modified in real-time allowing easy sculpting. Allow users to create their worlds or destroy them.
- Procedural generation - Procedural surfaces can easily be created, which diminishes greatly the content creation effort and possibly the memory footprint of the whole application
Requirements
- Windows 32-bit or 64-bit
- SSE2-enabled processor
- Voxels scales very well across processor cores; the more available on the machine - the faster the polygonization process will be.
The library is not strictly cross platform at the moment. I haven't tried it on other targets, but there shouldn't be hurdles porting it.
Documentation
Detailed documentation is available in the doc_source folder.
Samples
A sample application that uses Voxels is available on http://github.com/stoyannk/volumerendering. A pre-built version of the sample with editing functionality is available in the Download section.
Acknowledgements
Voxels uses the TransVoxel algorithm as described in: Lengyel, Eric. “Voxel-Based Terrain for Real-Time Virtual Simulations”. PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 2010. For more information please refer to http://www.terathon.com/voxels/. Voxels uses the GLM maths library http://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.7/index.html
License
The library is licensed under the permissive 3-clause BSD license. Please refer to the LICENSE file for all the details.