what are sparse voxel octrees?

Question

I have reading a lot about the potential use of sparse voxel octrees in future graphics engines.

However I have been unable to find technical information on them.

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Answer 1

You can even simply raster all the points, you needent raytrace or raycast these days, since video cards can project obscene amounts of points. You use an octree because its a cube shape, continually dividing making smaller and smaller cubes. (voxels) I have an engine on the way now using a rastered technique and its looking good. For those that say you cant animate voxels I think they really havent thought much about the topic, of course its possible. As I see it, making the world is alot like "infinite 3d-coat" so look up 3d coat and the level design will be very similar to the way this program works. Main draw backs involve streaming speed not being fast enough, the raytracing or rastering not quite making 60 fps, and plotting the actual voxel objects is very computationally expensive, at the moment I can plot a 1024x1024x1024 sphere in about 12 seconds, But all these problems could be remedied, its an exciting future. My maximum world size at the moment is a meg by a meg by a meg, but I actually might make it 8 times bigger than this. Of course the other problem which is actually quite serious is it takes about 100 meg to store a 8192x8192x8192 character even after compression, so an environment will be even more than this. Even though, saying your going to have characters 8192x8192x8192 is completely absurd compared to what we see in games today... an entire world used to be 8192x8192x8192 :)

How you do it by only storing bits per pointer is the pointers are constructed at runtime in video memory... get your mind around that and you could have your own engine. :)