NEYRET F.: Beyond Triangles : Gigavoxels Effects In Video Games

Figure 1: Our technique renders complex scenes consisting of billions of voxels in real time and supports soft shadows, instancing, high-quality filtering, and depth-of-field effects. Overview Voxel representations are commonly used for scientific data visu-alization, but also for many special effects involving complex or fuzzy data (e.g., clouds, smoke, foam). Since voxel rendering per-mits better and easier filtering than triangle-based representations it is also an efficient high-quality choice for complex meshes (with several triangles per pixel) and detailed geometric data (e.g., boats in Pirates of the Caribbean). We have shown in [Crassin et al. 2009] that highly detailed voxel data can be rendered in high quality at real-time rates. The work foreshadows the use of very large volumetric data sets in the con-text of video-games. Our system, based on ray-casting of a gen-eralized sparse octree structure on GPU, achieves high rendering performance for billions of voxels