Voxel Optimization

Voxel Optimization This poster presentation covers optimization for voxels. They can be thought of as three dimensional pixels. Vo coming from volume and xel from pixel. Voxels are just values placed in a 3D grid. Voxels have many interesting uses in the medical and scientific field, especially in geology. One use in computer science is storing world information for video games or graphical applications. One very popular example is Minecraft, a game that allows all of the world to be changed, that uses cube shaped voxels. The first topic will be on the naive approach of building a model from a Minecraft like voxel, face merging, and greedy meshing. These are techniques to improve performance and reduce memory consumption. Face merging is combining flat surfaces into a single polygon. An example is combining multiple touching rectangles into one larger rectangle. Greedy meshing is an excellent algorithm to do this by minimizing the rectangle count. The second main topic is about reducing disk space usage. Multiple compression algorithms will be compared using real Dwarf Fortress data. This is a game similar to Minecraft that also uses voxels for world data. Some algorithm examples are run length encoding, Zlib\u27s deflate compression, and CCITT (Huffman) Encoding