Comment by spitfire
16 years ago
Years and years ago (In the quake3 era) John Carmack talked about voxels being the future of 3d because of exactly thaty.
Ray-traced voxel based worlds. Personally, I think voxels will be hard to manage for objects/characters. Someone smarter than me will have to solve that problem.
There are ways around such problems, especially in terms of bridging the gap between convex smooth surfaced solid objects and collections of cubes. As the technology gets more mature more sophisticated approaches will be fielded.
A classic way of solving the voxel vs. smooth object problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
Atomonontage still uses polygon-based rendering for some objects (the vehicle in that video is poly-based).
I believe the appropriate expression is 'Horses for courses'.
> Someone smarter than me will have to solve that problem.
Someone smarter, or someone with specific knowledge of the relevant domain and a lot more time to invest on the problem? I see a lot of people assuming that someone who can do something they can't is inherently smarter, even if they do something just as complicated for their daily job and think nothing of it.
Someone with more time on their hands. I've actually worked close to this subject area already. It can be solved, but I'd have to care more than I do to bone up on the material to tackle it.