new Blog("Volumetric Worlds");

I have started this blog to record the progress of my 4th year project and I have decided to base this around the use of voxels in computer games.

The main problem with voxels is the large amount of data which they imply. This is because voxels are normally only considered to be 3D bitmaps. A small 512 x 512 x 512 contains over 100 million voxels (a lot of data). To put this in perspective here is a 2D 512 x 512 bitmap:

That's about 4 times the size of a single face of a rubix cube. So, if you wanted to make a voxel landscape for example, you would potentially need many gigabytes of memory (That is of course, without any sort of compression).

By rethinking voxels as models rather than images, I think I can reduce the memory requirements to be little bigger than that of an image.