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Wow I didn't see those tutorials before. It looks like the program is very slow. I bet in a future version of 3DC Andrew could come up with a method of adding procedural textures to our sculptures and end up with a very similar result, but much faster. Not that I know anything about programing, I'm just confidant in Andrew. :)

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looks like their software produces voxel artifacts as well... (viewed the first 'tutorial')

interesting stuff, tho

There are several artifacts usually associated with voxel mesh generation (typically a result of marching cubes):

- numerical debris: small variations in the density field function that result in isolated polygons.

- slivers: thin polygons that cause unsightly flicker and poor topologies

To remove disconnected polygons and polygon groups, Acropora provides a sweeper function. The amount of removal is user controllable.

Retopologizing (say this ten times fast :-)) takes care of slivers and other unsightly polygons.

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Wow I didn't see those tutorials before. It looks like the program is very slow. I bet in a future version of 3DC Andrew could come up with a method of adding procedural textures to our sculptures and end up with a very similar result, but much faster. Not that I know anything about programing, I'm just confidant in Andrew. :)

Speed is always an issue when voxels are concerned. The code to employ the GPU is written (via CUDA) and shortly will be included. Processing times are expected to be in the 20-30x range over multithreading (as it is now).

Remember, to create voxels from a large density field requires a lot of processing. Acropora divides the workload into blocks to expedite processing.

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Have you tried 3D Coat 3.0? I don't mean to put down your work, but 3DCs voxels are very fast in comparison, even without Cuda.

I'll have a look and get back, though I have a feeling we are talking apples and oranges here: procedural mesh generation vs modelling. All the meshes in the images provided on the web-site took a very short amount of time (typically an hour or less). However, that being said, the results were semi-deterministic.

Thanks for the comments.

PS: Take a look at the links sections on the web-sites. You can get an idea where the inspiration for Acropora came from...

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Voxels are good friends of landscape generating. Landscape was my first touch with voxels (5 years ago maybe). When I worked in GSC Game World I made landscape generator to produce non-trivial lendscape for RTS game. You can look short landscape video there:

http://www.3d-coat.com/files/Canyon.avi

codec: http://www.3d-coat.com/files/codinstl.exe

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Voxels are good friends of landscape generating. Landscape was my first touch with voxels (5 years ago maybe). When I worked in GSC Game World I made landscape generator to produce non-trivial lendscape for RTS game. You can look short landscape video there:

http://www.3d-coat.com/files/Canyon.avi

codec: http://www.3d-coat.com/files/codinstl.exe

Hi Andrew,

Nice to hear from you. Yes, exactly, this is what I had in mind, but to expand on the idea on procedural terrain/geometry. If you look at the examples on the net (Procedural terrain) you can see parallels with Acropora. The problem with this kind of application is the difficulty in designing the density function required to create an infinite landscape. Tools are limited if non-existent. Ryan Geiss programmed his shaders to do this, but tweaking such a landscape is difficult and impractical.

By the way, excellant software, Andrew.

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As I know purely fractal/random terrain looks cool but not very useful for practical needs like game lenscape or so. In that game I used combination of painted grayscale masks and random generation. Masks was used to allow or deny applying some rules in certain areas. Mouthains - one rule and masks, ice, ocean, desert etc - other. I don't know if you are using bitmaps for blending rules but it is very useful.

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As I know purely fractal/random terrain looks cool but not very useful for practical needs like game lenscape or so. In that game I used combination of painted grayscale masks and random generation. Masks was used to allow or deny applying some rules in certain areas. Mouthains - one rule and masks, ice, ocean, desert etc - other. I don't know if you are using bitmaps for blending rules but it is very useful.

I am using regions (3-dimensional volumes) and masks (for 2D scoping of the volume, much like your rules) to limit the effect of modifiers and operators. One could image a large tree structure containing multitudes of regions and masks that essentially derive the landscape or object. In the end you can generate a script that can be loaded into a shader (as Ryan Geiss did) along with LOD controls.

On the other hand CG tools like MAX have no problem handling the large meshes. Quite often I optimise the meshes for faster performance.

Anyway, it is a work in progress.

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