Voxvision is a library (few of them to be accurate) for creating and operating on voxel octrees and also for visualising sets of voxels. It also contains a demo application which shows functionality of these libraries.
A voxel is a small cube in space. Its coordinates are given in a Cartesian coordinate system and its faces are parallel to axes of that coordinate system. This libary limitation is that all voxels have the same size.
The first library, voxtrees, is not very feature-rich for now. It can construct voxel octrees and perform two types of search in octrees, which I think are of the great importance. The first one checks if an arbitrary ray hits any voxel in the tree. The second one checks if an arbitrary ball intersects with any voxel. These checks are performed much faster than a naïve O(n) voxel-by-voxel search.
The second library, voxrnd, is a SDL-based renderer of voxel datasets with 6 degrees of freedom, collision detection and multicore parallel processing.
And the third library, voxengine manages the first two, opening windows, loading data etc. and provides lua scripting with which you can describe your scene, control camera, do simple keyboard handling etc.
You can try to execute make doc from building directory (see below) to
generate an API documentation. But API changes too fast and unpredictable, so no
guarantees. Also this documentation contains a basic tutorial for these
libraries.
If you do not want to install doxygen, you can just visit voxvision site on Github Pages.
There is no special format the library can work with for now, but voxtrees can
handle simple raw binary format (see documentation and examples). For example,
you can visit http://www.volvis.org/ to get some of datasets. Also you need to
write a simple configuration file to work with dataset (or, if you use
voxengine, write a loading script). Few datasets and configuration (.cfg)
files present in example directory.
Usage: voxvision-demo [-c <global_config>] <dataset_config> where
dataset_config is a configuration file for dataset and global_config is an
optional global configuration file. These files are in ini format (as in
Microsoft Windows). See tutorial for more info.
Also, with version 0.20, here comes voxengine library and simple program,
which uses its capabilities.
Usage: voxvision-engine [-w width] [-h height] [-f fps] -s script. script is
lua control script, look at examples directory.
- SDL2
- iniparser for demo application, optional
- CUnit for unit tests
- GCD for parallel rendering, optional, but highly recommended.
- Doxygen for API documentation, optional
- Lua >= 5.2, optional, but highly recommended for voxengine library.
- Clang or other compiller with support for blocks. GCC will not do.
From directory containing this file:
git submodule init
git submodule update
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE ..
make
make install
Last step is optional. Also you can add -DSSE_INTRIN=OFF to the third line if
you have old hardware. If you do not have GCD, add -DWITH_GCD=OFF.
For more info visit the project page
I want to thank Tangent128 for his luasdl2, lua binding to SDL2 which I currently use.