Comments on: Really, another Minecraft article?

By: epoyart

epoyart — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:22:27 +0000

It looks like it does frustum culling. The frame rate rises and falls depending on where you’re looking. Especially at the edge of the world: when looking inside the world, the frame rate is much higher than when looking outside.

By: pmin00

pmin00 — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:15:46 +0000

> My experience with binvox was that it had issues in at least one case
> with some very thin & sharp features — missing a surface caused it to
> generate strands of garbage geometry.

Absolutely: because binvox renders a model at the resolution you specify
(it defaults to 256×256), anything that doesn’t render at that resolution
will not end up in the resulting voxel model.

A trick is to render at a higher resolution and then downsample, for example:
binvox -d 512 -down my_mesh.obj

Also, for some models using just the “carving” method works best:
binvox -c my_mesh.obj

I’ve put up a page describing the process at:
http://www.patrickmin.com/minecraft/
(work in progress, comments welcome)

Patrick

By: zaphos

zaphos — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:01:18 +0000

My experience with binvox was that it had issues in at least one case with some very thin & sharp features — missing a surface caused it to generate strands of garbage geometry. But aside from that it is pretty nice.

By: BinarySplit

BinarySplit — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:36:21 +0000

You can witness the lack of occlusion culling and the visible face tracing by performing a texture hack. Simply extract minecraft.jar and add some transparency to the textures in terrain.png, then repack in zip format.

What irks me is that the set of blocks that are considered transparent is hard-coded. Replacing the dirt texture with the glass texture does not create an equivalent rendering to that of replacing dirt tiles with actual glass.