I know enough about 3D graphics to understand the difference between polygons and voxels, but at the same time I know enough that I realize I don't actually understand how voxels work, how they actually get drawn in the end.
So a voxel is a point/cube in 3D space, akin to how a pixel is a point/square in 2D space. But how does the computer draw it on screen? How does the logic work to put the thing on screen?
For a polygon cube, it uses 8 points and 12 triangle polygons, passes the info to the GPU, and tells it to draw a triangle from A to B to C a bunch of times.
How would this work for a cube represented by a voxel? Does the voxel coordinates represent the center of the cube? Lets keep it simple and say it represents a corner, and the size represents the length of each edge. How does the computer process this info to draw your 1 voxel cube? Does it figure out where all the corners of the cube are and plays connect the dots? Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding this, cause whenever I try to think about it, it always feels like at some point it must do something similar to how polygons are drawn.
@LukeAlmighty
So only relevant as a way to build/construct your things in memory, but when it comes to drawing on screen you go back to the same old process? Pretty much the same conclusion I always manage to arrive at too, but with how people treat voxels, it always gives me the impression that there's something special when it comes to drawing them.
@alyx
Who knows?
I am not a programmer.