Granting normals to voxels.

[rouncer]

Im thinking about putting together a voxel model editor, but there seems to be a problem, how do you get a light to light them up when they have no normals?
You can give them a texture, but how do you make them diffuse light?

I was thinking maybe you give them floating positions inside the voxel compartment - and you use this to develop a smooth surface but is there a better way than this?

thanks for any replies...

[Rubicon]

Make some using a sobel filter ?

[kusma]

rouncer: I did a voxel-renderer with a friend that did something like that. We took the gradient over a large area, with gaussian weighting. It worked out quite well, but there were quite some banding in the normals for almost-axis-aligned slopes.

[rouncer]

rouncer: I did a voxel-renderer with a friend that did something like that. We took the gradient over a large area, with gaussian weighting. It worked out quite well, but there were quite some banding in the normals for almost-axis-aligned slopes.

Wouldnt that destroy high frequencies tho?

[Rubicon]

Seeing as I seem to be invisible, here it is from someone else (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=370902)

[rouncer]

Sorry Rubicon, so Its similar to converting a heightmap to a normal map.
Can you still use a 3x3 kernel and it would work?

I doubt it, because heightmaps have 256 positions and voxels only displace from each other in units, it would produce harsh angles.

[Rubicon]

Yes, you can use it in any dimension.

Your're right about it not being mega smooth, but that's not a voxel speciality

[rouncer]

the only way would be to increase the kernal size and lose hi frequency components.

[kusma]

rouncer: No, high frequencies worked out quite OK. It's a matter of tweaking the filter, though.

[rouncer]

Ok, thanksalot for the input.