koobas.hobune.stream
Introduction to Voxels and More
As of recently, I've become very interested in procedural generation and voxel geometry, and everything in between. I feel that getting familiar with these concepts would help me improve my ability to create games by adding another skill that I can learn.
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However, when I try to get into all of this, I get hopelessly and utterly swamped with an ocean of far too advanced information, and I don't know where to start.
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Can any of you recommend me basic and introductory resources to guide me down the rabbit hole of this complex topic? I'm eager to start from the beginning and master the fundamentals so I can eventually understand and use this kind of stuff.
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Absolutely anything will help: Wikipedia pages, video tutorials, articles on what the heck voxel even means, etc.
Thanks much!
Gonna go ahead and answer my own question here, since I have figured a lot of stuff out since asking this.
If you're interested in the marching cubes algorithm like I am, I'd suggest looking at Paul Bourke's abstract of Polygonising a Scalar Field. He breaks it down almost line-by-line and only requires a basic understanding of binary code.
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Nvidia's GPU Gems 3 is an amazing resource for fundamentally understanding the marching cubes algorithm. It goes into a cube's correspondance with bits and so on.
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Numerous YouTube tutorials teach the very basics of voxel geometry and procedural generation. I'd recommend Sebastian Lague's channel. In some of his older videos, he goes over 2D marching cubes, but the same idea applies to 3D. He also does procedural terrain, and those two tutorials mixed together will definitely help you. While scouring the internet, I've run into a great C# example of marching cubes (that must be ported to UnityScript). It's definitely a hard read, considering it's in a different language which I don't speak, but just reviewing the code helps you understand it.
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But by far, the most helpful resource was Lynda.com's Unity3D dynamic terrain tutorials. While it's not always good to copy directly from other people, it's an INVALUABLE resource for breaking down how to implement this algorithm in Unity. It provides a great base for most use cases, and it's pretty easy to study. I can say from experience that this tutorial plus Paul Bourke's techniques allow you to easily implement your very own version of marching cubes. One thing to note is that it's not free, but Lynda offers a free 30-day trial which will get you what you need.
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While marching cubes is a pretty sparse subject on YouTube, there are still some great resources out there for all you people that prefer text-based guidance. Good luck to everyone!
You should look at cat like coding tutorials. http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/marching-squares/
