VolumeComponent        

Welcome to the Volume Component of OGRE.

terrain.png

It is a component to render volumes. It can handle any volume data but featurewise has a tedency towards terrains.
The terrain aspect means, that it's all about huge meshes being displayed with high performance via a level of detail mechanism. Thanks to volume rendering, caves, cliffes, holes and similar geometry can be displayed. Also constructive solid geometry gets easy.

A dense list of the features:

  • Volume Rendering via Dual Marching Cubes
  • LOD mechanism via a chunk tree and marching squares skirts for crack patching
  • Data-Sources: 3D Textures with density values and the ability to buildup a CSG-Tree with 3D Textures, Spheres, Cubes, Planes, Intersection, Union, Difference and Negation, SimplexNoise addition
  • Loading a 3D Texture Scene from config files
  • An own file format for discrete density values which compresses a lot better
  • Realtime editing
  • Serialization and Deserialization from and to an own file format for discrete density values which compresses a lot better than 3D textures
  • A triplanar texturing example material
  • Small bonus: A triplanar texturing SubRenderState for the RTSS


To learn about the component, the following flow is recommended:

PageDescription
How to use itA basic tutorial on how to quickly show a volume terrain or CSG scene.
The ChunkParameters used for loadingDetailed description of the loading parameters.
Detailed Source DescriptionThe density sources of the component
Indepth usage of featuresCode snippets and explanations for some not so obvious features. This can be seen as advanced tutorials after the introduction how to.
FutureThe development plan of the component for the interested reader


This documentation is only intended for the usage of the Volume Component, not the algorithms which make it work. If you want to get to know the theory behind it, you can read the articles on this page: http://volume-gfx.com/