Just wondering if anyone has insight on the best way to turn a constructed object in a volume to a bunch of individual voxels that will be affected by gravity and collision.

Should/Can I use polyvox to achieve this? Or would I be better off "Model Swapping" by reading the volume before hiding the polyvox voxels and using that data to just spawn a bunch of cube meshes with the correct texture information and position.


I am interested in making destructible objects, but still trying to think of ways to implement it.


Here is an example of what I am hoping to achieve.
Wollay's Cube World Combat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FRd3KmGi6s&feature=player_detailpage#t=68s

If I was making that game I would use a different system for the terrain vs the characters.

PolyVox is perfect for doing that type of terrain, and if I wanted to destroy part of the terrain I would remove the voxels through PolyVox, and then seperatly generate some cubes in their place. These would be normal meshes and would be controlled by the physics engine.

On the other hand, I would not use PolyVox for the characters. I would probably store my characters as a simple list of cubes. Normally these cubes would have a fixed (or animated) position, but when the character dies I would feed those position to the physics engine and let it take over.

Actually, better destruction is something I want to investigate for our next game. I haven't looked in detail yet but I expect to do something like the above.

Thanks David.

I have been thinking of using polyvox for everything todo with voxels in my game, but after reading your comment I see that I am over complicating things .

It does make more sense to use meshes for the player, and just have the information on the blocks stored so I can spawn a bunch of coloured cubes .

if the things explode quick its only a trick for the eyes and so it would be perfect if its real voxel (or animated nodes looking like voxel) that explode but for a trick possibly in some cases its enough if we use a particle system? instead of fire we can use a pic of a 3d voxel. heres for example the irrlicht tutorial for particle system
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/example008.html

Better still, if you have access to a geometry shader then you can use it to replace each particle with cube: http://www.flashbang.se/archives/315

If you don't have the geometry shader I imagine you can do something similar via instancing.