> When computers get fast enough and have enough memory, you could have voxels at higher resolutions
I thought they were fast enough and with enough memory for this, at least with static scenes in the style of this portfolio. Do you know of any art created this way?
So that's what you were getting at. I've never seen anything like what you describe. I suppose it would be a very tall order to pay the same attention to every detail in a high resolution voxel-image as in a high resolution pixel-image.
I think the most practical way out would be procedural generation, but then it's arguably not manual art anymore.
I guess it could be practical with the right kind of environment. If you had all the tools of a good pixler like Deluxe Paint extended to a voxel-painting program.
I think the question of how you are rendering your voxels is a technicality. Redering voxels does not to my mind imply a specific rendering technique any more than rendering vector graphics does.
When I render a low resolution voxel image using vector descriptions of the cubes containing those voxels and then passing them through a rasterizer, is it still a voxel image? Certainly, because the image is natively described as a mapping from coordinates to present/not-present flags (and optionally color).
I can confidently say that the native description of the objects seen in that video is a direct mapping from 3d-coordinates to values. [Edit: So you can't just simply directly calculate an intersection point with a polygon. If you wanna cast a ray, you have to sample the mapping all along the way the ray is taking, in discrete steps, until you get a "hit". Optionally, you can then use e.g. bisection to get a more precise position of the intersection.]
For you edification, here's another video of a high-res voxel world. The voxel models used where converted from vectorized surface models. But the description of the models used by the renderer is a proper voxel description, maybe some octree-like thing, or whatever they came up with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Ets6bWjEQ
I thought they were fast enough and with enough memory for this, at least with static scenes in the style of this portfolio. Do you know of any art created this way?