Wednesday, March 28, 2018

[ndcjjiev] Sphere world

Consider a virtual world built not out of cubes as in Minecraft but spheres arranged in a grid.  With an ambient-lighting-only lighting model, spheres are even simpler than cubes to render: just circles. However, one cannot render an entire flat face all at once as one can with a wall of cubes.

One can see through gaps between spheres, perhaps a nice feature for gameplay but a headache for computer graphics as testing occlusion becomes difficult.

Which grid of spheres? The one aligned with the centers of cubes is the most straightforward coming from Minecraft, but it is not a close packing.  The hexagonal close packing has infinitely deep holes in the gaps, but the face-centered cubic (fcc) packing does not (I think). Does fcc have lines through the packing which do not pass into the interior of any sphere?

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