From: Zachary Vance <za3k@za3k.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:35:32 +0000 (-0500)
Subject: Hack-a-voxel
X-Git-Url: https://git.za3k.com/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=295a0e77db2550bcbe44d6046798848c1a7fe600;p=blog.git

Hack-a-voxel
---

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+---
+author: admin
+categories:
+- Technical
+date: 2025-11-03
+tags:
+- programming
+- voxel
+slug: hack-voxel
+title: "Hack-A-Day, Day 03: Voxel Rendering"
+---
+
+[Hack-a-Day](https://za3k.com/hackaday) is my self-imposed challenge to do one project a day, for all of November.
+
+How do you render 3D graphics? Here's a picture of a cube:
+
+![caption: a 3D cube](voxel-paper-3d.jpg)
+
+But when you draw it on paper or a screen, it's flattened. All you see are these three faces. 
+
+![caption: a 2D cube](voxel-paper-2d.jpg)
+
+In fact, if you turn off your brain, it's just three weird polygons. And we can figure out the corners of the polygon. For example, I figured out these with a ruler, measuring they they are on the paper in centimeters.
+
+![caption: some polygons](voxel-paper-2dlabels.jpg)
+
+So to draw a cube, we just need to draw polygons. That's the essence of today's project.
+
+---
+
+Here's a minecraft world.
+
+![caption: my minecraft base](voxel-mc.png)
+
+Here's the same thing in my voxel engine. If you squint, you might be able to recognize they're the same thing. Ignore the stripe at the top.
+
+![caption: my "minecraft" base](voxel-mc-render.png)
+
+Here's a much simpler scene. If you click, you can [explore it online](https://za3k.github.io/hackvoxel/)
+
+[![caption: some 3d stuff](voxel-simple.png)](https://za3k.github.io/hackvoxel/)
+
+The source code is [on github](https://github.com/za3k/hackvoxel).
+
+---
+
+This hack wasn't perfect. There's some significant problems, and I worked on it 3 different days. Oh well, live and learn! I had fun.
+
+Thanks to Claude for the code to extract minecraft data -- that was not the exciting part of this project.