What is Voxel?
A voxel is a value on a regular three-dimensional grid. It's the 3D equivalent of a pixel.
A pixel is a square on a 2D grid. A voxel ("volume pixel") is a cube on a 3D grid. Where a mesh describes only the outer surface, voxels describe the whole volume, inside and out.
Where voxels show up
- Games: Minecraft-style worlds and destructible terrain.
- Voxel art: a deliberate blocky style made in tools like MagicaVoxel.
- Medical imaging: CT and MRI scans are stacks of voxels.
- Mesh repair: voxel remeshing rebuilds a broken model as a guaranteed watertight surface, which is useful before 3D printing.
- AI 3D generation: some research models generate shapes on a voxel or other 3D grid before extracting a mesh.
The resolution trade-off
Double a voxel grid's resolution and you multiply the number of cells by eight. That's why voxel shapes look blocky unless the grid is very fine, and why large voxel data is usually stored sparsely or compressed.
Written with AI assistance and reviewed by the Renderlyst team. Corrections welcome at alishbakhalid766@gmail.com.