Help large multidimensional arrays

[phibermon]

I took an educated guess that our friend isn't ready for such complexity yet and tried to give him/her a window to the next level of understanding. You've got to walk before you can run

You know I develop 3D engines / ray-tracers and all manner of 3D related code? as well as having two degrees - one in quantitative mathematics and another in computer graphics and visualization? Please understand that I'm not trying to 'show off' but I must make it clear that I know perfectly well what is suitable for 3D.

If I'm not describing KD/Oct trees or managing entities on the GPU using transform feedback then I'm probably not doing so for a good reason

Your structure assumes too much at this stage and assumes that this volumetric representation is what the user requires and isn't in fact a misunderstanding. It is a more optimal approach in terms of memory use should you be looking to maintain a 'volumetric cloud' of data but is far from the correct approach should this be the case.

Let's get some more details first I think it's safe to assume it's a misunderstanding at this stage given the lack of objection to Mirage's suggestion of storing data per organism and my attempt to give an example of that in a way that doesn't exceed the current knowledge of the user, you may of scared them away with your fancy structures


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And rendering back to front vs front to back? in a simple software renderer without a z-buffer then you do indeed want to render back to front as you suggest but throw in a depth buffer as exists on all 3D hardware ever then you actually want to render front to back so that fragments that are obscured by foreground objects can be checked against the z-buffer and not be renderered at all (and indeed any modern attempt at writing a 3D software engine would include a z-buffer)

The *only* exceptions to this rule are when rendering transparent fragments and even then modern techniques such as depth peeling and stochastic transparency can't be said to be rendering from back to front, depth peeling rendering in both directions at the same time and stochastic requiring no specific rendering order.