>What is that beast known as a Voxel?
Classical 3D computer graphics render the surfaces of things, either
polygonally or with "blobbies" (spline-based modeling) to create the
appearance of the real.
Voxel based rendering actually does a "volumetric rendering" (hence the
name) of an object. This process is usually an order of magnitude (or more)
processor intensive than polygonal rendering, but then, you can do all sorts
of nice things like fluid dynamics and flames which are very difficult to do
through normal means.
There are several techniques for efficient voxel rendering. Check out
Lateiner DataSpace's home page at http://www.dataspace.com/ for some
interesting information about voxels.
Mark