System, method and computer-readable medium for organizing and rendering 3D voxel models in a tree structure

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium including computer-executable instructions which, when loaded to a memory coupled to a display and a processor, execute an algorithm comprising:

• (A) loading to the memory a set of 3D voxel data arranged in a N3-tree data structure, the N3-tree data structure including:
• a top node representing a cube and including 64 occupancy bits and 32 index bits, an occupied or empty state of each of 64 subcubes in the cube being indicated by 1 occupancy bit of the 64 occupancy bits, and the 32 index bits value representing a first pointer to a memory location of middle nodes,
• the middle nodes representing M occupied subcubes, respectively, each including 64 occupancy bits and 32 index bits, an occupied or empty state of each of 64 voxels in the occupied subcube being indicated by 1 occupancy bit of the 64 occupancy bits, and the 32 index bits value representing a second pointer to a memory location of either another layer of the middle nodes or the final layer of the leaf nodes in the occupied subcube, wherein M is a positive integer, and
• the leaf nodes respectively representing N occupied voxels in the occupied subcube, each leaf node including a voxel specific index number generated from the parent middle node, to be combined with a pointer to the start of the memory location of at least one type of attribute value of the occupied voxel arranged in an attribute array, wherein N is a positive integer;
• where
• the index to any current middle node or leaf voxel node can be calculated from the parent node's index value pointing to the start of child nodes plus a population count of the parent occupancy bits denoting how far to offset from the start of child nodes to reach the current middle node or leaf node;
• and
• (B) rendering the set of 3D voxel data on the display.