Voxels... Honestly, I need to know where to begin

Question

Okay, i understand that voxels are just basically a volumetric version of a pixel.

After that, I have no idea what to even look for.

Googling doesn't show any tutorials, I can't find a book on it anywhere, I can't find anything even having to do with the basic idea of what a voxel really is.

I know much of the C++ library, and have the basics of OpenGL down.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

EDIT: I guess I'm just confused on how to implement them? Sorry for being a pain, it's just that I can't really find anything that I can easily correlate to... I think I was imagining a voxel being relevant to a vector in which you can actually store data.

a voxel can be represented as ANY 3D shape? For example, say I wanted the shape to be a cylinder. Is this possible, or do they have to link like cubes?

Answer 1

Minecraft is a good example of using voxels. In Minecraft each voxel is a cube.

To see a C++ example you can look at the Minecraft clone Minetest-c55. This is open source so you can read all of the source code to see how its done.

Being cubes is not a requirement of voxels. They could be pyramids or any other shape that can fit together.