Successor to Polygons?

[ChrisGlass]

Voxels really aren't the future. They're WAYY too processor heavy plus they fucking SUCK for animations. Polygon's strengths are in the fact it can bend as needed to reflect clothing, skin, water, waves, etc. You want to see what voxels are? Look up 3D Dot Game Heroes. A pretty cool game coming out soon, but think about it would handle animations on a large scale. It won't look natural.

This system is a bunch of single individual points. So it's fine for static geometry, but nothing else. (And anyways, polygon models are CONNECTED INDIVIDUAL POINTS)
It's the difference between Lego bricks for modeling versus K'Nex with meshes over the gaps for animating.

All the other ideas behind it are methods that 3D games already use, like culling off-screen/obscured objects and mipmapping. (Storing smaller versions of objects/textures to use when you don't need the detail)

The real future is just more shader code and terrain deformation.