This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.
So, just to be clear, the only thing that worries me is whether or not the terrain shown at the beginning and end of this video is actually voxel based or something else.
Now, I agree that the terrain shown in the middle absolutely is Voxel-based. However, I'm not convinced the two are the same. I'm also a little confused why the higher mesh detail isn't centered around the camera for that part of the video, but I imagine it would be almost as hard to program a fake mesh enhancement that convincing as a real one, so...
@Wesbruce your example is poor, because it is very obviously voxel based. Note the texture is almost the same flat tone for everything. It's not displayed as cubes, but the data is obviously stored as cubes.
What keeps tripping me up is those small indents on the ground and the lack of obvious tiling which you should see unless they are messing with the textures. Also, why the tower at 10 seconds is floating on the right.
However, after staring at the terrain I can kinda sorta see tiling textures that are maybe randomly rotated or cropped (off of a larger single texture), perhaps based on a seed derived from it's coordinates? Perhaps small variations in height are actually non-existent and are really just baked on as part of the texture?
Yeah, now I'm starting to see it. I guess I didn't understand that dual contouring was basically averaging terrain meshes over local space. I thought it was storing shapes as meta data. That explains a lot of why the spherical tool doesn't seem to "work" as intended, or behaves rather unpredictably.
I have a very hard time believing that those voxels are 100 cm though. They look much more like 25 cm. Anyway, that doesn't matter either way.
Thanks @Wesbruce for the pdf. While I probably didn't read it closely enough to fully understand it, it did help.