NERDGASM ALERT: Detailed Rendering of CG just got infinately better. The polygon is dead

omg sometimes i love tech too much!!


crysis 3 i can't wait

probably won't be refined till then


so crysis 5 !! yaay

Originally posted by howmuch4another

Originally posted by SaturnFX
ok, this will be almost meaningless to some of you
some of you will drool over this endlessly..

First, the article
Source

A little more than a year ago, we wrote about an Australian hobbyist named Bruce Dell who was claiming--with video evidence to back it up--that he’d created a new graphics technology that could deliver unlimited power. That is, rather than working with a limited number of polygon shapes (restricted, of course, by computing power), a graphic environment could be built from an infinite number of 3-D virtual atoms, much like the physical world. It was a cool idea. Then Dell and his Unlimited Detail graphics system disappeared.
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Dell describes in perfect exhilarated-Aussie just how awesome this technology could make our video game worlds and other virtual environments. Unlimited Detail can now pack one million atoms into a single virtual cubic inch, allowing for unprecedented detail. And it could make such environments less virtual, allowing game designers to “scan” in objects from the real world and present them as they look naturally, making video game worlds a kind of hybrid reality with some parts real and some parts engineered by artists.

ok, basically:
They made little game atoms...the atoms assemble based on perspective, and you can zoom in pretty much infinately, this allows for the most realistic graphics short of...reality.
Every blade of grass will be a "physical" object...every grain of sand will be its own geometry sand particle...

You can scan in things and it will look exactly like what you scanned in with no poly count consideration...it runs on even a weak computer and makes all things smooth and breathtaking...not to mention the ability to use the new infinate geometry in practical environmental settings (dust storm is literal bits of sand picked up randomly from the scene, could even to proper destruction.

Once this is released, video (be it games or CG videos) will be pretty indistinguishable between reality and fiction.


And now watch the video...

Star/Flag. My son showed me this last night and blew me away. So if I understand you get to go atomic in detail without the accompanying data load?

Interesting comment in the video " keep in mind we're a technology company and not a gaming company". They are novice at CGI and look at that rendering. This should also be huge for 3D no?

They actually have a long way to go.... typical shaders are incompatible with this new renderer.... Hence why they are now building a better lighting model for their demo. The difference between regular rasterization rendering and raytrace rendering is just as large if not larger with this new technique....

We won't need tessellation anymore maybe no anti aliasing either -- it seems to handle aliasing pretty well... but we will still need normal maps and specular maps and effect shaders... All of which are currently still missing in action and they still only get 20fps.

Looooong way to go. It's going to work... it's going to be amazing... but think more like 2018 ish. This is the tech of the future not the now.

P.S.

He was totally right though... their artists DO suck... LOL! However, it's still a technological marvel.... They said he was crazy and nuts back in 2008.... Some feet have been put into mouths with this one.

This breakthrough is so significant that it is going to affect philosophy and science.
For those who remember the database debates, it is now correct to say
"It should be easier to do it right."

Euclidion is a perfect name for this company.

Apparently Euclid's Elements is still
taught in some countries.
If not America.


David Grouchy

As a 3d artist, this is fascinating; I thank you for the thread/link. However, the polygon is not "dead"; he mentioned in the video that the artist would still be using polygons in the creation/modeling process, but afterwards would be converted to work in the "atom" rendering engine. The big difference is that when modeling, you won't have boundaries on the polygon limit for neither the base mesh or even high-poly sculpt. I also feel this could be a big step for the advent of virtual reality/digital universes.

S&F for the post

Could some of us throw it around some gaming forums see what the reactions are like? Iv just posted the link on an up coming Sci Fi Fantasy MMORPG forum.

reply to post by SaturnFX


I am impressed!

And that says a lot...
I almost never get impressed.

Thank's for the post.

I'm not much of a gamer anymore, but I distinctly remember when polygons came in to my life in Super Mario 64. This new technology does seem rather incredible, especially in the hands of a company with a supermassive budget like Sony or Microsoft.

After seeing the rock 'imported' from real life, it got me thinking about importing the entirety of Google Earth...You could literally play Grand Theft Auto: Earth

Originally posted by Laokin

He was totally right though... their artists DO suck... LOL! However, it's still a technological marvel.... They said he was crazy and nuts back in 2008.... Some feet have been put into mouths with this one.

But that tree was cool eh? looked like some tropical jungle tree compared to the original

I’m a bit sceptical of this company’s claims, and it seems that I am not alone in thinking that this could be a scam. Minecraft creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, thinks that Euclideon are just looking for investors...

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited

Source

I think 2018 is a bit of a stretch, but 2012 is being overly hopeful...somewhere in between before the games industry starts adopting it I reckon.

I would think about 14...hard to judge, it really depends on the maps, lighting, and a proper physics engine being written (and streamline rendering cost overall to its most minimal)

mang, realtime cg not restricted to polygons and pixels but based on atoms, this is not only a breakthru for gaming and art but also science & medicine, just imagine the folk will be able to analyze the realtime simulation of matter, dark matter, etc., phew, yay, i'm dancing like houdini right now

Originally posted by sean_uk
I’m a bit sceptical of this company’s claims, and it seems that I am not alone in thinking that this could be a scam. Minecraft creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, thinks that Euclideon are just looking for investors...

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited

Source

Its a scam that you can't contact them to get part of...
Nobody will be investing until they see firsthand what is going on and its confirmed...I think minecraft boy is just jealous for some strange reason.

Just tell him to shut up and finish project zomboid already. heh

Originally posted by Hawking
I'm not much of a gamer anymore, but I distinctly remember when polygons came in to my life in Super Mario 64. This new technology does seem rather incredible, especially in the hands of a company with a supermassive budget like Sony or Microsoft.

After seeing the rock 'imported' from real life, it got me thinking about importing the entirety of Google Earth...You could literally play Grand Theft Auto: Earth

What an amazing idea..

Put on some 3d goggles and you could literally walk around earth...how long before google stops sending camera cars around and start sending scanner cars....ok, that would be a big job overall, but still...

While this is pretty impressive to me as a gamer with limited knowlege of how 3D rendering actually works, I feel I should point out that this isn't exactly new or revolutionary technology. There are a lot of drawbacks that limit its potential for game design.

I'll let my sources do the talking. It should be noted that the author of this blog is in fact a game designer, so he knows his stuff.

www.notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

So don't get your hopes up too high. This could be the future of gaming, or it could just be another expensive dead end. Only time will tell.

we'll start seeing real breakthroughs in graphics as soon as the industry can break away from microsoft's API grip.

reply to post by Glass


Ya, the biggest issue I see so far is the physics end of it and how to get the cloud to respond naturally and quickly...a entire different way of thinking is required on that. I have mentioned using nature to lead the coding towards this polyatomic structure will ultimately be the key (probably) and "binding" strength..if you use how we do things today on this, it will fail on ice.

The problem with the article is that its assuming it will be used with todays physics concepts (which works great for our current use)..but thats a bit like saying you invented the engine, so lets stick it in the horse to automate the horse to draw the carriage...

Dang I was too late to mention it would need a serious processing monster to produce real world physics. Which I noticed was not in the demo. Very cool I have to say but they still have a long way to go and to me it would take an huge amount of number crunching just to move a blade of grass in a simulated wind, or a rock tumble...but what do I know.

thats amazing!

maybe the world is just a big video game. anyways....if i had money to invest, i would dump it in their company. in a few years, this will be used everywhere, from games to special effects in movies.

One of those genius ideas that you cannot believe hasnt been though of much sooner.

From one of the comments that says it best:

This technology is not a voxel engine... that is why Notch is wrong. He is assuming that this technology is needing to calculate points for every point in the system for every frame... when in reality this engine searches and calculates for only points that can be seen and displayed on a monitor which is your resolution. The billions of points that are not being displayed are not using processing power.

There is however some astute observations...such as the processing power for (current) physics would be huge when you even say, walked down a dirt path...would you sink down into the dirt because your "mass" is greater than the dirt, having it move aside as you step...impact physics for a footstep alone would be incredible without a base.

So ya, an entire new physics engine will need to be written for it. and that may take a few years from start to finish before its functional.