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

I would be hesitant to get too excited about these guys and their "breakthrough" technology. If they really think they have something special, they need to take a look at what's being done with DirectX 11 and tessellation. That's the technology they're competing with, and it can already solve a lot of the problems they claim to be unsolvable with polygons.

Part of the issue with this technology is that although it can create ultra-detailed 3d scenes, they have yet to prove that it can be used with moving objects. Note that their island is completely static. Their plants don't blow in the wind, and they don't have any characters walking around. Hyper-realistic grass is useless if it doesn't flatten underfoot, and grains of sand and dirt don't mean much if they can't blow in the wind or get pushed into the shape of a footprint or tire track. I'm not saying that this technology is incapable of these things, I'm just saying that they haven't proven that it is.

Finally, there is something inherently flawed about a technology company working on a new graphics technology for games, but then admitting they don't really have anyone in the games industry working with them on it. This is how a lot of really good ideas end up failing. It's like making someone the perfect pizza when all they really wanted was some ravioli. Whether or not their technology works for games depends entirely upon how it's received by game companies and how well it integrates with other programs and technologies used by those companies.

The technology looks promising, but I don't see that much progress from the videos they released a year ago. There are definitely some things it could be very useful for, but it's still not available, and in the meantime parallel technology is being created that will give these guys a run for their money. I hope for their sake they're successful, but until they release an SDK and game companies start picking it up, I have my doubts.

Outstanding Find. This is awesome. Now we truly are going to become God's of our own Universes.

The video says that you can create the model using maya and other standard 3d programs. But all of those programs use polys. I dont get it.

Originally posted by free_form'
Things like Tesselation, pixel shading, etc., it's basically the equivalent of putting make-up on an ugly girl. I think it's time for us to ditch polygon rendering. We're really reaching the technological limits that the whole pixel schema allows for.

If you had some proper artists working with voxel rendering, the results would be far better than current techniques.

The problem is (like many different industries these days), nobody is going to support this. There is already big dollars behind the current, expensive methods of rendering. Nobody is going to buy into voxel rendering, because it would mean profit losses for so many different industries - for example, graphics processing hardware would become nearly worthless, and that's obviously a huge profit loss for companies like say, Nvidia.

Shame.

edit on 2-8-2011 by free_form because: stuff

edit on 2-8-2011 by free_form because: (no reason given)

Replace it with what? Computers simply can't support voxels in a way that will provide even a fraction of the detail polygons currently do at their current level. We have not reached the limit of polygons, not even close, we've just reached the limit with the current hardware (and even saying that is a big stretch). All further subdividing the object from 100,000 polygons into hundreds of millions of voxels will do is drastically increase the overhead and computations required. If the current number of polygons are maxing out hardware, how is that same hardware supposed to magically process 1000s of times that data to render the voxel based world instead of the polygon one?

I also find it ironic how you we've reached the limits of the 'pixel' schema and that we should use voxels, considering voxels are simply pixels that have a position in 3D space. Not to mention everything, whether polygons or voxels still have to be rendered to 2D pixels to display on your screen.

Your logic is flawed in regards to supporting the new technology, because rather than a huge loss for Nvidia and other companies, this would be a massive gain. It would force everyone to buy new generations of even more expensive cards, because their old ones would be instantly obsolete. The problem here is not a big conspiracy to keep the technology out of your hands, but rather it's just not practical on a consumer level with current hardware.

This thread reminds me of the old sprites are better than polygon debate because its not practical for consumers to render such objects. Back in the day we could put up more sprites than polygons, just saying.

Originally posted by BIGPoJo
reply to post by Akasirus

 

I think most people can grasp the physical limitations of rendering a crap ton of voxels. What if the developers found a way to only track and render the voxels that you are looking at? Also, at a great distance away you would need less voxels, just scale them up or down based on your distance. Maybe they found a shortcut to reduce the hardware requirements. Maybe they only track a limited number of voxels and predict the rest based on previously rendered voxels?

I personally have no experience in 3d rendering and voxels are new to me.

That's the thing though, there aren't any shortcuts when calculating the visible faces or voxels of an object. Everything the camera can see has to be calculated and rendered. Even if you ignore all the data points that wouldn't be immediately visible, this would still increase the number of faces drastically. The level of detail is directly proportionate to how many points on the objects surface you use to calculate the position and lighting. What you are basically asking is if they've found a way to do the math faster, which is very improbable. Using fewer and fewer points, to where it's equivalent in overhead to the same scene rendered as polygons would provide no noticeable benefits.

And yes, when an object is further away you would not need to compute each point. With polygon rendering this is known as tesselation.

If they only track some voxels, and predict the rest, logistically that's exactly the same as polygon rendering, where it calculates the vertices to render the faces. So then what is the benefit to this new rendering method, if it just uses a subset of voxels and treats them as vertices?

The other problem with voxels is that once you introduce physics into the system, you can't just calculate any voxels that you can see. You don't have to render them, but every voxel every other voxel is touching would play a part in how that objects behaves when it's interacted with.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not ruling it out as impossible, something like that would be entirely possible, and potentially incredibly detailed. All I'm disputing is that they've found a way to render 1000s of times the detail using less resources. Polygon rendering has gotten incredibly efficient, and the reason it's used is because it is a fast approximation a 3D object. Voxel, atoms, or other volumetric 3D objects with smaller building blocks would almost by definition be more demanding on hardware. Voxel rendering would require amazing processing powers to look semi decent, it isn't until levels well beyond our current consumer tech that it would begin to surpass polygon rendering. There are many shortcuts you could take, sure, but each of those shortcuts is going to lower the detail further.

I don't know if it was posted here, but it's an interesting tweet from John Carmack:
preview.tinyurl.com...

Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging.

Read here about who Carmack is: en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by SaturnFX


No way that this can work in the way they claim it. NO WAY. I have been developing games, developing other graphics systems for some years now. The described technology is definitely not possible and I am 100% sure this is a hoax. The average joe is just not able to realize it.
The described technology based on "atoms" is in fact VOXEL based rendering / volumetric rendering and no new invention at all. However you should be aware of the fact that the data involved in voxel based rendering is MASSIVE as you have to store position, color, normal vector etc. PER VOXEL (=point in space). Polygon based rendering has the benefit that you can actually REDUCE the number of points in space and attributes involved in the rendering process. Therefore we use it today.
So if they claim they have increased the level of detail by a factor of 100.000 compared to current graphics and if you take into account that voxel based rendering generally requires MORE data than classic polygon based rendering then you should easily understand why the claims made here are definitely impossible to be true. The amount of data required could easily be multiplied by a factor of 100.000.000 this way. Do you have a zettabyte sized harddrive?
The amount of data required to render voxel based scenes with the detail they describe would mean incredible(!) amounts of data to be stored and processed even for a little island like the one they mention. The more data is involved the more memory the graphics hardware with need. The more data it has to process. You will need excessive more bandwidth and storage capacity everywhere. Their claim that something like this can run on a avarage PC is ridiculous.
You can easily see that today voxel based rendering cannot be a better approach to conventional polygon based graphics for most applications. In fact the issues that voxel based rendering has make it impossible from being used in these days games. And the issues - enourmous amount of data and processing effort - will NEVER go away no matter what you come up with!! Let's talk again in 20 years...

Whenever someone used the world "unlimited" he / she can't be serious.
Game over - this is a fraud.

reply to post by T3hEn1337ened


uh, Directx can barely keep up with a properly set up OpenGL API, so what makes you think it has any chance of competing with unlimited atoms??

reply to post by mrMasterJoe

The described technology is definitely not possible and I am 100% sure this is a hoax. The average joe is just not able to realize it.

LOL irony at it's finest, dude this is very much possible

Unlimited Detail eschews the usual polygon shape construction for a point-cloud construction for his virtual environments. But an infinite number of 3-D atoms would require an infinite amount of computing power to render. Even a small number of detailed point-cloud objects would require tons of computational wherewithal.

In other words at its base this technology RIGHT NOW is possible, and if development is kept up we could perhaps see unlimited 3D rendering one day (maybe soon?)

Moores law is a law for a reason you know?

Just wanted to note I wasn't referring to 3-D though that could one day be possible aswell

Originally posted by BIGPoJo
This thread reminds me of the old sprites are better than polygon debate because its not practical for consumers to render such objects. Back in the day we could put up more sprites than polygons, just saying.

2D->3D is not in anyway the same as Polygons->Voxels. The former was adding new dimension, with a different coordinate system. Polygons and voxels are just different ways of subdividing a 3D object. The same vectors and math in a 3D world apply to both polygons and voxels.

Think of it this way: Polygons are building blocks used to subdivide a 3D object to allow it to be rendered with finite resources. Voxels are also building blocks used to subdivide a 3D object to allow it to be rendered with finite resources. Polygons are already so small, they are pushing the limit of most hardware. Voxels are many, many times smaller than most polygons. Do you see the problem here? So how are we supposed to have thousands of times more building blocks calculated, using less resources?

reply to post by Nobama


Have you read and understood my arguments telling WHY this is impossible? You stopped there, right after the first paragraph, eh?

Originally posted by SaturnFX

Originally posted by john_bmth
reply to post by SaturnFX

 

Physics is physics. I'm not sure what you're getting at with "today's physics"... The laws of physics stent going to change any time soon (God forbid), nor are the technological challenge of emulating said physics.

Game physics...they are currently aimed at using giant blocks and are event driven...sort of the difference between our day to day physics and quantum physics in reality...very different concepts overall.

Anyhow, that is needing a tune up...if your dealing with just a single plane, you don't need to worry about sand compression under a foot, or a bullet hitting the ground and having specific particles of sand shoot off, etc...for now its just you shoot, and a bit of smoke may come along with some dot markers showing where the bullet landed

Unless the rules of physics change and someone fancies rewriting calculus, "today's physics" is not going to change. You misunderstand how physics is modelled and implemented in computer games.

reply to post by SaturnFX


It IS voxel tech. It's nothing new. The use cases in the video are chosen very carefully as to not show the obvious limitations of the technology.

reply to post by SaturnFX


Awesome! That is the best news I've seen on ATS in a long long time. Good find OP!

Interesting technology, I wonder why they have no demo of moving/animated objects though?
even simple things like leaves blowing on trees or clouds floating in the sky will probably crash
there program at this point because of the massive processing power needed.

reply to post by SaturnFX


"Chirping and rehashing the minecraft dude" is right, as minecraft dude is right. There's a lot of people with no credentials "chirping in" on this very thread.

Originally posted by ChaoticOrder
reply to post by Pumper

 

as of now they can only offer unlimited geometry. By the time they sort out all the other major issues like no animation and no physics

It's a modelling engine, not a physics engine, so it isn't a "major issue" or problem. A lot of games have different physics actually. It will be up to game developers to make physics engines, which may take a few years, but who cares, the graphics boost is well worth it. Why are you so attached to "good old polygons"?

edit on 3-8-2011 by ChaoticOrder because: (no reason given)

The models have to integrate with the physics engine so yes, it is a major issue.

Very cool thread Saturn FX thanks

What happens when we we are unable to tell the difference...and they can beam it straight into your head instead of going by optical nerve (TV) ?

u guyz ar killin me. I work in the gaming/media arts industry. This tech has been around for a while. When i was in school some of my buddys were workin with this.. its really good. and is prob the future. but... it will be quite a while till its implemented in the industry. good find.