Detailed Rendering of CG may be fake!

Hello ats I found this last night and thought somone with a background wizdom in game design etc could shed some light on this article.

notch.tumblr.com...

It’s a scam! Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: www.youtube.com... Well, it is 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. In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine. 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. There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: www.youtube.com... Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: www.youtube.com... And there’s more: www.youtube.com... www.youtube.com... www.youtube.com... They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited. Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen. posted 19 hours ago

I do not know enough about this stuff to be able to find out if this article is true. So if any one can prove this wrong or right let me know. thanks.
I do have a great deal of respect for Saturn FX. His threads are among the best on ATS. He may not have seen this yet.

I mean absolutly no disrespect to Saturn FX who I look up to a great deal. I posted this last night in his thread and nobody read it. I'm on a quest for the truth any truth will do as long as it is indeed the truth.

I invite any one to prove or disprove this article.thank you.

Well I can see why Notch would say it's fake, his game is based on nothing but pixels ..I'm still on the fence with this one, but I really am hoping that this "limitless rendering ability" is true

Originally posted by Nobama
Well I can see why Notch would say it's fake, his game is based on nothing but pixels

..I'm still on the fence with this one, but I really am hoping that this "limitless rendering ability" is true

I do want to believe its true. If it is true thats awesome. but if it is not well bummer.

reply to post by enament


Also just wanted point out he was wrong about a bit of his reasoning already....so perhaps this is legit?

Animated voxels: * Holy crap, people sent me videos of this actually being done! * I was wrong!

* www.youtube.com... * (But please note that just that single animated character runs at 36 fps)

source

Originally posted by enament
I mean absolutly no disrespect to Saturn FX who I look up to a great deal. I posted this last night in his thread and nobody read it. I'm on a quest for the truth any truth will do as long as it is indeed the truth.

Ye i read it multiple times but first responed on it today. Havent seen this post berfore now.

As they said in the "original thread" that they have been working for a year and will know go back to get done with it. So I think it is a little early to tell weather it is fake or not. But I will tell you in a years time

I didnt really think for one second that this technology would or could be used to replace current technology, but I figured it was well suited for various other applications.

It is really cool to see the thread last night show so much detail, bu I also noticed what could be construed as a slightly disingenuous quality about the presentation from euclidean. There are just too many variables that the technology has thus far failed to address. I'm not downplaying it, it is still very cool, but for gaming I think it may be the wrong application. It would be well suited in other areas I think, like 3D mapping, medicine, and other things of that nature.

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

Article makes the flawed assumption that the island is a cube. It's mostly flat, so the cube calculation is wrong.

1*1*.001, would be more accurate than 1*1*.008.

On top of that, the 64 atoms per cubic millimeter, could easily be brought down to a more managable number. Unless he said it in the video. It could also variate to only be high in areas where quality is needed.

Also, the insides of objects could be made hollow, like with polygons, except with a noticable deep of atoms around the outside. Vastly minimizing size too.

~
That's just off the top of my head. While I'm not saying it's a scam or not, the article assumed the worst about the specifics, and that doesn't given an good perspective to decide off.

reply to post by enament


I pointed this out yesterday to saturnFX, on the 2nd page of his thread, using the same article source from Notch:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

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 have noticed that the people who really get excited over this kind of stuff are he ones who really don't know what all goes into producing a video game.
It's similar to people who over simplify the method for creating a flash website because they use one of those free do it yourself sites.

People seem to not realize all the code that has to go into developing a game and every aspect of its being. Even then the glitches are too numerous to mention.
I personally think game design is doing ok for what you get.
I think voxel Tech is cool and all but I get the impression it is a little late to the party. By the time they actually figure it out well enough to produce any thing of substance and value a new engine will be designed using a far better technology.

Looking at some of the videos presented in the OP from Atamontage, I will admit I get a little squeaky at the idea of playing in a place like that. Especially a first person shooter, that would be awesome. But holy God the physics,,,,,,,,the physics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

People believe what they want true or not . Hell some people still blindly believe Columbus discovered Americana even though the Vikings beat him to it.

It's not fake or a scam but remember the video is basically a marketing video. It only focuses on the advantages - whereas in reality the approach also has disadvantages too. It's a promising technology but don't believe the salesman because you're setting yourself up for disappointment - some people in the other thread even thought that this negated the need for a powerful computer. The opposite is probably true! It by no means kills the polygon, and is not revolutionary as voxel engines have been around for over a decade now.

The last line of Notch's blog entry was spot on:
"Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen."

It's just an alternate to using polygons with its own advantages and disadvantages. It would be nice to see a polygen & voxel engine that combines the advantages of both though!

reply to post by sean_uk


Well Sean uk you beat me to it. You should have authored this thread. I'm not being sarcastic at all you really should of.

I definitely see this technology being used to lower production cost in game design, but it is IMO a long time coming before we see the end of the polygon. 3D surroundings and environments would be amazing with this, but the method for applying the physics for things like destruction value would always return to the old school ways of coding.

There is just too much data to process other wise. In that case it isn't the graphics that need to be revolutionized it is the programming itself. How information is processed will go a long way in producing a more realistic tactile environment. I believe physics will almost always be the major hang up in game design. Some have come "close" but no cigar!

thats another example of similar technology - more focused on physics than detail but as you see it is possible


www.atomontage.com...

reply to post by snowen20


This. The cheerleaders of this tech are laymen who have next to no understanding of the field of computer graphics. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's the truth. Like someone above said, it's not so much a scam, rather the marketing hype is leaving out the glaring dude effects of this technique. You do not get something for nothing. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Originally posted by enament
reply to post by sean_uk

 

Well Sean uk you beat me to it. You should have authored this thread. I'm not being sarcastic at all you really should of.

I should have, but I'm glad that you made this thread. I tried to bring it to people's attention that this was probably a scam, and I provided good evidence... and it was almost completely ignored. You have brought it to people's attention by making this thread, and you deserve all the credit for doing that!

Thank you!

Here's an update from Mr Notch:

notch.tumblr.com...

* Voxels store only the information about each point, and their positions are implicit in the location of where the voxel is stored. Point cloud data stores both the information about each point and the position of each point. * They mention “64 atoms per cubic millimeter”, which is 4*4*4 points per mm^2. While it’s possible they only refer to the sampling frequency for turning polygonal structures into point data, the numbers are just too round for me to ignore as a programmer. * All repeated structures in the world are all facing the same direction. To me, that means they aren’t able to easily rotate them arbitrarily.

Why it’s a scam: * They pretend like they’re doing something new and unique, but in reality a lot of people are researching this. There are a lot of known draw-backs to doing this. * They refuse to address the known flaws. They don’t show non-repeated architecture, they don’t show animation, they don’t show rotated geometry, and they don’t show dynamic lighting. * They invent new terminology and use superlatives and plenty of unverifiable claims. * They say it’s a “search algorithm”. That’s just semantics to confuse the issue. Sparse voxel octrees is a search algorithm to do very fast ray casting in a voxel space. * They seem to be doing some very impressive voxel rendering stuff, which could absolutely be used to make very interesting games, but it’s not as great as they claim it is. The only reason I can see for them misrepresenting it this bad is that I assume they’re looking for funding and/or to get bought up. If these guys were being honest with the drawbacks and weaknesses of their system, I’d be their biggest fan. As it is now, it’s almost like they’re trying NOT to be trustworthy.

reply to post by sean_uk


Notice the attention this thread got people would rather be in denial about something than knowing the facts if the news is bad.