United3dArtists Archive

Yes you read it right, UNLIMITED graphics. I recently saw this vid about unlimited graphics for games that could be applied to our rendering world as well, in fact it would probably mean we could render professional renders in real time.

I really suggest you check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Note that's it only the poly-limits that are unlimited, I'm not sure how they will do the lighting for all of this and I suppose that's why this technology is not on the market yet, because other technologies just are way to simple... Still, I'm really interested in seeing how this turns out.

this looks really exciting.

but: as far as i a know. There have been for years a technology called voxels. Which is almost or is the same thing. An object consisting of 3D pixels. Like 3D bitmap file. You could build very complex models using it even years ago. It can be also 3D accelerated by a graphics card. You surely know Cry engine and game FarCry (quite old one these days). This game used alot of voxel technology. The forest, jungle, much of it were created by voxels. The cry engine is a hybrid engine which uses voxels and polygons. So that was why you could see amazing detailed forest with high framerate. Very good thing indeed, i like it.

I think this is the same, but maybe enhanced. They found a way to optimise the display of the scene with contemporary hardware. Certainly you get the detail (dirt) displayed only when you get close to it, so the scene is not rendered whole or i cannot imagine rendering trilions of voxels. Anyway having a scene of trilion "atoms" must cost alot of data to load and work with. So maybe its not a big load for CPU and GPU, but such island has to be on some very fast hadrdrive array and has to load and deal with a big amount of data (use alot of RAM too). I dont believe its that perfect as show on the video.. It has to have some drawbacks and negative side which was of course not a part of the presentation.

I understand you concerns bitkar. Naturally I thought the same things, however I doubt they spent a whole year working like crazy on a technology that already existed. Their system might just be able to do all of these things, that's not their biggest problem, their biggest problem is probably making this technology work with everything else a game needs like a physics engine and animation for example.

I think they were working on optimisations, some converter from/to polygons, software for scaning, ... This can make year. But its only what i think from the video.

The video mentions point clouds which are different beasts from voxels (from what I understand). It looks cool, however there has been other nice ideas over the years that have disappeared due to a lack of support from hardware vendors etc. The whole raytracing white elephant at intel comes to mind.

Anyway, good to see these guys back - if for no other reason that he reminds me of that British guy on the daily show.

I heard someone mention use of point clouds on a "making of" show about a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

Point clouds are a renderman staple. Perhaps that's why they were talking about them in Pirates.