Detailed Rendering of CG has adjusted, infinitely. The technology of polygon is dead

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Razer0

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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.
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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...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=player_embedded
 
There was already another thread yesterday about this snake oil salesman pretending that Voxels are something new and revolutionary.
 
Saw a link to this on facebook, was very impressed with the technology demo of this so far.

:)
 
makes little sense to me?

so you wont need AA with this because there ARENT jagged edges anymore or what?

Imagine the GFX card manufacturers wont like that
 
HTC_guy said:
makes little sense to me?

so you wont need AA with this because there ARENT jagged edges anymore or what?

Imagine the GFX card manufacturers wont like that
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The only way you can eliminate jagged edges is by either increasing the screen resolution/dots per inch to something where the you can't see the actual pixels anymore or by using AA to fool the eye. A new rendering tech wont fix that problem unless it has something similar to AA.
 
FarligOpptreden said:
This looks very impressive. Their website is pretty dead though...
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Let me put it this way.

You won't see a construction business have all these grand designs. Illustrations ex. While an architect will showcase all the eye candy and exotic designs and stuff.

They only construct the product that will be used by the designers. Only once the designers has it to play around with can we see what really can be made with this technology
 
Have a look at this : http://notch.tumblr.com/

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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

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.
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