youtube.com
Apparently there are drawbacks to this rendering approach, although this company has claimed to have solved them. I'd be interested to hear from anybody here what experience they have with this type of rendering.
The most visible ways that nvidia and ati are tackling the LOD problem is on-GPU tessellation. This means using a mathematically smooth surface (such as beziers or nurbs), and approximating it with polygons at the appropriate level for each frame. This means that if your lettuce is far away, it gets few polys (or culled). If it's 20% of your screen, it gets lots more. You can avoid popping artifacts because it's the same surface, just approximated differently, and it's not too tricky to get approximations that blend smoothly into each other.
If you need more detail that doesn't need to be animated, toss on a displacement map at relatively low memory cost.
True volumetric modeling works best for things that have lots of branching and void spaces, like dandelions.
Displaced surfaces work for lots of interesting things. See Mudbox and ZBrush galleries:
Mudbox http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...
Either they're hoaxing clowns or they have no idea how to communicate in a way that appears legit!
"The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software."
Set off my bullshit detector immediately. I hope this is real, but I'd love to see maybe.. some sort of OpenGL extension, or demo app. I can understand wanting to be secretive, but he's got nothing to show at the moment but a lot of talk.
That said, at first I didn't like the narrator, but I actually don't mind him in a Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw sort of way.
This seems really fishy to me. First of all, the detail simply cannot be 'unlimited'. The point cloud data is necessarily limited by memory. And unless the search algorithm is O(c), there must be a limit to how much point cloud data can be searched in a 60th or a 30th of a second (pick whatever frame rate you like).
It also seems like animation would complicate things greatly.
Although I don't quite believe the hype, it is a fucking impressive piece of software and should be praised as such.
Hoping one day that GOG (http://www.gog.com) has it.
Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texturemapped polygons.
From what I see it was not a true point voxel system, but rather a ray tracing algorithm that was only used for the ground. Animated objects were still rendered using polygons.
Keep all your sprite models separate from the main. For each sprite rotate the camera so you're viewing it from the same relative position you would be in the game, render it and put it to the right spot on the screen. As you do this for every object, you should be able to skip pixels you've already drawn. Once all the objects are up, draw the background and again skip all the pixels you've already done.
So again, if this works it should be able to do animations in a single pass, with just a little per-sprite overhead. (and they could well have overcome that too.)
Every model created for this is, for all intent and purpose, a piece of rock.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HScYuRhgEJw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2009/CNLE09/
As someone mentioned, this makes me think animation or changing stuff in real time would be difficult (since the indexing part of it is slow) but I don't have much background in this area.
I wonder if physics calculations play into this.
The problem is that point clouds can't be easily animated, and forget about applying physics to them, which makes them fairly useless for realtime gaming.
It would be interesting to see if anyone can create a hybrid of point-cloud scene + polygon animation... should be enough for most shooters. (Outcast apparently had something like that, but that was pre-"nice graphics")
Although I'm pretty sure point sprites and voxels are two different things.
The reason why we use polys is for eliminating the math of all those points to make physics, shadows, texturing possible. I can see voxels/point clouds will be something in the future and voxels will probably be it, but this is silly to present static low quality work to show off a new technology for graphics.
I wonder if it is not a joking jab at tessellation and voxel directions as DX11 and OpenGL 4 now have tessellation and voxel discussion by Carmack. It will happen but these things are slow moving.