Atomontage: voxel 3D simulation technology for games
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Voxel graphics for games is mostly restricted to non-deforming bodies. Games like Comanche and Outcast made use of an optimized variant of voxel rendering for their terrains with great results in the 90s. But I have yet to see an animated face in realtime rendered using voxels or points. I would love to see that done, but this is a hard problem.
If you're doing it in a pure software implementation and with no tilted camera, you could optimize this heavily. You start at the bottom of the screen and for each vertical row of pixels you march along the heightmap in 2D and project the texels to the screen. You also remember the current hightest Y coordinate that you've drawn. If the new texel is projected higher than that, you draw another vertical line to that position with the texel color and remember that position. So you're filling up your screen from bottom to top in an extremely efficient way.
edit: found the video (I find myself skipping the teaser quite often these days). They show recordings, not animations. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it's not. An animated rig of some kind can be adjusted through parameters that are entered by an animator to create or alter the movement. This is also the basis for technology like animation blending and inverse kinematics which (in a nutshell) are some of the techniques that make movement in current games so plausible. If this is just a static stream of volumes that is played back like a flipbook, then no easy adjustments are possible.
All of the shading that I've seen in past Atomontage videos has been screen space ambient occlusion, which is a great effect but is no substitute for real lighting with dynamic shadows. I've also seen them use AO baked directly into the voxel models.
I just wish that they would actually release something instead of posting countless tech demo videos. If the technology is so great, why aren't they trying to put it in the hands of real game developers right now? The whole thing smells of vaporware...
8 years old.
The problem with voxels is always the memory requirements. Even with only one byte per voxel at 1cm resolution, you're talking 1GB of per 10m cube for a naive implementation. You can limit your model to just the visible surfaces of your world, but then you're basically just using fat triangles.
I check on them about twice a year and they are often experimenting with something new.
They have a VR entertainment center here in Australia you can visit called Holoverse.
They also released a web demo a while back which is no longer available, but here is a video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlR8AQuIQH4
It's interesting to see all the CPU cores at near 100% utilization and very little on the GPU.
https://github.com/millerhooks/draco/tree/unity_point_cloud_...
So the challenge is you don’t just need fast voxel rendering, you need fast 3D rasterization into an optimized data structure (like sparse voxel octrees).
I don’t think this will pay off until game engines do absolutely massive amounts of physics and lighting simulation. But I think it’s inevitable. You’re already seeing indirect lighting engines using low resolution sparse voxel representations of the world.
Just that this implementation in particular, and a similarly advertised one in the past both stink of marketing bullshit with no actual substance behind it.
What're the current methods for doing reasonable volumetric video capture? I had a set up of kinects a few years ago, but it was quite tedious to programmatically interact with in real-time.
This is why existing voxel games tend to look super blocky and pixelated.
That said - they seem to have solved that for non-organic forms at least (their video forms are very cool, but are basically frame by frame volumetic animation - a little different).
Lighting will be the big issue, though not always a problem in all games.
I'm assuming by this you mean each frame using a distinct voxel model.
I may be wrong, but I think what's being demoed at 0:47 in the video is animation by deformation of a static model. If true, this is something I've not seen in voxel graphics before.
Unfortunately, the article is very light on the details about what is technologically novel about what Atomontage is doing, versus previous endeavours.
That said if they can do just non-organic forms well and leave organics to polygons - that would be pretty incredible.