The novelty in this paper is generating photorealistic textures and scenes without using any assets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk
EDIT: To be clear, I was not being flippant, I was assuming that there is some nuance to how "assets" is used here that I'm not aware of since I'm not a 3D artist which would make this work novel compared to the work in the demoscene. Beyond being a general purpose asset generator, which is indeed very impressive but not what is being argued here.
What is being argued here? I don’t see where this turned into a competition.
It’s a paper presenting a system of new algorithms that can generate geometry, textures and lighting with extreme photorealism. It seems to do that very well. It’s not a study of the procedural 3D graphics evolution, pretending to be an entirely new technique or the first to do it.
Again, not a contest. The paper is exploring new techniques for generating content. Why all the negativity?
No new ground is broken here in rendering techniques, nor in procedural generation, nor in actual content. AI is generating actually photorealistic content today, AI-adjacent techniques such as NERFs as well as traditional but sophisticated rendering like UE5 are the leading edge of rendering. If you're going to make a strong claim, you should deliver something.
I honestly don’t know what you’re reacting to, what strong claims? “Infinite” is a given for procedural assets, and is highlighted in comparison to the existing partially asset-based generators (they go over existing software on page three), and the output certainly qualifies as photorealistic. There are no claims in the paper about being the first to do anything.
So if they don't view the demoscene as relevant previous work to their paper then I want to understand why they think their work falls under a different kind of procgen.
"Ours is entirely procedural" == ""Infinigen is entirely procedural"
"relying on no external assets" == "every asset, from shape to texture, is generated from scratch via randomized mathematical rules, using no external source"
If that doesn't make it make it clear, could you elaborate on the part that doesn't click and I'll try and explain further.
The sheer scale of what this does, how general it seems to be (instead of a single special-purpose animation like in the demoscene), as well as the fact that the output is structured and labeled assets I would consider novel, and very impressive.