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Comment by ramshanker | Hacker News Reader

I am all in for any development in this domain. Just to spread some sense of scale, We recently processed (manually) the point cloud scan of one of the (<1% of whole complex) working Oil Refinery. The total volume of point cloud was 450GByte. Our previous project of slightly larger scope was 2.1TByte.

So the scale shown in this paper feels like toys! Not undermining the effort at all. We need to start somewhere anyway.

For the same reason, I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

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Real life castles were designed to withstand a siege, video game castles are designed to give off a castle vibe. Once you've achieved that you stop adding stuff, as anything beyond that just creates problems - you start killing performance, visibility starts to suffer, it's not clear what's interactive and what is decoration, gameplay starts to take a hit as the AI and player start getting stuck in the clutter, etc, etc...

Most people don't care as they don't have deep knowledge of how a castle or a power plant really functions, you only notice oversimplifications in media in the field you work in.

It's also very likely the designers and artists didn't have time to do much research, and the whole thing is based off a Pinterest reference board.

A personal pet-peeve of mine is "movies that feature an airplane flying away and turning left off into the sunset..."

ThEy NeVeR AniMaTe The FlAps!!

It's like you'd have an animated motorcycle scene and they don't turn the handlebars or make the bike lean when going around a corner. Like, the graphics are _soooo_ good but then they make the danged plane turn and immersion breaks (for me).

Let me just plug this criminally underwatched video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBHPSmsrEC0

I have never seen flight discussed in such detail, especially by someone who is an artist, rather than a pilot or an engineer.

In the same vein, any time someone plays an instrument that they don't really play, and their hands aren't moving to match the music. Or when the sound for a vehicle doesn't match the actual vehicle type - there was a CGI short film with a motorbike that was clearly a Yamaha MT-01 with its massive V-twin, and it sounded like a 600cc 4-pot rather than a tractor.

> For the same reason, I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

Because they are games, not oil refinery simulators. They are typically intending to only convey a general sense of “industrial environment” and nothing more.

Do your models of oil refineries include the correct grass and other plant species growing in cracks in the pavement?

> they are games, not oil refinery simulators.

That's an excellent point. I do feel compelled to mention the exception of oil refinery simulator games. Maxis (of SimCity, The Sims fame) made SimRefinery way back when.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimRefinery

Yes, if a game is in fact a refinery simulator I would expect it to have an accurate representations of oil refineries. But whatever the latest Call of Duty game is? It’s going to be a grey block environment designed for gameplay that then gets covered in industrial props and textures and called a refinery.

Could you go into some details here?

- sensors used

- postprocessing

- registration algorithm(s)

Are all things that would interest me greatly :)

I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

Really? You don't know why video games don't have 80 billion points and you don't know why a tool made to simplify meshes into video game objects isn't using your 80 billion point lidar scan?

For starters, these are meshes and you're talking about points. If anyone is meshing those points and they have any sense, they are working with "toy" sized chunks too so they avoid doing nearest neighbor calculations on terabytes of data.

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