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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

This seems extremely cool. I’m wondering if it can be used to create procedural video game assets.

From the homepage it sounds like they've prioritised geometry fidelity for CV research rather than performance:

> Infinigen is optimized for computer vision research, particularly 3D vision. Infinigen does not use bump/normal-maps, full-transparency, or other techniques which fake geometric detail. All fine details of geometry from Infinigen are real, ensuring accurate 3D ground truth.

So I suspect the assets wouldn't be particularly optimised for video games. Perhaps a good starting point though!

Well, we've come a long way. Look at nanite - it might actually be compatible...

Epic did say that you might in some situations forego normalmaps with Nanite and save disk space even though you have super detailed models so it DOES fit in this context.

Also, video games are used to take a high poly model and bake a normalmap corresponding to it on a lower poly model anyway so it might also be used that way. I think Doom 3 was the first game to show the technique?

With nanite normal maps are less required than otherwise because the detail is preserved in the mesh. You could make the argument that micro detail normal maps are still useful but those aren't always generated from the mesh. Especially if they are tiling.

I doubt they prioritized it. To get normal maps you usually first need a high resolution mesh, but then need other steps to get good decimation for lods and normal bake. That's mostly extra work, not alternative work that wasn't prioritized. If by transparency they mean faking aggregates, you also need full geo there before sampling and baking down into planes or some other impostor technique.

That's actually a fairly ideal fit for nanite meshes.

This looks rather extremely similar to something that Unreal already natively supports. Here is a demo video from them - https://youtube.com/watch?v=8tBNZhuWMac

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