Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011

[Silver Knight]

Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011

[deluxulous]

Shit just got real.






badumtish

[Ping-Pong]

Holyshit.

[Steven :D]

Australia, you have regained your glory.

[Bl★ck Star]

What the-.. O.o

[Knife_cz]

Wow.

[Chrono]

Holy shi-...

[Maxi96203]

Australia is now officially my favorite country.

[Cutch]

Now all Australia needs to do is stop banning violent video games.

[lolKieck]

Now all Australia needs to do is stop banning violent video games.

OR get their own type of PEGI rated for 18+.

[Poler]

W-O-W

:O

[Kassendraw]

Everyday I think technology advances it's almost scary how quickly technology advances these days. I have to say this is the most impressive thing to the date that I have seen in the year 2011 and is one of the things I am sure will end up becoming part of our everyday video game experience if the future. Wow...Just....Wow...

[Duranblackraven]

Taken from Notch's blog:

'Perhaps you've seen the videos about some groundbreaking "unlimited detail" rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That's cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let's assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it's not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don't need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It's possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it's not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It's a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they're carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they're pretending like what they're doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it's been done several times before.

There's the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: Atomontage Engine - Wheel Tracks

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: Voxelstein3D

And there's more: Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO) Raycasting a high detailed scene SVO raytracing - streaming CUDA Voxel Demo (Endless Buddha)

They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It's a scam. Don't get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.'

[Kassendraw]

Scam or not I find it to still be a very interesting concept. It's the intent that counts, of course it's bugged but, that's not the point. The point of all this is the simple fact that we are technologically progressing, sure, this one may not work. Then again, we have the concept, and, with that concept we can maybe in the future develop a functional one that is similar or used it as a base!


It's not about if it works or not, it's about if it will ever serve useful.

[mikeman003]

The fact is, eventually we will either move on from polygons or there will be such care in forming them that we won't notice unless we are specifically looking for them.  Voxels will never be that great, unless you are making game levels with extremely repetitive areas, which is no fun.  Also, you can't animate them without killing everything, and in this world where every new game destructible environment, voxels just don't make the cut.  It is fancy, and supposed to make them sound super special to get investors excited about technology that is going to probably end in failure.  I will wait until they have a real world environment that doesn't repeat everything 200 times.

[Kassendraw]

Well with how technology at such a pace these days I wouldn't be suprised if it does end up resulting that we move on from polygons and obtain computers that can actually handle this.