Graphic Whoregasm

[MetalCraze]

I don't know shit about this, so I can't really say whether it's believable or not, but it looks pretty... insane, and undoable.

What he is talking about are still voxels in a nutshell except with some kind of cloud computing or some bullshit thrown in.

Voxels themselves are still pretty believable as a future tech though. When they were used first we didn't have the needed computer power to process detailed voxel objects. The low-performance complaint was the most common when it comes to NovaLogic games of that era.
3D Mark 2001 SE btw has a p. good CPU benchmark including voxels where surfaces of the horse (or what was there) look incredibly smooth.

 

[J1M]

I don't understand why this is interesting... and I have a background in graphics programming.

 

[ever]

For those of you who are like me and love tech but know nothing of coding but still like to follow a good discussion go here:

http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=904&start=250

"One observation I made, is that it seems that they use lots and lots of replications of the same things everywhere. Which is also what gives everything its odd appearance to me. I wonder if that is some kind of limitation of their system or its just a byproduct of poor art. Its certainly hard to tell, but if I were them, I'd get my artists to make Z-brush or 3D-coat models and use those. It would look a whole lot better in the end I bet. Other than that, I'm very curious to hear more, uhm, details about their unlimited detail engine. The information they give is, like usual, very sparse."

John Olick is not impressed

 

[poocolator]

hurr durr
I don't give a fuck whether something has polygons if that something is ENTER-FUCKING-TAINING.
hurr durr herp derp
$$$$$$$$$$444444444444

 

[Destroid]

It's also good to see people at least trying for paradigm shifting technology...

Procedural graphics (such as seen in some more modern demoscene videos) is another cool technology that has not really seen commercial use, although some people have made small indy games that use it I believe.

 

[Armacalypse]

Man those 640x480 pictures and videos sure look convincing.

 

[Mangoose]

From what I understand (very little background), typical voxel rendering processes calculations for all terrain, objects, what have you in range. In this video, only visible voxels are processed. Anything not on the screen, behind some object, the other back side of an object, is not calculated.

 

[Destroid]

Not exactly new technology, polygon rendering has been doing that for a long time.

Isn't voxels where you create the shapes out of 3d pixels? That is rather different from what this video is showing.

 

[dbx]

From what i understand from the youtube video and their website "the new thing" is not voxel rendering. What they do is to use database technology and dedicated search algorithms to speed up the rendering process. It's not really "new", i know some people that are trying to do that with ray-tracing. The difference in this case is that they are using point-cloud rendering.
Point cloud rendering is a bit different than voxel rendering( one of the old 3d mark has a scene with a brute-force point cloud renderer ), from what i remember both start with point cloud data, but real 3d voxel rendering is done by rendering cubes, sphere or better, metaball or metacubes. Pure point cloud renderign instead is much faster and usually done by rendering 2-dimensional "points" ( i rememeber an old videogames which used something similar, rendering the world using 2d discs, but it did use very sparse point clouds )

From the videos on their website, the tech has it's drawbacks. Shadows suffer from some ugly rendering defects ( shadow details appear and disappear for no resons ). There are also errors on the boundaries of the viewport and when rendering very close objects ( something similar to the vertex popping defect of old terrain rendering engines ).
Another problem of point cloud rendering is that when you zoom on something you lose details and things looks blocky: polygons are at least continuous mesh, point clouds however are discrete mesh and filling the gaps is a pain in the ass, the easiest way is to render bigger points hence the blocky rendering.

 

[MetalCraze]

From what I understand (very little background), typical voxel rendering processes calculations for all terrain, objects, what have you in range. In this video, only visible voxels are processed. Anything not on the screen, behind some object, the other back side of an object, is not calculated.

In older apps yes. Simply because when voxels were used there were no videocards as we know them at all let alone features like *-buffers, clipping etc. Not mentioning that nobody even tried to do a proper 3d acceleration of voxels, although NovaLogic somehow managed to do that in Delta Force Land Warrior. If you remember it has real and very smooth voxel terrain yet somehow it is accelerated.

From what i understand from the youtube video and their website "the new thing" is not voxel rendering.

Pixel in 3D space is still a 3D pixel - volumetric pixel - voxel. It isn't like everyone who used voxels used the same rendering method
Blade Runner even had certain amount of lighting calculations going for its voxels - something nobody did before.

 

[SCO]

http://www.javagaming.org/index.php?topic=22102.0

Slightly more informative thread.
Resuming :
No animations or indeed anything dynamic.

 

[Nostradumbass]

If carmack, a programmer of all sorts of genius, is still trying to make voxels work I strongly doubt the guys that are gonna beat them to the post are some very condescending british persons.

but the guy said this isnt exactly voxels either

 

[Zed]

It looks like colored rice.

 

[Black Bart Charley]

100000 TIME BETTA! EPIC MUSIC!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUuUvDSXk4

I love skyway's insights on "rendering methods"

Oh and J1M, how about some software voxels in XNA? Octrees, destructible environments and all that.

Here is an actual paper bout dem voxel engines. They load the whole scene into gpu mem though.
http://research.nvidia.com/sites/defaul ... _paper.pdf

 

[sgc_meltdown]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

In the future, graphics will be divided into two categories: Fiction and Non-fiction

 

[fizzelopeguss]

wtf is that voice.

 

[felipepepe]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

In the future, graphics will be divided into two categories: Fiction and Non-fiction

And Nintendo next next next next console will laser scan you to be in the game. Now YOU is The Power!

 

[dextermorgan]

I think hiring Prosper to do their artwork was a major mistake.

 

[MetalCraze]

Real world physics and hardware limitation defying technologies seem to be the next big thing since OnLive started the trend.
(Of course OnLive barely offers the graphics quality of 8 years old PC but sponsors poured a lot of money into that hoax so it was a success after all)

But yeah they need to hire better artists next time they pre-render a video in Maya.

Funny thing how they use mostly 7 years old console graphics or carefully found low-res objects in games to prove their point.

 

[ksjav]

So they say they "use a search algorithm like google". Assuming they preprocess an inverted index of some sort for all the points possible in the scene and "find" the ones to draw. Considering that building such an index takes quite a bit of processing power that that is done on high performance computing clusters and apparently one has to build an index for quite a few states/frames, not sure how this would be handled as it also has to be kept in somekind of a database, it's no wonder there is nill animation in that choppy abomination. Enjoy using 16 GB of ram and 678 GB of your hard drive without a video card.
There are no "magic" technologies, there will always be some sort of tradeoff.

P.S: It looks like a badly aged scortum.

 

[Ulminati]

I'm pretty sure Comanche Maximum Overkill used voxels back in... 92? 93?

in before "but Comanche graphics sux!"

Comanche had them, Delta Force had them, Outcast had them, Blood and ShadowWarrior used them, Quake 3 was originally meant to be entirely in voxels. I'm sure some newer games have made use of them skyway mentioned some russian RTS or something...

Westwood had a short love affair with Voxels too. Models were made of Voxels in Blade Runner and Tiberian Sun. that's essentially backwards of how everyone else used Voxels for static objects only. (Commanche had voxel terrain and sprite units, Delta Force and Outcast had voxel terrain and polygon models. Bladerunner and Tiberian Sun had Voxel models and FMV and bitmap backgrounds respectively).

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I loved graphics in Tiberian Sun.

 

[Catbert]

From what I gather, these are the reasons this thing works so fast:

1. Procedural generation of geometry.
2. The scene is completely static, no animations or anything to change the underlying data structures of the geometry at runtime.
3. I also remember reading about the time the algorithm takes to run is proportional only to the number of pixels to be rendered (meaning viewport resolution), but I'm not sure about this.

Which basically means this is useless for games (no animations/changes to the scene) and perhaps might be why nobody is actually implementing this method. Scammers gonna scam.

 

[MapMan]

Dont believe what you see on youtube. There are reasons why voxel technology isnt widely used yet and its not because artists are used to polygonal modelling...