Bye-bye polygons - the next step in CG

mav northwind

Take a look at this impressive video: Unlimited detail realtime rendering[^] It definitely blew off my socks...

Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...

Sander Rossel

Wow, that is unlimited coolness! :D Can't wait to play video games that use that technique. Maybe The Witcher 3? :D

It's an OO world.

NormDroid

Holy Smoke, takes CG to a whole new level.

www.software-kinetics.co.uk Wear a hard hat it's under construction

David1987

I see no arbitrary rotation or animation though, I would have expected them to include those if the system was capable of it. If it really can't do that, it would still be cool, but essentially useless for games.

Lost User

This is not as revolutionary and new as they would like us to believe. Practically they simply generate the meshes on the fly in more or less detail depending on the viewing distance. Such techniques have always been used, especially in landscape rendering. However, this has been done really well and looks much better than earlier approaches and no doubt required very clever programming. Much more interesting would be to see what the price for all this is. Even a modern GPU can only do so much every second. I suspect that weaker GPUs don't have any chance to render this and that this load of work for every frame imposes limitations on other rendering techniques.

"Dark the dark side is. Very dark..." - Yoda ---
"Shut up, Yoda, and just make yourself another toast." - Obi Wan Kenobi

Rage

I do not find this impressive at all, it all looks like as if the number of polygons were multiplied by 1000, that's all. It still does not look any real. As long as they will focus on improving details instead of improving lighting and of implementing the general randomness of things around us, which it is that gives this impression of reality, the "reality" feeling won't be any better.

Rage

What has Christian to do with all of this ?

Maximilien

I'm not certain how simple surfaces will be rendered, the idea of using polygons is that for a lot of surfaces, the graphic engine (hardware/aoftware) will fill in the "blanks" and do a lot of work by itself without additional model information. For example, if I have a plane (and there are a lot of planes in the real-world), I only need 4 points (and a few additional data, color, normal, ...) to render the plane whatever the size; not if I need to have a plane rendered with a point-cloud, then I will need to have points (atoms as they call it) fill in the whole surface and each atom will need to make the surface "solid" ?? IMO, Dense Point clouds are a bitch to animate. Dense Point clouds with color information (RGB, normal vector, ...) are a memory hog. I would assume that doing (close to) real-time lighting will be very difficult if not impossible. LOD (level of detail) already exists for both polygon and point cloud models and scenes it is used not because (at least not always) we don't need that information in real life application; even our mind and eyes does that when we "eliminate" the details of far-away objects. One thing that bothered me from the video, is that they could at least have something more "artistic" to show us, not much, maybe a 5, 10 seconds of a good simulation instead of elephants with wahsed-out colors. If that works, maybe the technology can be used in combination with other more traditional rendering technologies. But hey, why not ... I'm always open to new technologies.

Watched code never compiles.

Mike Hankey

One small step for man one giant leap for the gaming industry?

The problem with borrowing money from China is 30 mins. later you feel broke again.

Daniel Grunwald

I'm not sure that they generate meshes. They could also be using surface splatting to "directly" render the point cloud (of course with LOD - e.g. something like Sequential Point Trees[^]) And as the detail level increases, ray-tracing becomes more competetive, so that might also be an option. By the time games using this technologies are actually published, everyone will have a programmable graphics card (CUDA, OpenCL, ..), so there's no need for them to stick with good old triangles.

modified on Thursday, August 4, 2011 8:17 AM