Unlimited Detail

Technology and Gaming
#81

Well then…

…we shall see. Someone wake the thread in a years time k? :stuck_out_tongue:

#82

But, but then you might miss Black Mesa:|
On second thought, that sounds like the best thing right now. BMS 2011 release! Fingers crossed. :smiley:

#83

One year later: New Video
Black Mesa still not released

#84

lol Siggs goin to eat his words

Shit’s pretty damn cool and that commentator comes off as a very cool prick.

#85

His voice is pretty annoying.

#86

I like the fact that you are being annoyed by him. He’s a cool kid tho.

#87

THANK GOD!!!

I have been looking for this thing for ages and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of it!

Thanks to whoever revived this thing!

#88

holy shit, I can’t wait to see their next demonstrations.

#89

Wow, they really made every game I thought to look photorealistic look like absolute shit, I can’t wait to see games using this technology.

#90

^ same here, that is really cool. I hope this gets implemented soon.

#91

But… How the hell do you model?

#92

1024×2520 299 KB

#93

This visual doesn’t illustrate the fundamental difference between data management and rendering. As far as I can tell (admittedly not much, since I’ve just looked at the videos), their real-time show of “unlimited detail” uses polygonal rendering with a point cloud representation of data. Minecraft uses voxel-like data representation with polygonal rendering (actually Minecraft is full-on polygonal but I’ll let that one slide).

So basically, the whole illustration is completely misleading :slight_smile:

Anyway re. Unlimited Detail, I’d be interested to know how their algorithms manage to deal so smoothly with LOD, that’s damn impressive for sure. Lighting is currently terrible but that might not be too complicated to add a competent lighting engine.
Animations are another matter though, requiring to maintain a regular database of bounding boxes and a translation to the point cloud tree/matrix which will get pretty expensive CPU-wise.

#94

A techdemo would be nice, Just to fly a camera through the island? it would certainly be useful for the skeptics and peoples queries.

#95
  • Boxy
    I believe boxyness wouldn’t be an issue. Imagine a tool like Zbrush that instead of exporting a simplified model with a normal map, it exports the point data. Sculpting details in Zbrush is pretty easy.
  • Storage
    This is true. Storage sounds like a huge problem. Especially storing the cloud in RAM. But I’m hopeful. Maybe they’ve found a way so it doesn’t take too much space. Wish the guy in the video had talked more about this.
  • Anti-alias
    I believe Antialias is posible. If you render a depth map along, I’m sure you can antialias in post.
  • Animation
    This one does sound like an issue. You could create a bone system for animations, but calculating how all the points in a model move along with the bones does sound expensive to calculate.

These guys have made some big mistakes int heir tech demo. First, they should have gotten themselves an artist to make a proper scene to show off. Then they should have talked about memory and animations further (and other stuff like collision detection). I don’t know how this guy plans to compete with showing purple sausage trees and cryptic sayings like “Unliiiimited Detail”. I also believe polygons aren’t going to go away, at least not for many, many years.

That being said, I do see some real potential here. If memory management is good, and animations aren’t a hog, some truly cool stuff could be made with this technology. If collisions are an issue, an invisible polygonal model could be used to check collisions with the environment. If animations are a problem, animated things could be polygonal.

But if this point cloud is as fast as these guys tell us, at the very least static environments could be made with them. The level of detail in that trippy scene really was amazing.

#96

Their art direction has improved a fair bit

Err, did you even listen to the guy? You can model in any normal program and then export as point cloud using their plugin. Apparently

My question is if you have unlimited detail…surely alot of this ‘grains of dirt’ nonsense will be the biggest waste of time for modellers around the world. There’s modelling good objects, then there’s modelling pointless objects

#97

I think the modellers will love it to see their high poly models in game instead of their normal map low poly models.
Also you can create dirt and repetitive models with algorithms so you don’t have to model every single sand corn.

#98

Well, when he said about modeling each grain of dirt (and getting close enough to them to look like large rocks), I think they could use a combination of polygonal and “point cloud” modeling. For example, a polygonal ground and where characters run, kicking up actual dust particles and small pebbles behind them that interact physically with the environment (such as wind forces or falling down hills or stairs or something).

I don’t see modeling static objects in this fashion to be honest. When playing a FPS, how detailed do you need the wooden railing of stairs? I don’t feel the need to be worried about splinters or anything. Unless one is going the destructible-environment route…

And that complaint about the cactus not having spines in the back (“looks like a large tentacle”) isn’t really an issue because, well, why model something the player is never going to see without cheats (passing through a wall with noclip on, etc)?

And I’m a bit curious about animation as well. Sure, they showed “unlimited detail” in static objects but what about animation? Characters modeled in this fashion? Liquid effects (water, blood, etc)? Fog effects? Physics modeling such as spent casings or ragdoll-style physics for creature animations?

#99

I love when people make outrageous claims like this. I love it more when they can actually deliver what they say.

#100

Hi this is my first post here.

Personally i think this still has to go a long way before it is actually useable. My college had a ray tracing program to render one scene and it took 3 PS3 cell processors to render 1280x1024 at 30fps.

One more advanced engine i’m looking at that actually has more potential than this is the atomontage engine. I think this is much more impressive than the unlimited detail because what good is an enviroment these days if you can’t blow holes in it :smiley:

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