31–40 of 144 posts
20 FPS in software is pretty impressive, I wonder (if this is real and if it takes off) how long it will take to see hardware voxel acceleration.
I'll say the same thing now as I said last time these guys released a video: I'll believe it when I see them make a single blade of grass move, or when they place a single dynamic light source and cast a single dynamic shadow. Until then, this technology is awesome, but more or less useless.
Dynamic shadows work in exactly the same way as they do for standard triangle rasterization. Each light has a shadow map (which can be thought of as "the depth of the scene, from the point of view of the light"). During the final rasterization pass, the shadow map is sampled. If the sampled depth is less than or equal to the current fragment's depth, then the fragment is in light; otherwise it's in shadow. So, nothin…
So... where were they in the video?
There's a difference between "some voxel engines can have dynamic lighting" and "dynamic lighting works with this particular engine".
It's not like this is some obscure or useless feature that nobody has ever heard of. In fact for all the "detail" one can't help but notice the number of other things missing from the video.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dynamic shadows work in exactly the same way as they do for standard triangle rasterization. Each light has a shadow map (which can be thought of as "the depth of the scene, from the point of view of the light"). During the final rasterization pass, the shadow map is sampled. If the sampled depth is less than or equal to the current fragment's depth, then the fragment is in light; otherwise it's in shadow. So, nothin…
"tl;dr: Dynamic shadows work fine." So... where were they in the video? There's a difference between "some voxel engines can have dynamic lighting" and "dynamic lighting works with this particular engine". It's not like this is some obscure or useless feature that nobody has ever heard of. In fact for all the "detail" one can't help but notice the number of other things missing from the video.
I meant to imply that Euclideon are lazy and haven't implemented dynamic shadows yet.
There's no fundamental reason why dynamic shadows wouldn't work in voxel engines. But whether you believe me or not is of course up to you.
Every time this comes up I like to point people to the Atomontage Engine[1], which takes (what I think is) a more pragmatic approach, combining voxel and polygon graphics. Voxels are used where appropriate (eg. landscape, destructible buildings) and polygons can be used for dynamic objects. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE
But it's a much higher quality demo than Euclideon IMO, from a technical standpoint.
So much work left to do.
Polygon engines work nice with physics and animation. I'm trying to figure out how they could have a dynamic world based on particles.
I'm in Brisbane. Mmm I'm nearly tempted to apply for a job there.
I thought it was interesting that they predicted some sort forthcoming schism between 'real' scene objects and 'artificial' ones. At first I thought he was talking about the characters and scenes of residing on one side of the uncanny valley or the other, which I think is a valid thought. But he wasn't talking about that at all and posited instead that objects will either be scanned in from the real world and placed…