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Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

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Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#91

Post by hasenj »

hristov wrote: post #5
saulrh wrote: post #2

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.

Also if they actually make a scene with different things in it. Having millions of objects in your scene is not that hard if they are all copies of the same object. The old demonstration showed a bunch of repeated copies of a single object. This one showed a lot of copies as well, although not as obvious.

Would you say the same thing about polygon models? That is: if you have a scene with a million[0] copy of the same polygon-based elephant model, would it run as smoothly as this demo?

[0] not to be taken literally

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#92

Post by badmonkey0001 »

tintin wrote: post #88
coffeemug wrote: post #76

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheape…

And there are no moving objects in this demo. Voxel animations are much harder than poly animations. Then there is memory. The elephant is looking great, no doubt about that. But I think you will need a lot of space for it. On a PC this might work, but I'm not sure it can be used on consoles.

That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs.

They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using low-poly collision models (with the same pitfalls such as moonwalking, blocked projectiles or mystery-bouncing).

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#93

Post by roel_v »

jerf wrote: post #32
palish wrote: post #19

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.

Near the end they claim to have added more detailed shadows to their engine just after making this demo. I'm not sure if they meant 'dynamic shadows' by that.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#94

Post by Maxious »

vrode wrote: post #64

I'm sorry, but as much as I respect people both on Reddit and Hacker News, I wonder where does all the enthusiasm come from, when: * demos show nothing new from a technological perspective * the presenter sounds like a door-to-door salesperson * as it seems to me, the only purpose of the demo is to raise a hype and somehow (I still don't understand) they succeeded Euclideon got financed by Australian government. I re…

The startup grant program was this one: http://www.commercialisationaustralia.gov.au/WhatWeOffer/Ear...

Terms in that program are you have to match the government funding 1:1 so they must have (or raise within 2 years) $2mil to put against the government's. They also have to pay it back "on success" (5% of revenue once that reaches 100k total) and are monitored closely for "fast failure" (they are expected to succeed and repay within 2 years, they have to repay even if they fail after 5 years). Euclideon claims to have had a 2010 funding round so maybe that's how they got into this program. It also says this program is not to be used to "Prove to the applicant that a certain technological problem can be overcome (R&D projects)" so they must have shown it as a viable product that just needs to be packaged up for sale.

What strikes me most is anything under a Commonwealth funding agreement has to have the words "Funded by Australian Government through the XYZ Program. An Australian Government Initiative" in all their promotional material. Yet the shining star of Commercialisation Australia's portfolio forgot. Ouch.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#95

Post by cgart »

coffeemug wrote: post #76

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheape…

This video is not that fresh. I have seen it already last year and the way how this guys speaks has not changed since then (speaks like a salesmen) ;)

Their technique is based on point cloud rendering. My supervisor has proposed already in 2004 how this can be done on a standard PC. Look at his PhD-Thesis [1].

This technique is usable for static objects as well as for dynamic objects; however, using it for dynamic scenes additional acceleration structures are required (besides of the Octrees) in order to dynamically change according to the deformation of the object. To clarify on several comments made here:

- this is a rasterization technique

- they used acceleration data-structures like Octrees, kd-trees, BVH, ... (which exactly they don't tell)

- the graphic "aesthetics" depends actually only on the artists and not on the technology itself, so not a good point

[1] M. Wand: Point-Based Multi-Resolution Rendering. PhD Thesis, Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science, Graphical-Interactive Systems (WSI/GRIS), University of Tübingen, 2004.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#96

Post by tintin »

badmonkey0001 wrote: post #92
tintin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are no moving objects in this demo. Voxel animations are much harder than poly animations. Then there is memory. The elephant is looking great, no doubt about that. But I think you will need a lot of space for it. On a PC this might work, but I'm not sure it can be used on consoles.

That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs. They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using…

Yeah I think so. A tree-lookup can make things easier, but then you have to estimate the bounce direction.

But overall it's a great demo. And you see more and more games using voxels for surroundings. So ofcourse you could combine this technique with polys.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#97

Post by Tomek_ »

prawn wrote: post #12

John Carmack's repsonse: "Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging." https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...

I remember reading years ago that id was considering using vortex graphics for Quake2 and Carmack had even started to work on it, but they abandoned the idea seeing that industry is heading into "more polygons!" thing (the context: it was a time when 3dfx released Voodoo2, nVidia was starting to gain popularity (Riva TNT2) and first Unreal was on a horizon).

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#98

Post by badmonkey0001 »

tintin wrote: post #96
badmonkey0001 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs. They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using…

Yeah I think so. A tree-lookup can make things easier, but then you have to estimate the bounce direction. But overall it's a great demo. And you see more and more games using voxels for surroundings. So ofcourse you could combine this technique with polys.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that of the three pure voxel problems (rendering, animation and collision), rendering is probably the low-hanging fruit - Though I'm not sure if creating a hybrid poly/voxel engine is any harder or easier.

Here's to at least getting a hyper-real Myst someday :)

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#99

Post by sycren »

nosignal wrote: post #60
saulrh wrote: post #2

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.

Even if it's absolutely impossible to animate this technology I don't think it would be "useless". I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have the static elements (buildings, tree trunks, ground, debris, etc etc) of a level rendered using this tech, and polygons used for everything else. It used to be this way in the bad old days (Doom etc) - Polygons for level structure and sprites for animation. This would at l…

Would this not be perfect for films where you are rendering per frame?

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#100

Post by SimHacker »

WoundedMarlin wrote: post #7

If this takes off the whole graphics industry is going to get so much better. I am talking from movies to games to everything else you can think of. I mean think if FIFA started to use this in there games, you could make it so you see a shoe lace move or individual hair strains moving. I hope they get this out to market sooner rather then later.

And seeing the details of a shoelace makes a game of soccer how much more fun?

Fuck this shit. Back to Minecraft.

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