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Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

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Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#11

Post by mjhall »

tobiasu wrote: post #2

Hmm, what's so amazing about it? It's a voxel graphic engine, of course it's going to have great detail and no polygons (duh). That's not new. Commanche had this in 1992... I'm not at all an expert in this area, can someone who is explain what the downsides of voxel graphics are? There must be some serious problems with it, because the technology is well known. Is there something new that makes this particular engine…

I think the major downside is the world is immutable. For the search algorithm to run in short enough times to render in real time the point cloud needs to be organised very carefully.

Part of the point cloud needs to move for animation, which involves re-indexing at least part of the world. Doing this once per frame is probably far too expensive (at least currently), which is why animation doesn't feature in their videos.

That doesn't mean this technology should be dismissed; most world data in 3D scene graphs is static, so it does have applications. I don't see it overtaking rasterised graphics entirely, but I think there is value in it.

I'm not an expert either, so take my comment with a healthy bucket of salt.

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#12

Post by gizmo »

tobiasu wrote: post #2

Hmm, what's so amazing about it? It's a voxel graphic engine, of course it's going to have great detail and no polygons (duh). That's not new. Commanche had this in 1992... I'm not at all an expert in this area, can someone who is explain what the downsides of voxel graphics are? There must be some serious problems with it, because the technology is well known. Is there something new that makes this particular engine…

The big downside is that you have no idea ahead of time what parts end up on screen and which parts don't. With a voxel engine you create a giant tree that allows you to do a quick logarithmic lookup to a voxel for every pixel on the screen (more or less). Suppose you're standing on a hill and look down on the valley below. If the terrain and world below is created by artists and contains many unique objects then you end up with a voxel tree that's terabytes large. You can't keep it in memory, so performance will be awful. The only way (afaik) to keep the memory usage in check is to force reuse everywhere. So you then create ultra high resolution models of 100 different bricks and mortar. The artist then composes those "lego pieces" into different buildings. That would work, but then everything is going to look very repetitive again (which brings us back to square one).

Then of course there are the problems with lighting, animation and so on.

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#15

Post by babebridou »

What I don't like with "Unlimited Details" is that Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. We know it's a work in progress. We (the internet) are excited about it because it's an experiment that's on scale with what we could expect from that branch of 3D graphics technology. Trillions of atoms, whatever. Show us what's still in progress because the internet is skeptical about this, this and this.

Hacking reflexion by duplicating the scene is a good way to start, because no one can say whether it's a good or a bad solution to a non-trivial problem - it gets the job done for now - but can you have multiple coexisting versions of the world? like a vertical mirror, a horizontal body of water and an underwater section?

To Dell: just stop handwaving the questions already, we get it that you ignored the state of the art and built your own thing, just tell us what it can't do yet, show us your current progress and you'll be met with much less skepticism, and even help, even if you keep your trade secrets, at least show us your specs! You won't be struck down by lightning if you talk - no one ever died from reinventing/copying the wheel and making it so good that the wheel can fly.

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#17

Post by roel_v »

wladimir wrote: post #10
timknauf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see how animations might be difficult, depending on what sort of data structure one uses to store the voxel data. But why would you not be able to see the same object from different angles?

I think he means that you cannot rotate an object and keep it aligned to the voxel grid at the same time. It would be a lossy operation, and require interpolation, just like rotating an image on a 2D grid.

But if the resolution of your grid is smaller than the size of the voxel, that wouldn't matter much - and you could keep rounding errors in check by anchoring larger units of voxels at a certain location in space. I can see the drawbacks of the voxel cloud approach (requires much memory, what algorithm is fast enough to do voxel culling on such a massive amount of data, what about animation) but the 'can't do rotation' doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument (unless I'm misunderstanding the actual argument, which is very well possible...)

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#18

Post by ajuc »

roel_v wrote: post #17
wladimir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means that you cannot rotate an object and keep it aligned to the voxel grid at the same time. It would be a lossy operation, and require interpolation, just like rotating an image on a 2D grid.

But if the resolution of your grid is smaller than the size of the voxel, that wouldn't matter much - and you could keep rounding errors in check by anchoring larger units of voxels at a certain location in space. I can see the drawbacks of the voxel cloud approach (requires much memory, what algorithm is fast enough to do voxel culling on such a massive amount of data, what about animation) but the 'can't do rotatio…

Rotatin (in general - transforming) voxels in real time is difficult compared to polygons, because with polygons you only transform vertices, and in voxels you have to transform every voxel.

EDIT: If you are spekaing about preprocessing data - yes - you can rotate as much as you want, the only problem will be that object instanced 1000 times with different orientation/scale will take 1000 times more memory than object instanced 1000 times with the same orientation/scale. With polygons there is no difference.

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#19

Post by Causification »

The way the author posted the picture (used in a much earlier Euclideon article talking about how badly polygon engines render complex organic shapes) of a polygon tree and a PHOTOGRAPH of a real tree and passed it off as the Unlimited Detail Engine makes me question his bias.

The way he used "Kuda" when talking about CUDA makes me question his technical competency.

Until there's a demo I can download and run on my PC it's a load of baseless claims as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

#20

Post by Causification »

Cyph0n wrote: post #13

Interesting article. Judging by Dell's (the CEO) calm attitude towards "haters", I personally believe that he truly has something revolutionary to offer. Only time will tell though.

How so? His claims that "We could call notch out and prove that he's a total incompetent in a bunch of areas but we want to be nice to him" manages to deeply insult notch without actually making any technical claims that could be disproven by a third party. It's a total weasel move.
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