Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

rockpapershotgun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#11

Post by Raphael »

mullr wrote: post #9
noonespecial wrote: post #4

It sounds a little to me like the old "once the polys get small enough, everythings a particle system" approach. Sure you save lots of GPU by essentially doing away with surfaces and textures (by making everything a floating colored dot) but you then have to contend with massive storage, manipulation, and filtering problems. They might be at the stage where they say "we'll just make everything a point! this'll be cak…

Indeed. Through many mentions of the word "unlimited", never once was the word "storage" mentioned, or "cache" or "memory". How about the design toolchain? The only solution I can think of is to store all the assets as ... polygons. Unless there is toolchain support for a CSG/procedural approach.

I could conceive a fractal analog of the spray paint tool.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#13

Post by dirtbox »

From a modelers point of view, this type of technology would be perfect, essentially rendering redundant most of the current workflow, from battling with poly counts to playing tricks with displacement maps and baked occlusion. The model swapping he mentioned is pretty outdated, most engines use dynamic LOD which automatically reduces a models polycount depending on your view distance, also removing parts of a model that are under a certain size.

I'm not sold yet, it's making some incredibly bold claims. I'm aware of point cloud data models from back when it was included in the 3D Mark '01 benchmark (the rotating horse statue, the test was called point sprites http://www.ixbt.com/video/images/3dmark2001/gf3-sprites.jpg ), and found it an oddity at the time, not all that visually appealing and certainly not as a believable modelling method. It's not raytracing, although it does bare a lot of similarities.

I'll be keeping a sceptical eye and an open mind on this one.

Anyway, here's their website http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

Edit: Thinking about it, it's biggest downfall will occur when physics are involved. For a static scene it's ideal, but to get the branches of the trees to blow in the wind, or to achieve any kind of real time environmental change beyond lighting would likely cause some serious difficulties.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#14

Post by noonespecial »

mullr wrote: post #10
mullr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Through many mentions of the word "unlimited", never once was the word "storage" mentioned, or "cache" or "memory". How about the design toolchain? The only solution I can think of is to store all the assets as ... polygons. Unless there is toolchain support for a CSG/procedural approach.

Another thing I wonder is, if their "search" system, what kind of indexing is required? How long does it take, and can you re-index on the fly? Their demos have a conspicuous lack of any kind of movement at all, much less dynamic geometry. And what about shading? Shading typically require surface normals, something that's not readily available from a mess of points in 3d.

Shading in particle systems (when its addressed at all) usually involves making a topo-map like structure out of the points and then creating virtual polys out of the contours. You can then apply shading to groups of points contained in the virtual polys based on those surface normals. It takes lots and lots of cpu. Decidedly not like the "it'll run on your cell phone without a GPU" hype presented here.

My guess is that they created a small static particle system that looks like 3d figure, "rotated" it by selectively displaying particles and got all excited.

A classic case of needing to be an expert in a field before trying to push the state of the art in order to save yourself the trouble of chasing a dead end that most people in said field already know is infeasible.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#15

Post by chrischen »

hristov wrote: post #6

I listened to their explanation and it sounds a bit shady. First they used that old salesman trick of using a British accent to appear smart, so that was already a red flag. And then their explanation of the secret to their technology sounded rather ridiculous. They said that their technology was like the google search engine or like searching for the word "money" in an MS word document (the latter was the lamest att…

If I understood correctly, it seems to resemble a search engine in that it takes all the dots that compose the 3D world and search for the ones that need to be displayed to compose the 2D image on the screen at any given viewing angle?

If that is correct, then I think the search engine example is pretty good at explaining it.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#16

Post by jwhite »

mullr wrote: post #9
noonespecial wrote: post #4

It sounds a little to me like the old "once the polys get small enough, everythings a particle system" approach. Sure you save lots of GPU by essentially doing away with surfaces and textures (by making everything a floating colored dot) but you then have to contend with massive storage, manipulation, and filtering problems. They might be at the stage where they say "we'll just make everything a point! this'll be cak…

Indeed. Through many mentions of the word "unlimited", never once was the word "storage" mentioned, or "cache" or "memory". How about the design toolchain? The only solution I can think of is to store all the assets as ... polygons. Unless there is toolchain support for a CSG/procedural approach.

He did mention the word "compress" though. Once. That might be a key part of their technology, but to say that they glossed over it would be a gross understatement.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#17

Post by jonnycowboy »

chrischen wrote: post #15
hristov wrote: post #6

I listened to their explanation and it sounds a bit shady. First they used that old salesman trick of using a British accent to appear smart, so that was already a red flag. And then their explanation of the secret to their technology sounded rather ridiculous. They said that their technology was like the google search engine or like searching for the word "money" in an MS word document (the latter was the lamest att…

If I understood correctly, it seems to resemble a search engine in that it takes all the dots that compose the 3D world and search for the ones that need to be displayed to compose the 2D image on the screen at any given viewing angle? If that is correct, then I think the search engine example is pretty good at explaining it.

Graphics cards already have this functionality, it's nothing new.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#18

Post by justinsb »

Given we're on a collective patent kick at the moment, this is surely the perfect example of why we have software patents. If we assume this to be real, who here would like to have spent years working on this, only for ATI and NVIDIA to reap all the rewards?

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#19

Post by aresant »

As impressive as this sounds, it's interesting that the graphics they display are Quake 2 generation . . .

Although they call it search technology it sounds like a very effecient graphic codec - blending pixels, focusing on rendering frame vs. scene etc.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#20

Post by barrkel »

noonespecial wrote: post #4

It sounds a little to me like the old "once the polys get small enough, everythings a particle system" approach. Sure you save lots of GPU by essentially doing away with surfaces and textures (by making everything a floating colored dot) but you then have to contend with massive storage, manipulation, and filtering problems. They might be at the stage where they say "we'll just make everything a point! this'll be cak…

I would imagine a fair amount needs to be dynamically generated and procedural, and perhaps with jitter etc. added to reduce the cookie-cutter effect.
Post reply on HN