Euclideon Infinite Detail

[ali31]

This Australian company claims to have achieved "unlimited detail" by switching from triangles to points.

Video Here

What do you think of the technology and if it's legitimate would Epic be interested in incorporating it into UDK?

[Blade[UG]]

This gets hashed out on virtually every game enthusiast forum at least once every 2 years or so for the past 10 or more. Until someone actually shows something off, it's pretty much snake oil.

[ADF86]

Seems you can't animate with that tech; might be better just to stick with tesselation, it'll achieve similar results and actually works for game purposes. Otherwise you've simply got rocks with as many verts as an average games' entire level.

[Graylord]

It's old news rehashed and renamed. Most people believe it to be a scam, as we never see any proof of it being realtime, they don't explain anything at all in their videos except repeating themselves for 10 minutes and there's no animations.

They've been gone for a year and all they did was put together a map. If this was truly useful technology, it would have been picked up by the big guys ages ago.

[danimal']

They're called voxels, they're old news, move along, move along...

[Crusha K. Rool]

Wow, this suddenly pops out on all gaming forums simultaneously again as if it would be such a big deal.

All I see is that the commentator is still as swanky as he used to be in the first video and that he is still harassing on other games, just that they added Bulletstorm into the new video. And if I wanted to get some funding for such a project, I wouldn't slander about potential partners like AMD and nVidia in my first appearance.

[Outstandish]

I have said this on OCN, it is redundant now. If you have seen the Samaritan video, you see that in terms of geometry the objects are very realistic, and those are done with well POLYGONS! THis causes way to much load I can predict, and it is a little to late to actually make a **** difference when Polygons are starting to look as good as they do now.....

[darthviper107]

And the issue today isn't the polygon count--it's lighting. Notice in that video, even though they were using "billions of polygons" it didn't actually look better than today's video games because the lighting was ****.

[Outstandish]

And the issue today isn't the polygon count--it's lighting. Notice in that video, even though they were using "billions of polygons" it didn't actually look better than today's video games because the lighting was ****.

Quite, lighting makes a game for me, besides texture sizes of course. Polygons are not much of a problem anymore....

[ambershee]

There are decent voxel engines out there, this isn't one of them. It's not lit properly, and it's not in any way interactive. The most promising one I've seen so far was by a small Polish developer - but they still used regular polygonal geometry for everything except the static scenery.

[DifferenceEngine3D]

In the end, they're still dependent on polygons; the modellers all work on them, and as far as I can see, they use a fancy algorithm to simply extract the surface layer of voxels to produce a pixel of colour. Nothing new here, TBH; still needs DX9/10/11/OGL 3/4/whatever, since that's what the graphics cards they display it on works with. Something like this will work out eventually, but it'll take some time.
@ambershee: I'm guessing atomontage?

[DifferenceEngine3D]

BTW: my guess about color extraction is based on the fact that no hardware in the world can run trillions of voxels in memory at once. I worked on medical visualizations for Royal Holloway and you have to find ways to extract point-cloud data efficiently without holding it all in memory.

[ambershee]

@ambershee: I'm guessing atomontage?

Amongst others. I'm fond of Atomontage because it's hybrid (voxels for terrain / static environment), and because at least they're actually honest about the issues they're running into. Instead of selling the same **** every 6 months trying to get more money for their snake oil.

I don't know why this is cropping up all of a sudden, but I've seen four threads on it today in various forums.

It's the exact same **** the same people have been showing for years now, with no noticeable improvement.

[DifferenceEngine3D]

I was taken with Atomontage, too. I mean, no-one else out there had the guts to say the procedural generation took hours for a small level (on a low-powered laptop, sure, but still). They're honest about their timeline, and as open as they can be about the technology without revealing too much detail. Plus their presentations are nicely poetic, thanks to the translation from Slovakian!

Voxel tech has been used in games before, of course (remember "Comanche"?) but it's still relatively inefficient. It has engineering, Earth Science and Medical Imaging appliations, because you need to move large amounts of 3D data with actual 3D properties in those arenas. Game tech simply doesn't need voxels; the CG companies out there use polys (last I checked, even Pixar still used them! < snark > ) and all we need is better applications of existing tech to make it look real. UE3 and other engines can do that with good enough hardware and good enough artists.

Ah, it'll recede to background noise before you know it. Only to start up again in 2012.

[Crusha K. Rool]

Even Notch warns about it:

It’s a scam!

Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.