Unlimited Detail

[DaMage]

I dont know how many have seen this recently, but a small Brisbane based company has been working on a new type of real-time rendering that is much more powerful then the type we normally seen in games today.

There is a fair bit to it, but this is the video they recently released to explain what it is/how it works:

Now when they released that there was a fair few people calling 'fake' (myself included), things like it was all pre-rendered, it was running on supercomputers etc. However they did another interview (you might not want to watch all of it, its 40mins long) and dismissed these cliams, as well as showing the technology running on just a simple laptop. I now firmly believe it is real.

I was amazed by this, just thought I would share it here. They have said they are going back into lockdown (why not? they are only a 9 man company.....a place like Nvidia could do the same work in a much faster time), but this is certainly something to look out for.

[_echo]

Its cool and all, but the downsides and other limitations don't make it very appealing. Animation is hard to do. Memory will be a problem. Never mind they said it wasn't. Their world is made up of all repeating chunks. If it were all 100% unique data for the whole world, that computer would cry and beg to be put out of its misery for being forced to try and remember all that data.

Its cool, yes, but as Notch said, I wouldn't get excited over it.

Unlimited, in terms of computers, is complete and utter crap. If they had that running on a computer from 2000, then sure, I would believe it then.

[Vouivre]

I had a conversation about this a couple days ago with someone. For things like rocks or actual solid things which do not need animation and would be 'scarce' and need to be very detailed it could work and the rest use polygons. Don't forget processors will be getting better and able to process information better, so you could have a million polygon count and it fast as the ones today with a few thousand. Give it a few years time we'll see how solid and viable it is to the industry whether for gaming or movie making.

[grond]

I feel like a certain TV FBI guy once did: I want to believe. It's the beginning of something that will astound, I think.

[_echo]

I doubt it will catch on simply because the industry has been using polygon modeling for so long, and its easy to work with.

Perhaps this tech could be used with LOD to eliminate the "popping" from lower quality meshes since the "atoms" can take the shape of the higher quality meshes.

[Arthmoor]

Interesting stuff, too bad Youtube was lagged into the gutter and couldn't deliver the longer video. The shorter one was fascinating. I'm hoping it will eventually get fleshed out to the point where devs will take a real interest.

[Meo]

The level of detail is astounding, im gonna keep an eye on this, but like echo said, they are tricking us too. Yes their world is huge but they just used a handful of models and duplicated them. Yes its an exploit to have so many objects "in game", but not so much when you only have 20 objects in the memory buffer. Also the land is shaped like minecraft, there are no curves at all, only right angles and planes.

So yes its jaw dropping impressive, but theyre not there yet. TES6 in four or five years with that technology would be awesome. Im sure Nvidia and AMD are trying to buy them out for a ridiculous amount like 15 to 30 million dollars, and the guys are not interrested, for a good reason. Thats the future of 3D right there. Not just for gaming but for movies, TV and live shows too.

Rendering technology for hyper-realistic holograms anyone?

[ub3rman123]

After seeing them playing it in real time, I've got some suspicion they have a Cray-9 hooked up to that laptop screen hidden under the table.

[ResolveThatChord]

Yes, go Australia! One step closer to the singularity. I think this could catch on, because the traditional polygonal modelling skills are still relevent. As for animation, just use polygonal wireframes to define volumes of atoms, and animate that. Maybe there's an even better way. I'm optimistic.

[Yevic]

Heres my question.....how do physics work?

I mean, he was just flying all over the place, is there any collision?

I mean, it looks pretty, but also very still....no real movement

[grond]

He was dodgy about collision in the video, saying it was easy....never mentioned physics as far as I remember.

[Yevic]

Maybe thats the catch then?

[DaMage]

In the long video he talks about how collision is the next step.

Can't expect them to do these things overnight....he entire team is only 9 people that are building a rendering technology from scratch.