

So Long Polygons.  It's been a blast. - chubbard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4&ttl=1
Unlimited Detail is a new technology for making realtime 3D graphics.  Unlimited Detail is different from existing 3D graphics systems because it can process unlimited point cloud data in real time, giving the highest level of geometry ever seen.
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Splines
The discussion on reddit about this technology is interesting, especially if
you're not familiar with how this is accomplished:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbg9c/unlimited_deta...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbg9c/unlimited_detail_the_end_of_poligon_based/)

Apparently there are drawbacks to this rendering approach, although this
company has claimed to have solved them. I'd be interested to hear from
anybody here what experience they have with this type of rendering.

~~~
tfinniga
I'm not too experienced with voxel rendering, but I'm familiar with the
general problem.

The most visible ways that nvidia and ati are tackling the LOD problem is on-
GPU tessellation. This means using a mathematically smooth surface (such as
beziers or nurbs), and approximating it with polygons at the appropriate level
for each frame. This means that if your lettuce is far away, it gets few polys
(or culled). If it's 20% of your screen, it gets lots more. You can avoid
popping artifacts because it's the same surface, just approximated
differently, and it's not too tricky to get approximations that blend smoothly
into each other.

If you need more detail that doesn't need to be animated, toss on a
displacement map at relatively low memory cost.

True volumetric modeling works best for things that have lots of branching and
void spaces, like dandelions.

Displaced surfaces work for lots of interesting things. See Mudbox and ZBrush
galleries:

Mudbox
[http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...](http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13587084&linkID=13552502)

ZBrush <http://www.zbrushcentral.com/featured2col.php>

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ianbishop
this was posted a day or so ago here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179970>

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frou_dh
The vibe of this and their accompanying website is plain weird.

Either they're hoaxing clowns or they have no idea how to communicate in a way
that appears legit!

~~~
wizard_2
Lines like

"The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry
running super fast, and it's all done in software."

Set off my bullshit detector immediately. I hope this is real, but I'd love to
see maybe.. some sort of OpenGL extension, or demo app. I can understand
wanting to be secretive, but he's got nothing to show at the moment but a lot
of talk.

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keltex
There used to be this fantastic game called Outcast on the PC
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29>) That used Voxels
too. The resolution was limited because of the processing power required but
the graphics were impressive for the time.

Hoping one day that GOG (<http://www.gog.com>) has it.

~~~
NathanKP
According to the Wikipedia article about Outcast:

 _Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is
somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional
volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be
seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are
modeled using texturemapped polygons._

From what I see it was not a true point voxel system, but rather a ray tracing
algorithm that was only used for the ground. Animated objects were still
rendered using polygons.

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indrax
Assuming this is legit, yes you can do animation with it. Probably with a
minimal performance hit.

Keep all your sprite models separate from the main. For each sprite rotate the
camera so you're viewing it from the same relative position you would be in
the game, render it and put it to the right spot on the screen. As you do this
for every object, you should be able to skip pixels you've already drawn. Once
all the objects are up, draw the background and again skip all the pixels
you've already done.

So again, if this works it should be able to do animations in a single pass,
with just a little per-sprite overhead. (and they could well have overcome
that too.)

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dirtbox
I'm still waiting to see how you're meant to animate a point sprite model.

~~~
mortenjorck
The animation UI at 1:45 looks very austere, with the typography resembling a
DOS app. I wonder why would that be.

~~~
dirtbox
I was aiming more at not being able to do the deformation required for facial
animation or skeletal animation beyond rigging some prims together. To my
knowledge it can't be done with this rendering technique.

Every model created for this is, for all intent and purpose, a piece of rock.

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hedgehog
As others have said looks like some sort of voxel raycaster. I wrote one a
couple years back that got to about 1FPS w/o too much optimization so it's
pretty conceivable that with better optimization and faster hardware you could
go much faster. The big problem with building scenes like this is that the
datasets get really big really fast. There's a lot of interesting work
happening in the area, in particular id's upcoming stuff and the GigaVoxels
project.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HScYuRhgEJw>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI>
<http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2009/CNLE09/>

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Jeema3000
Sounds a lot like a raycaster engine (i.e. what was used in the orignal 1992
Wolfenstein 3D), except in 3-dimensions instead of 2.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting>

~~~
elblanco
I was going to say the same thing. That or some kind of fast search variant of
something like a geoindex used on geospatial servers.

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barmstrong
So is it essentially "indexing" point data like Google indexes content?

As someone mentioned, this makes me think animation or changing stuff in real
time would be difficult (since the indexing part of it is slow) but I don't
have much background in this area.

~~~
indrax
No time to find a link, But I recently read an article about google tweaking
their index from a once a month task to something they can do in 10 seconds.
(though obviously they are also throwing hardware at that problem.)

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NathanKP
There is absolutely nothing new in this movie compared to the one which was
submitted a couple days ago. Even the description that supposedly goes into
more detail about how it works is cut and paste from the Unlimited Detail
site.

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GrandMasterBirt
Hey makes perfect sense, why calculate for any point that is not visible.

I wonder if physics calculations play into this.

~~~
cheald
This happens with polygonal renders, too - it's called occlusion culling.

The problem is that point clouds can't be easily animated, and forget about
applying physics to them, which makes them fairly useless for realtime gaming.

~~~
Tycho
What about for rendering 'virtual reality,' Quicktime3D type environments?
Like to give people virtual tours over the web.

~~~
drawkbox
Games and graphics look great nowadays, the need to do something just for the
tech is not a real driver. Why would someone invest the time in this and
static when they can also add interactivity? Until it can do interactivity,
real-time, lighting, animation, collision detection/physics, etc better,
faster and stronger, it will not take the market for graphics.

~~~
Tycho
Well one thing I was thinking about is this 'laser-scan' technology for
modelling real world objects. Perhaps the appeal of a quick, light, easy
method of rendering detailed environments (albeit static) will prove very
popular. Usually when I see static 3D demos on television (for instance on
Grand Designs, a new-build architecture show, or computerized replays in
soccer), they meet the bare minimum in aesthetic appeal.

