
Atomontage: voxel 3D simulation technology for games - bangonkeyboard
https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/05/atomontage-reveals-voxel-3d-simulation-technology-for-games/
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gavanwoolery
I have known two of the guys involved for a while now (Dan and Bran). Both of
them strike me as honest people who are legitimately passionate about graphics
tech, so I don't think they are running a scam (only mentioning this because
of other comments). I myself, having delved into the voxel world, have my own
doubts about voxels in general, as a silver bullet for everything, but there
are many areas worth pursuing (particularly within medical, which they are).
From an aesthetics standpoint alone voxels are great for games (voxel art now
has a serious following on Twitter). Anyhow, I've been amazed with Siles' work
over the years. I am curious to see what they cook up. :)

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gmueckl
Volume amd voxel rendering are essential for medical visualizations. But there
should already be a lot of competition in that area.

Voxel graphics for games is mostly restricted to non-deforming bodies. Games
like Comanche and Outcast made use of an optimized variant of voxel rendering
for their terrains with great results in the 90s. But I have yet to see an
animated face in realtime rendered using voxels or points. I would love to see
that done, but this is a hard problem.

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Numberwang
Wow. It's been quite some time since I last thought about Comanche. Thank's
for the throwback.

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aaron-lebo
You may find this interesting:

[https://comanche3d.com/](https://comanche3d.com/)

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gmueckl
Nice, but this implementation should extend the voxels down to the lowest
neighbor. This would close the gaps in the steep hillsides.

If you're doing it in a pure software implementation and with no tilted
camera, you could optimize this heavily. You start at the bottom of the screen
and for each vertical row of pixels you march along the heightmap in 2D and
project the texels to the screen. You also remember the current hightest Y
coordinate that you've drawn. If the new texel is projected higher than that,
you draw another vertical line to that position with the texel color and
remember that position. So you're filling up your screen from bottom to top in
an extremely efficient way.

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Jugglerofworlds
Atomontage has been around for many years now without any release. The two
Achilles heels of finely detailed voxel engines have historically been
animation and lighting. Based on the video, it looks like they have animation
now but the lighting doesn't seem to be any better.

All of the shading that I've seen in past Atomontage videos has been screen
space ambient occlusion, which is a great effect but is no substitute for real
lighting with dynamic shadows. I've also seen them use AO baked directly into
the voxel models.

I just wish that they would actually release something instead of posting
countless tech demo videos. If the technology is so great, why aren't they
trying to put it in the hands of real game developers right now? The whole
thing smells of vaporware...

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VikingCoder
I see specular reflections in here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE3bjUrhXWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE3bjUrhXWk)

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Jugglerofworlds
There are now algorithms for screen space reflections and screen space
shadows, so perhaps that is what they are using.

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p1necone
Anyone else getting flashbacks to that "Infinite Detail"
Vaporware/Propagandaware with this? "Exciting New Graphics Technology!", light
on technical details and heavy on marketing speak.

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p1necone
We need a nice succinct term for projects that are purely marketing and exist
only to scam money out of venture capitalists.

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fwip
I think vaporware does the job.

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lainga
But this is specifically shined up for VCs - _ventureware_!

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fenwick67
Ooh I love this and will start using it immediately

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stuntkite
While I totally get that this isn't going to quite "change everything" what
really stuck out to me is their use of geometry shaders to do the animations
with voxels. Very interesting. I have a fork of google draco where I've been
working on getting animated point clouds into unity compressed then adding
geometry shaders to them. I think there are very unique experiences coming for
us with point cloud tech and voxel tech, but they probably wont replace our
polys any time soon for gaming or anything.

[https://github.com/millerhooks/draco/tree/unity_point_cloud_...](https://github.com/millerhooks/draco/tree/unity_point_cloud_plugin)

[https://github.com/millerhooks/DracoAnimatedPointClouds](https://github.com/millerhooks/DracoAnimatedPointClouds)

[https://github.com/keijiro/Pcx](https://github.com/keijiro/Pcx)

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psyc
Attn. vaporware naysayers: Some smart people think this is worth pursuing.
Miguel Cepero has been doing this forever with Voxel Farm. Sony almost made an
Everquest with it. John Carmack once believed a future id engine would be
voxel-based. It hasn't been proven yet with a big hit, but there is probably
something here worth noting.

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__phantom
So Sparse Voxel Oct-trees (SVOs) have been around for a while now. NVIDIA
heavily invested in researchers for this. However, the existing workflow for
game / movie assets is polygonal in nature, making this a really niche
technology. They've instead focused on Bounding Volume Hierarchies (bVOs)
which allow for fast ray tracing into traditional models / with normal
materials.

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audunw
I don’t think voxel engines need to work with only voxels. The environment
could be, but animated models should probably still be polygons.

So the challenge is you don’t just need fast voxel rendering, you need fast 3D
rasterization into an optimized data structure (like sparse voxel octrees).

I don’t think this will pay off until game engines do absolutely massive
amounts of physics and lighting simulation. But I think it’s inevitable.
You’re already seeing indirect lighting engines using low resolution sparse
voxel representations of the world.

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sgrove
The volumetric video rendering they showed seems particularly compelling for
me, having played a bit more with VR recently.

What're the current methods for doing reasonable volumetric video capture? I
had a set up of kinects a few years ago, but it was quite tedious to
programmatically interact with in real-time.

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taneq
Generally structured light (ie. Kinect or laser scanner) is still gonna be
your only option, I think. Stereo 3D reconstruction is getting quite good and
might be usable though.

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abainbridge
The demos look nice. Is there any information about how their technology is
different to voxels that have been around forever?

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ashleyn
This again? Remember the Euclideon engine? The main problem is that you can't
animate models composed of voxels. Every one of these "atom-based engine"
projects runs into that wall and rides the funding until the hype runs out.
Bummer.

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abritinthebay
Of course you can animate voxel models - there are game engines that do it now
- the trouble has been doing it on a _large number_ of voxels in real time.

This is why existing voxel games tend to look super blocky and pixelated.

That said - they seem to have solved that for non-organic forms at least
(their video forms are very cool, but are basically frame by frame volumetic
animation - a little different).

Lighting will be the big issue, though not always a problem in all games.

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gnode
> but are basically frame by frame volumetic animation

I'm assuming by this you mean each frame using a distinct voxel model.

I may be wrong, but I think what's being demoed at 0:47 in the video is
animation by deformation of a static model. If true, this is something I've
not seen in voxel graphics before.

Unfortunately, the article is very light on the details about what is
technologically novel about what Atomontage is doing, versus previous
endeavours.

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abritinthebay
That's certainly what they're doing with the buildings. The dancing man and
face animations look like frame-by-frame tho (which is why they are likely
video I would imagine)

 _That said_ if they can do just non-organic forms well and leave organics to
polygons - that would be pretty incredible.

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bhouston
Seems neat but not scalable. I would like to be proven wrong though. These
description was pretty generic so it is hard to see what is unique.

