Unlimited detail in games

[yuriythebest]

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6 ... re=feedbul[/youtube-hd]

Right, playing a game that uses this tech in 3d = future.

[AntiCatalyst]

I think polygons are going to be around for a LONG time before voxel graphics happen in the big game titles. There are lots of old games that use them, but obviously none with the level of detail seen in the video. Voxels are essentially just as limiting as polygons, but in other ways.

EDIT:
Hadn't seen that particular video before, so now i'm somewhat converted. It does work, that's for sure, and they seem to be using polygons, not voxels as i initially thought.
The thing is, with their unique way of rendering, they have to keep EVERY object in the map stored in RAM, in "unlimited" detail. This works fine for their preview, because if you look closely, you'll notice there's only 10-20 separate models cloned across the entire island. for example, there's one palmtree, one leaf tree, an elephant, two or three different rocks, some grass and then that female statue.. that's 8 different objects.

This technique basically trades the limit in the amount of polygons being rendered on-screen for a limit in the number of unique objects in the entire map.
It could work though, with Blu-ray discs, slow storage isn't as big of an issue so there's space for all the extra polygon data. Realistically, in a game they'd have to turn down the overall LOD(level of detail, not distance) knob a bunch of clicks and start loading lower-lod versions of distant unique objects to conserve RAM.
END OF EDIT



When it comes to existing technology, DX11 with dynamic tesselation and displacement maps looks beautiful and is very efficient!
[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkKtY2G3FbU[/youtube-hd]
Just look at those wireframe shots - that's great use of available recources, tesselating more and more when the "camera" comes closer. It's also about as simple(from the artist's point of view) and memory-effective as adding a bump map.

this is what we'll see in the foreseeable future(well it's been in games for a while), and probably in the next console generation.

[yuriythebest]

they seem to be using polygons, not voxels as i initially thought.

actually what he says is that developers can create polygon-based models and they will be converted to their native, voxel/point like format anyway

The thing is, with their unique way of rendering, they have to keep EVERY object in the map stored in RAM, in "unlimited" detail.

yeah, what somewhat bugged me was that there weren't that many unique objects in the scene- however I could see many different objects in the older demo. Of course, in the new one things like a plant, dirt grain, leaf, etc all all different objects. Indeed- I'd love to see a version where there are 100 or so unique objects on the screen at the same time in that detail.

they'd have to turn down the overall LOD(level of detail, not distance) knob a bunch of clicks and start loading lower-lod versions of distant unique objects to conserve RAM.

you mean if there are many more unique objects?

All I know is I await what they'll do next.

1. create magic 3d engine with unlimited detail
2. profit $$$$$
3. problems much other game developers to whom we haven't licensed our stuff?

[cybereality]

I still think these guys are being deceptive. There is not such thing as "unlimited detail". These has got be be a limit somewhere, at least with traditional voxels its with memory. That elephant model was probably something crazy like 10GB or more (of hard disk space). Try building a whole game like that. Even with a Blu-Ray XL, you could only have like 10 models in your whole game. And that is basically what they showed. There were maybe 20 or 30 unique models in that whole demo. I'm sure it looked nice, but its just not economically feasible today to build a game like. Not to mention that doing animation is exceedingly difficult, and may not even be able to be done efficiently. Funny how they didn't show any real animation (I'm not counting that garbage they showed at the beginning). I mean, its a promising demo but I doubt it will make it into real games any time soon if at all.

[AntiCatalyst]

Of course, in the new one things like a plant, dirt grain, leaf, etc all all different objects.

Those leaves, rocks and blades of grass etc are always in the same place on each "block" of land, so they're not individually placed throughout the world. They're probably all just part of the underground cubes.

I have a copy of the map layout for the demo and it lists 24 major models like the palm tree cactus etc

This quote is from the article discussion thread on HardOCP.

That elephant model was probably something crazy like 10GB or more (of hard disk space)

Not likely. The laptop only had 8GB of RAM, so those 24 models together are less than 7.5GB.

[cybereality]

Not likely. The laptop only had 8GB of RAM, so those 24 models together are less than 7.5GB.

I said hard disk space, NOT RAM. It could potentially be streaming data off the disk and not holding the whole model in RAM. But if it was storing it in RAM, I bet it was maxing out the whole 8GB just with what was shown. I might have been a little extreme though, even so, voxel data is huge. Wikipedia claims typical voxel models used in the medical field are around 1GB a piece. So its not crazy to think that the elephant was around 1GB. Compare that to a polygon model, which could be a few MB at most. Not practical at all.

[OuHiroshi]

Crysis 1 can use voxels for the terrain and that's pretty much what the voxels are good for. Like cyberreality said, it takes a large amount of ram and it takes more resource to animate it. Noticed how everything in the video are static? There's a reason for that, moving millions of voxels takes up way more resource than moving a few thousand polygons.

[Okta]

Just watched the HArdocp video with the real time running on software. I cant see how this is fake now. Carmack will be shaking in his boots.

[cirk2]

I've seen the older video
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; )

I belive in the possibilyties of voxel Rendering (and Raycasting) and I belive that it will be possible in not-so-distant future (Thanks to GPUGP and many core CPUs).
I belive that it will be used for Games.
But I don't belive that they have found a real solution for the core problem:
The size of the data.

In the video they state that the world ist made up from 12062352345000 "Atoms" (21 trillion 62 billion 352 million 345 thousand).
One "Atom" has to Store its color information and some other things, lets believe they will have 1 byte (8bit) per "Atom" so be get
12062352345000 byte or 11503555 GB or round 10 Exabyte.
Where do they store this vast amount of data? oh well they dont... Like hinted above they use 24 models and replicate them over and over.
Unlimited detail? Not if you have to use replication in such a scale.

[cybereality]

The other big problem, somewhat related, is how to do animation. With polygons you can do animation very efficiently with skin/boned animation. With these "atoms" you would need to store animation weighting values and rotational data for millions of atoms. I guess you could use polygon cages, but even so, you are looking at greatly increasing the already ridiculous size of the data. It just doesn't seem practical today. And they purposefully hide this by showing only a dozen replicated non-animating models.

[PalmerTech]

Their goal is just to try and get funding before people with money figure out they are selling a (currently) impractical technology, one that people have tried to do lots of times before.

They got a $2 million grant from the Australian government, so I guess they were successful.

[Okta]

According to them they have money coming at the them in buckets they are not accepting and are not interested in further investors for now.
Can anyone point top a tech demo comparable to theirs running on a laptop in software?

[cybereality]

Can anyone point top a tech demo comparable to theirs running on a laptop in software?

Probably not. They do actually have an impressive demo, they are just over-selling their technology.

[Okta]

I also had a thought they may have been running that demo streaming from a local server over wifi after he unplugged the lan

[PalmerTech]

It is a cool demo for sure, but it cannot be scaled to a useful point.

I am not a Notch (Minecraft developer) fanboy, but he has a really good piece on why their tech is impractical: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He goes further here: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802 ... not-a-scam" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[groda]

Another Unlimited Detail video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... jB3ejLhfoI from an interview in May http://xbigygames.com/euclideon-still-a ... w-footage/ . Even more impressive each time!

However, Bruce Dell and the people at Euclideon still haven't talked about the most obvious problem with their technology. Where to store all that information? Obviously there must be a way, since he has been displaying the "Island" demo from a laptop, but how that can be done really boggles my mind.

[cybereality]

That actually is quite impressive. Looks almost photo-real. Still, they haven't solved the problems with this method: storage space, difficulty with animation, etc.

[groda]

Well, we simply don't know how far they have come with animation. All we have is the 8 year old clip seen in the first post by yuriythebest and their statement that they are currently "working with converting movie quality animation". Let's wait and see.

Concerning storage, somehow they must have succeeded in fixing it since they run the "island" demo (also in the first post by yuriythebest) on a laptop. The data for a single stone in that demo should logically take up a full hard drive... Beats me how they did it.

Another problem with a technology that shows only the data for "a single atom" per pixel on the screen is if you have really small but shiny objects. Just hoping they're solving it nicely. And that we can see an Oculus Rift demo of their engine as soon as possible!!!

[Okta]

Took me a while to understand how they rendered so fast but once i did it became more believable. The engine never has to calculate any more atoms than there are pixels on the display resolution setting. I think they said the laptop demo was 1024x768? This still doesn't explain the unlimited detail because the data must be stored...

But still... if they have had 20+ people working at this a for a few years i think they would know by now if they were banging their heads against a tree or if they were onto something.
Hoping this turns out as good as they describe.

[Krenzo]

This still doesn't explain the unlimited detail because the data must be stored...

I'm still skeptical because a lot of that data was repeated. The trees, the rocks, the elephant, etc were all just duplicated a bunch of times into neat individual sections. It's unlimited in the same sense of compressing a small string of data that repeats/loops forever down into an equation/program of a few kilobytes and saying you can do unlimited compression. Why don't they make an actual level that you might see in a real game with varying terrain and unique features? I don't think they can. I think Carmack is right in that it's not possible for several more years.

[groda]

Krenzo, your question are answered in the first video.

They can't do it for many years - well, they just did.

A lot of repeated objects. Yes, they didn't have more objects. Also, they did not put a lot of effort into making the demo. Still, if one single of their objects contain more information than a whole normal computer game, it is very impressive, repeated or not.

[Fredz]

I fail to see the relation between this last video and unlimited detail. To me it's only a voxel rendering with a not so great resolution, everything looks a bit blocky or smoothed out.

The interesting part is the capture with laser scan to me, it could by useful for crime scene analysis or room arrangement, but that's not like it hasn't been already done in the past.

[groda]

The relation is that the video is rendered with the Unlimited Detail technology in real time.

[cybereality]

Its not that they don't have something impressive. Its mostly the marketing BS of calling it "unlimited".

[groda]

Nothing is unlimited, but I guess when they say "unlimited detail" it is true in that sense that the detail is only limited to the number of pixels on the screen.

[Fredz]

Its not that they don't have something impressive. Its mostly the marketing BS of calling it "unlimited".

The "unlimited" term certainly doesn't help to give them some credibility, but I really fail to see what is so impressive with that last video, especially considering the small size of the scene and the lack of precision of the voxels.

[groda]

Is it impressive? I don't know. Has any other company presented any videos of real time renderings with that many voxels/atoms on display at the same time with a similar degrees of photorealism?

[Fredz]

This guy ? :
http://voxels.blogspot.fr/

As for the photorealism, as I said before I'm more impressed by the laser scan than by the rendering itself. With the same data I think a classical polygonal rendering would look better and at a higher resolution on such a small scene.

And as the Minecraft developer said (see Wikipedia), I don't think there is anything revolutionnary in their approach.

Time will tell, but they are at it since 2003 and they don't seem to have made much progress since then...

[Krenzo]

Krenzo, your question are answered in the first video.

They can't do it for many years - well, they just did.

Did I miss something? Their demo is nothing indicative of a game. They took all of their objects and have them repeated in a very uniform manner with flat ground. They're doing that to hide the fact that their engine is not capable of driving anything of real value, most likely because of memory requirements. They are reusing the same objects, but why don't they rotate them or vary the slope of the ground? If their engine were truly functional, they could show off naturally sloping/varying terrain with incredible detail. In a polygon engine, you could make still make a large, unique terrain based level with only a few trees and rocks.

Time will tell, but they are at it since 2003 and they don't seem to have made much progress since then...

True, they will never have a game engine at this rate.

[cirk2]

They haven't got a fix for the problems every voxel engine has:
1. Horrendous size of models thus need for awesome streaming/prefetching
2. How to do animations?

[groda]

I'm sorry, Fredz, but to me, this http://voxels.blogspot.fr/ does not look photorealistic. It looks even worse than what Unlimited Detail did a few years ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4 or even their 8 year old animation video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZqPMg-Y7gE .

Anyways, I'm wishing them good luck and it will be interesting to see how they solve the following ostacles; realistic hair, water, subsurface scattering och reflective objects.

[Fredz]

To me it doesn't look very different, the models are probably better done in the Euclideon demos but that's just it, good models vs bad programmer art, but the underlying technique is pretty much the same.

And the big difference is that this guy gives rendering stats on an identified machine and he published a demo so anyone can try it and see the results by himself. Euclideon for now has not produced any stats, any code, and only 3 videos in almost 10 years. It's pretty much the best way to sell vapourware...

Anyway, I'm not that much interested in what they are doing, visually it doesn't even visually fight in the same category than games that are more than 10 years old.

[cybereality]

There is also the Atomontage Engine, which is more impressive in my opinion and actually seems like non-vaporware:



http://www.atomontage.com

[groda]

Things are starting to happen att the official Euclideon website: http://www.euclideon.com/

[cybereality]

Right under the heading "Unlimited Detail" is says "Unprecedented detail with over 1 million point cloud atoms per virtual cubic inch".

So its 1 million voxels per cubic inch. That is, by definition, NOT unlimited.

[groda]

You're right, Cybereality, but by that kind of reasoning our world does not have unlimited detail either, since there will always be a limited number of atoms per cubic inch. However, what Dell has been saying is that his engine can produce enough detail so that every pixel on your screen will take information from different polygons/atoms.

[yuriythebest]

cool! the Atomontage Engine looks splendid - the tracks are amazing. One thing to clarify though - a working tech demo does not equal a game development environment. Hopefully the creator would either create such a thing, or perhaps allow an existing leader in this area (for example, Unreal Engine, Unity3d, Cryengine) to buy his tech and incorporate it - this would be the awesomest way

[groda]

Yes, I kind of hope that they will merge the Atomontage engine, which seems mostly to be a physics engine, with the Unlimited Detail engine, which seems to be a graphics only engine so far. I don't think the Atomontage engine will be useful for non-atom-based engines, like the unreal engine och cryengine.

[groda]

Oh, and Aerometrex, the first known company to licence the Unlimited Detail technology, have released a few interesting videos on youtube, three of which might be using the U D tech, and one that should, at least according to the title.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=640UNfAznZM&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8HLKXzi ... ure=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZUJtk0B5Sc
AEROmetrex point cloud rendered by Euclideon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx1x54Xl ... r_embedded
According to Aerometrex, the unlimited detail will revolutionize 3D photogrammetry rendering.

[Fredz]

The last one is private, how come you can have access to it ? Working for AEROmetrex or Euclideon ?

Nice videos though, even if they are not realtime but rendered with Blender.