Unlimited Detail Technology

[Chimpy]

Well from the sounds of it, and if i understood right, the idea of being able to only render/show the needed points is a damn good one. Most of my work is in the CG animated world, with stills coming second, so i've seen similar technology where you can limit the render to just what it seen and the increase in speed is pretty surprising. If the same can be done for a game that's being created on the fly then i can easily see this helping to create more detailed worlds with current tech.

 

This will be done in nearly every modern game renderer. The techniques empolyed are collectively called culling.

 

Only problem is the whole point cloud data. I mean polygons are the main focus in games but that's because they are easy as hell to work with, and quick, but if your going to go with a new tech then you run the risk of increasing game development time. Not to mention needing to retrain your graphic artists, i still recall the headache of learning spline modelling methods when compared to basic polygon methods. That isn't going to be cheap so i can understand why people aren't rushing for this new tech.

 

Too true.

 

A question about using voxels for landscapes, in those cases isn't that just for the 3D data to create more accurate landscapes more than for detailed models?

 

Voxels for rendering landscapes were pretty common back in the 90's for that very reason. However the memory requirements these days are going to be pretty big to replicate a Battlefield 2 map for example. Particularly to a level of detail where it doesn't get all blocky and nasty looking. See the Nvidia demo for some potential techniques to solve this.

[H.U.N.K]

Voxels! First seen in an old FPS game that got swept under the carpet called 'Blood' if my memory serves me correctly...

 

Looks like this technique pretty much.

 

 

Also wondering how it can do translucancy if it only samples one point per pixel. Stuff like subsurface scattering just won't work. Lighting, shading etc. would also be interesting.

[H.U.N.K]

I'm not writing this off. I found this very fascinating, especially when he mentioned only drawing the amount of points needed in ratio to how much your monitor can display. I'm massively interested in game developement and the like (aspiring concept artist/environement artist) and to me, this seems like one of those things that get scoffed at in the early days but eventually end up becoming a staple technology.