f13.net

I don't even know what to say, so take a look for yourself.

http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

I am not technical enough to tell if this is completely bullshit or not.

I don't know much about it, but I seem to recall someone saying that while you can render ridiculous scenes like that, you can't animate them or something. 

Disclaimer: This might be complete bullshit also, I have no idea what I'm talking about and am repeating something I remember hearing last time this tech came up in conversation elsewhere.

It's basically just some kind of voxel system. While voxels aren't totally bullshit(they're used for static terrain in some engines like crytek and the next iD tech, iirc) this 'company' most assuredly is.

But this voxel system has a z-buffer! :why_so_serious:

That was a question I had.

Animation is possible.

The problem is scalability: voxels are effectively a 3d mesh where each point of the solid is explicitly mapped, as opposed to a polygon mesh where you can map eight points and get a rectangular prism of any size that your engine can handle.

Not really. The size is still somewhat of a problem, but can be greatly reduced with run length encoding or a sparse voxel octree. You can perform some basic effects on voxel groups, like rotation/translation/skewing, but advanced effects like mesh skinning can't be implemented without effectively nullifying the significant benefit of voxels, the regular ordered arrangement of the geometry elements. The simple ordering of voxels is what allows for such fast searching of RLE voxel maps and tree traversals of SVOs.

So effectively you can't skin meshes because the computer doesn't store the coordinates of each voxel because the position of each voxel is most efficiently stored as a result of the structure of the voxel group?

For typical implementations of voxels, basically. Voxels tend to be very strongly tied to some kind of memory arrangement, either a 2d array of pointers to a heightmap array for rle encoded voxelmaps(which are usually multiple layer heightmaps for most videogames, since most game levels are vaguely flat) or an octree with explicit pointers up and down the branches of the tree. This is why they're so fast. They have easy ways to go through them and find what you should be looking at, while poly's are just a random soup of data that you have to search through and order while rasterizing. This is why visible surface detection/culling/zbuffering and stuff like that are so important in poly rendering, otherwise you'd have to test every single triangle for every frame.

In theory, I suppose there's nothing stopping you from adding extra 'real position' data to the voxel data, the same way you can add 'real normal' and texture data to them. However, if you did this and started warping around the voxels, once you tried rasterizing these points that could basically be anywhere now, you're going to have to start doing a lot of that searching all over again. The voxels are no longer right next to each other, they could be feet apart, or even be overlapping. So it's basically like all you've done is turn your voxels into vertices, and now you have to make triangles out of them and rasterize, and at that point you're basically just working with a convoluted high poly mesh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4

There's not really anything more that needs to be said about them. A thread like this seems to come up every year or so on some of the forums I read. I'm pretty sure they've been at this for at least a couple years now, and as far as I can tell, 'they' are actually just one guy. One who apparently has a tendency to DSma and show up in said threads.

Looks interesting.

It's basically bullshit (not the tech, but the company). They're pitching for easy VC money.

The same stuff is being done by many people. Id Software has one such system in development for their Tech 6 (whatever comes after Rage). There's been a lot of research to using sparse voxel octrees and ray-casting with GPU in 3D graphics. Just check the publications from I3D, Siggraph etc.

You can find his forum posting from 2008 here (http://www.tkarena.com/Articles/tabid/59/ctl/ArticleView/mid/382/ArticleID/38/PageID/171/Default.aspx) with the same examples.

Yeah but what Id's doing is GPU-accelerated, this is pure software.

Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011  (http://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4?hd=1)[HD][/url]


They are back with more to show.

 :oh_i_see:

Notch posted 2 blog posts about this.  It's a Scam (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam) and his follow up "But Notch, it's NOT a scam" (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam)

Just like herpes.