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Stippling As Fast 3D Technique
An anonymous reader writes "This Stippling
effort wins best paper at IEEE Boston conference. Could real time medical rendering be whizzier than Id?"
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Stippling is just the application of small, uniform polygons (aka "dots") in rendering images. To modern graphics hardware, a dot may as well be a polygon, so we haven't gained much in practical terms.
This Stippling effort wins best paper at IEEE Boston conference. Could real time medical rendering be whizzier than Id?"
Lets see... ID is a company devoted to making games where you run around aimlessly killing and dismembering people.
the people who developed the strippling effect are hardworking professions trying to help mankind by developing technology that could help further medicine.
How can you even compare these two?
A truly thoughtless comment.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
On top of that, I don't think that stippling really applies to the gaming situation as a technique - they are trying to generate 3-D images given complex data sets based on x-ray transmission within the body. I have a feeling that generates points of information, and the old technique would be to either use voxels or translate the data into polygon information.
Beside the fact that modelling such information for a game would be ludicrously time-consuming, I fail to see why this technique could offer an advantage to the display of 3-D graphics in a gamin sense - and I doubt it's actually faster in terms of the amount of time it takes to get mathematical data translated onto a cathode ray tube. All the article says is that it's faster than previous techniques in medical imaging. The article doesn't say what those techniques are, but since I can't for the life of me see how a CT scanner would get polygon information out of x-rays, I think we can all be sure that they aren't at all similar to what the Quake 3 engine is doing.
This technique is meant to be a fast ( real time ? ) method of viewing medical data , like watching a CAT scan as it's happening. It's *not* attractive , it has no textures , it doesn't render the organs with all their colour or bump maps. What it *does* do is give the surgeon an immediate source of information on the status of the patient's condition. Very interesting stuff , good application of a technique to a real need. But it's not anything to do with Id. It *won't* make Quake 4 any faster.
As most people know , including most Slashdotters ( I hope ) , 3D doesn't begin and end with Video Games. Other things use the technologies too.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
...from drawing an image as a collection of pixels ? Isnt the fact that 3D objects can be represented as collection of discrete pixels well known ?
The purdue scientists know what stippling is. They point is they found out how to transform voxels into 3d stipples that look good from multiple directions... not stippling in the screen coordinate sense. So how is Carmack suddenly a pioneer of medical imaging?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Academics are good at coming up with applicable theories. There's a world of difference between a theory (and what is necessary to create one), and its application...
Id has know-how... The same know-how that the ironworker gets from handling iron and knowing small things like how it behaves under certain conditions... This know-how, the scientific doesn't have - or need.
Id is a software artisan.
If you find what I just said theoretical, take this simple example: Id probably spent weeks just optimizing the asm routine to draw a line.
The scientific wouldn't be interested in that... all they would care about is to prove that it can be drawn, but is left to the reader as an exercise to make it render fast...
actually,
i think the only thing revolutionary about it is its application and the fact that it is being used for VOLUMES - which is really smart.
it's basically a POINT CLOUD which is the data that you get back from a lot of SCANNERS used to scan models and people for movie special fx.
but this point cloud doesn't only go for surface features but volume detail.
and let's not forget - it's just RENDERING VERTICES.
so at most, you could have colored dots but not any kind of texturing or advanced surfacing....
so not that sexy for games but really cool if it speeds up medical imaging.
not brilliant for technology (at least on renderside) but the idea is sharp.
jin
Note: I've read the linked article but not the actual paper.
I think the reason for doing a stippled technique is to cut down on preprocessing of the data set, rather than to speed the actual rendering of the graphics.
You're trying to visual a 3d volume, but you don't have a surface map. What you have is a series of bitmaps taken at different z-depths. You can either just render the z-ordered bitmaps with appropriate transparency (expensive for your graphics hardware) or you can try to calculate surfaces and render polygons. Calculating the surfaces can be extremely expensive (think hours of computer time on what was not too long ago a super-computer class machine).
It looks like what they've done is find a way to render the bitmap data with (a) minimal preprocessing and (b) not needing hundreds of megs of video RAM.
A few years ago I shared a VR setup with some people visualizng seismic data. They were always complaining about the onyx only having 256 megs of video ram...
I was quite horrified at the number of comments I saw posted suggesting that generating a decent stippled 2d image from 3D volume data is trivial or somehow like "2d point sprites" or "reinvented voxels".
I felt I should try and explain a few things to help the less, um, "graphics savy" among us appreciate and understand what's going on here.
First, we need to know what "non-photorealistic rendering" (NPR) means. It is NOT (as some fool mentioned) a "tradeoff" and inferior to photorealistic effects. It only implies that the rendering does not use a light-transport model to acheive its results (hence not realistic in terms of how lights/cameras work).
This is a GOOD thing. In a CAT scan you don't want a picture of the guy's head. You want an image giving you useful information about the internal structures of the guy's head. Photorealistic rendering would be as useful as taking a picture your patient.
The problem of getting a useful image from a large volume dataset is non-trivial. Doing this at interactive rates is even tougher. Further, drawing realistic stipples is difficult in its own right, because of the nature of the stippling technique (spacing and distribution are used to convey transparency, as well as contour).
The images produced by this technique are amazing, and look very close to what one might imagine an artist would produce for a textbook. That's incredible, people! If you compare these images to those that doctors currently have to look at (slices, color coded density maps, etc) you'll notice that the stipples are much easier to understand, and look very natural.
Congrats to the Purdue team and kudos to Slashdot for covering a real comp sci paper, despite the fact that the yokels in the groups think that it has something to do with Quake 2. (Groan)
actually, this skips the pre-processing so you can view live data. Read the article.