Slashdot Mirror
Creating 3D Environments Without Polygons
Igor Hardy writes "I've conducted an interesting interview concerning a new episodic indie adventure game series called Casebook. What's quite uncommon, especially for these kinds of independently developed and published productions, is that they include professionally created FMV — all of the footage is filmed in real locations. Yet what's even more interesting is that the games use an innovative photographic technology which recreates a fully explorable 3D environment through the use of millions of photos instead of building from polygons. The specifics of how it works are explained by Sam Clarkson, the creative director of the series."
Real life graphics are over-rated, almost all games bend the rules of reality significantly. The fact is even in the movies, the 'photorealistic' images we are seeing have been usually doctored to high hell. Almost everything one see's in a movie is made to be look ideal or if not ideal a certain unrealistic way that looks visually nice.
I think his point about 'not being able to connect with' polygon characters to be a overstatement, a good case study is Prince of persia: the sands of time.
The characterization in that game and banter back and forth was excellent. There's more to developing interest in a character beyond mere appearances and fancy animations people get the gist of things. I know I was disappointed to what they did to the series and it's characters after the first game, with the whole injection of the "badass prince" persona with it's sequels the warrior within and the two thrones. The game veered well away from the original princes personality in significant ways.
Except that you get a smooth transition from one VR to the other.
A QuickTime VR - for those who have been living under a rock or just don't care - is a small file with a graphical representation of, typically, the whole environment. So 360 degrees around and 180 degrees up/down. Within a QuickTime VR viewer you can then look in any direction of that environment, zoom in/out, etc.
In some QuickTime VRs (and much better in older PanoTools-based panoramas, or even SmoothMove/etc.), you can click on a hotlink and it would take you to another QuickTime VR taken from that position/area (e.g. click on a door and you would get a VR of the next room).
This is much the same technology as far as that goes, except that instead of clicking (presumably), you move around using whatever you'd use to move around with typically.. such as the keyboard.
The nice part is where they blend smoothly between the panoramas. Sure, they have to take a LOT of them to begin with (hence the camera rig off a grid in the ceiling, probably something like 1 pano every 10 inches or whatever; from the looks of it only in a 2D plane, but 3D should be doable), but even with that you need some nice motion estimation to blend between the two panos as depicted on the screen.
However, there are limitations that they point out...
1. they can't blend in live actors -while- you move. That's an organisational limitation - you'd have to make the actor re-do their steps for every single pano vantage point. Ouch. You could mount a whole grid of cameras, but that's gonna be insanely expensive (not just in material costs but rigging that up for each room as well). Probably their best bet is to 3D digitize the actor and blend that into their panos using standard 3D compositing software.
2. they're limited to a 2D plane at the moment. As I mentioned, this could be made 3D - just means it will take a LOT more time to create
3. they're limited by storage media; granted, they're talking about their hope for a DVD release, so I guess they're stuck on CD, but even DVD or Blu-Ray would be filled up quickly if it was a more involved game than what it currently looks like.
This actually sounds like they are generating polygon-composed scenes from photographs. Cool, yes, but not actually without the traditional rendering method.
Of course, yes, it's possible to do this entirely with photos and without any kind of 3D rendering at all, but in that case, can it be accelerated? Will it move at a decent speed?
~ C.
A "photograph" is just a textured rectangle - i.e. a textured polygon. So the environment is created by the blending of many textured polygons. Sounds awfully familiar to me.
Sure, they are rectangles instead of triangles; and sure, they aren't arranged in a mesh. But this looks to me like the triumph of a marketing press release over engineering reality.