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."
Okay, so these voxels - with current generation technology - are represented as cubes which of course are 12 tri-polies, so it's not entirely -without- polygons.. but at least it's not based on polygons and it lets you do some pretty cool stuff - such as truly fully destructible environments. No, none of that "we ran a script on all objects (except for those we don't want you to be able to destroy) that pre-fragments them and call the havok engine on the object if the damage model reaches a certain level" crap. I mean *fully* destructible.
Sadly, this is the only 'worthy' example I've seen and it's still kinda 'meh'... ...but it's got me excited for what could be done with voxel-friendly accelerators.
http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net/
The biggest hurdle, however, is not the accelerators... it's the artists. Suddenly you can no longer get away with 'modeling' a house by simply putting up a façade like they do in movies.. now that house has got to have an interior because some wise-ass IS gonna be spending all of the ammo on the map to chip away at that 10" thick brick wall so they can venture inside the house WITHOUT collecting the key from the bossfight.
So... shot my own excitement down there, again... but at least there's the potential :)