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Euclideon Teases Photorealistic Voxel-Based Game Engine
MojoKid writes Not many would argue that current console and PC graphics technologies still haven't reached a level of "photo-realism." However, a company by the name of Euclideon is claiming to be preparing to deliver that holy grail based on laser scanning and voxel engine-based technologies. The company has put together a six-minute video clip of its new engine, and its genuinely impressive. There's a supposed-to-be-impressive unveil around the two minute mark where the announcer declares he's showing us computer-generated graphics rather than a digital photo — something you'll probably have figured out long before that point. Euclideon's proprietary design purportedly uses a laser scanner to create a point cloud model of a real-world area. That area can then be translated into a voxel renderer and drawn by a standard GPU. Supposedly this can be done so efficiently and with such speed that there's no need for conventional load screens or enormous amounts of texture memory but rather by simply streaming data off conventional hard drives. Previously, critiques have pointed to animation as one area where the company's technique might struggle. Given the ongoing lack of a demonstrated solution for animation, it's fair to assume this would-be game-changer has some challenges still to solve. That said, some of the renderings are impressive.
Not only that we're talking about voxels, but also we're actually Slashdotting an origin server.
LOOK! Look at how bad these OLD and BORING graphics look when we zoom really, really close. Now look at OUR awesome graphics moderately zoomed out! Aren't you impressed???
I was waiting for the "photorealistic video" to show up and it didn't show its face.
Hit the snooze button. The stuff at the beginning has crappy texturing and the stuff at the end has better texturing but it's *not* photorealistic.
They essentially haven't made any progress since when they turned to laser scanning a few years ago.
Oh and no, not really impressive graphics. They're just showing a cloud of points with some color. No dynamic lights and shading, no dynamic geometries/skeletal deformation here...
Here's the direct YouTube link, BTW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Another potential problem here might be dynamic lighting.
It looks really good, it's fantastic actually.
However, I could still easily tell that these were not real world images. Some more than others stood out, but in motion these elements still looked 'wrong' for real.
I think his work is fantastic and state of the art, but I think he was a little to hopeful in his video that no one could tell until he said it.
Hard to take the summary seriously when it compares console and PC graphics as if they are remotely at the same level...
Graphics so real you could almost be there although we can't figure out why you'd *want* to be there, exciting architecture-based gameplay. Defeat enormous boss structures such as gothic cathedrals and terrifying office blocks, advance to higher levels and face ever-more-powerful types of inanimate building...
Where the hell do I find a dinosaur in this day and age so that I can laser scan it?
More reasonably: one thing that leapt to mind when watching the video is that laser scanning inherently "can't see behind the curtain". So how do you generate data for all those hidden surfaces? Several of the examples in the video showed fields of rocks, and I can't imagine there would be enough time to scan the field from all possible view points that would ensure that all surfaces have been scanned. Or is this product mainly targeted at fly-throughs along well defined paths?
I also did see in one of the comments on the site that all of the video data that was shown was static IE no animation.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
These clowns have been showing up every few years promising the next big thing in voxel technology. It never materialises.
Just ask Notch what he thinks of them: http://kotaku.com/5827034/minecraft-creator-calls-bullshit-on-unlimited-detail-graphics-hype
I claim that I had photorealistic, real-time voxel graphics running on an iPhone 2 seven years ago. I just didn't release it for... reasons. Until they release a demo that runs on someone else's hardware, it's just a worm on a hook for investors.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Yes, with this new product, you the fashion and cosmetic industry will be able to make videos with models whose waist is thinner than their ankes.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Didn't John Carmack of ID Software vanished voxel-based engines back in the 1990's as being technically inferior -- or maybe impractical -- with the video cards of the day?
and the year before.
Fraudulent.
They've shown up numerous times presenting this technology with an attempt to garner easy money. They already suckered in Australian government with a $2 million grant. They haven't really produced anything new and are just presenting the same polished demos without making efforts to tackle any of the issues inherent in such voxel-based engines.
So as well all know... the better it looks, the worse the gameplay will be - and the storyline will be even worse.
Looks like National Geographics already scanned the universe from earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've seen demos of what I believe to be this technology before, but what it seems to lack is any kind of interactivity with the environment/objects in the environment. From what I can tell in this latest video they've added an FPS handgun overlay and some poorly animated ferns.
The point is: Cool, you can render a nice point cloud. Can you actually do interesting things with it / what we want in most games or virtual environments, or can you simply render a nice point cloud?
1) They still haven't explained how they solved the memory-bandwidth issues inherent to point-cloud rendering. As far as I'm concerned, they're probably a scam just because of this. I can't say with 100% certainty, but their refusal to demonstrate it actually running in real-time is extremely suspicious.
2) How do they plan to work with dynamic content? Animations? Dynamic lights/shadows? So far I've only seen static scenes - unless they just want to make a new Myst, this is basically useless for games.
3) How exactly is this "cheaper"? Instead of making a scene in Maya or whatever, you now have to physically fabricate your set, then scan it, and then probably do some edits on the computer anyways. Even if they really can do everything they say they can, they're just going to make game development orders of magnitude more expensive, which is directly against one of their main advertising pillars.
the people turning their nose up at this are failing to see the implications. We can 3d model reality in precise detail with this and then replay the model realistically.
that is amazing. What is more, the data is precise enough that you could reconstruct the whole thing exactly. That is completely amazing.
As to games... I look forward to them. I remain a little skeptical as to the animations but maybe they really did sort it all out.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This guy has an annoying, self satisfied way of speaking that just makes me want to beat the snot out of him.
Voxel graphics are interesting and the laser measurement plus automatic texturing from a real world scene is cool, but this just does not compare in detail or framerate to a mesh generated by the exact same laser scanner and a little bit of pre-processing, all of which has been possible for over a decade now.
Plus, what are you going to do with this 3D scene? An interactive game? But games need dynamic objects, which cannot really be done well with voxels and will contrast dramatically with the scene's lighting model. You don't have any light probes, or spherical harmonic coefficients or anything useful for static lighting dynamic objects, let along dynamically lighting static objects.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
You just need to mine a lot of stuff beforehand
Likely the subtle cues, such as the complete lack of animation in the samples, give it away. The best looking ones are the shots where you don't *expect* much movement (the edge of the paved road, for example). In others, it's their choice of 'lens' (FOV, DOF, etc.) for the 'camera' which wasn't *quite* right to match what you'd expect from a real camera on location.
"Dead Meshing" a real environment, and then shooting enough JPG compressed digital photographs to texture the mesh from most possible viewing positions is the very WORST way to handle the problem of real-time rendering of open world environments. And BTW, this method has ZERO to do with 'voxels'. But periodically we get this same nonsense sold to fools alongside the cretinous "ray-tracing uber alles".
John Carmack- an individual with intelligence vastly greater than the con-man behind Euclideon- attempted to follow this approach with every state-of-the-art programming method. He created the so-called MEGA-TEXTURE method, which solves the only interesting part of the Euclideon problem. The result was dreadful- utterly hopeless. 'Rage' and 'Wolfenstein- New Order', although both games with merit (especially the later as an old-school FPS) had textures and meshes vastly worse than the best of the current AAA titles using traditional rendering engines.
A back-of-an-envelope calculation quickly demonstrates to anyone what the problem is. To create unique textures, even with feasible compression, for even a modest environment, takes horrific amounts of memory. There is a good reason the Euclideon conman talks about streaming his data from a multi-Gigabyte hard-drive. Even a relatively tiny area (by current open world game standards) needs such astonishing amounts of texture data.
It gets worse. No modern rendering engine relies on 'dead' textures with pre-baked lighting any more. Indeed what most of you think of as the 'texture' is often less than 20% of the REAL texture data- the rest being texture data that defines the 'material' and lighting properties of the surface.
-Programmable shaders with per-pixel lighting
-realtime shadows
-realtime day-and-night light cycles
-complex tessellation
-multi-layer textures combined with alpha-transparency
These methods allow a limited data set of textures to cover a vast open world area with unique visual variation or the textures in each different location.
Pre-baked, dead-mesh and dead-texture methods, as sold to idiots by Euclideon, are from the stone-age, and look 'good' in controlled demos only.
Carmack destroyed iD perusing this same hopeless method, and he understood its limitations from the off. Carmack's mega-texture literally has ZERO advantages over current methods, and extraordinary numbers of downsides- the worst being the disruption of the ordinary artist development pipeline. Modern games on modern engines, by comparison, are crafted very much as Hollywood builds (and lights) real and digital sets for their movies.
Megatexture- the infinitely more intelligent approach to Euclideon methods, is just horrible for artists and designers- increasing development time (with no visible advantage over traditional methods) by a depressing amount. The processing of Megatexture data for a test build takes a cluster of power PCs working for a long time. A modern AAA gaming engine allows REALTIME visualisation of new assets in the actual game world. It is a bad joke to even compare the two methods.
Euclideon's bigest con is the ability of such a limited rendering system to use JPG quality compression of the world textures in near real-time. A gaming environment, on the other hand, cannot use compression anywhere near the quality and efficiency of JPG. Dead meshing using dead textures, JPG and simple streaming can appear to achieve 'miracles' (if you are a credulous fool). No useful real world renderer can rely on these methods.
I thought they were gone for good after the last, oh, I don't know, 4 attempts of selling a shitty static-everything voxel engine as THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY THING EVER? Ask anybody who knows fuck all about computer graphics what they think of these people, and prepare to get laughed out of the room.
Can anyone commment on their previous technology that they say was sucessfull?
It strikes me as odd that they din't name any companies or products that use those previous technologies.
Voxelization is 4-D calculation. Every five years 16x faster computers double the rendering speed. After 20 years you see significnt progress.
I was much more impressed with this technology, photogrammetry, given that they're already using it to develop a game (called the Vanishing of Ethan Carter). Rather than brute force laser scanning to create voxels, they are building 3D models using photographs from many different angles and to me the results look as good or even better than those in TFA.
Your ad here.
Early in the video, the narrator said "our eyes just know that these (shown on the screen) videos are real", with the point being that later on he was going to surprise us that they were in fact renditions by his product.
But when I was looking at those images, I was actually thinking that they didn't look real to me. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Half-life 2.
I still think it is hilarious people even give a shit about mentioning his reaction to Euclideon.
He is an average programmer at best that got SERIOUSLY lucky. Even he said that before the power and popularity got to his head. Then every community that cared for him kicked him out in quick succession, one after another. From 4chan to reddit to youtube.
The even funnier part is he seems to think Minecraft is the epitome of voxel worlds. Minecraft BLOWS in terms of its game engine.
It is so horribly inefficient that so many times they have come up with lame excuses for not making the world infinite height.
I can't count how many times I told him how he could improve the game engine considerably, and simplify the already simple skylighting system.
Then a modder comes in and blows them all away. (and me)
Hell, his own team completely overhauled the renderer when they finally got allowed to after he stopped interfering, and now the renderer is considerably faster than before.
It was funniest when after he blasted it for being a complete fraud, then HardOCP guys popped over for a visit and they showed off a realtime demo of the engine working for huge static scenes. He never had any reply for that one, that was for sure. Yogscast drama all over again.
Notch really developed an awful habit of that when he got popular. He developed a HUGE ego and a huge reason to voice opinions.
Shame, if only he never got popular, then Minecraft might have been fun, like he promised.
People are going to have to face facts, the engine works, it has even been proven several times with live demos.
They stupidly keep referring to it being awesome for game engines, which is probably damaging them more than it should be, but it would be great for all sorts of laser scanning data like shown. Combined with the usual light source probing and even sound mapping, you could create those sorts of things easier and get some good sound harmonics too instead of having to assign textures various properties. (that one team that put dynamic sound in to Half Life, that was fantastic. Games really need to play around with actual sound modelling more. It is an amazing difference over pre-computed)
I mean, it possibly could be good for games engines now, they did have a very easily game engine working on their older engines that had voxel creatures (probably still assigned a skeleton for anchor points though, but that just makes sense)
Regardless, their engine works. It will likely still need a decent-ish hard drive or solid-state drive not to lag. I also had a similar idea for an engine, but never got it working well enough for anything of worth, so I dropped it entirely. I even found my old notepads with some of the maths I had written down, that was so exciting to find all my old stuff. I would love to know how they managed to defeat the bandwidth issues for it. I am not math enough for that.
In fact, they've been claiming the same thing since at least 2011. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/02/notch-vs-unlimited-detail/
Isn't this the same company that showed of the same voxel engine quite a while ago that looked pretty decent? Although from that screenshot, it just looks like Banished with actual shadows in it.
Somehow it seems that people have forgotten that this same company has hyped their game engine before in 2011. At the time even Notch weighed in calling in bullshit. It is a scam and I'm shocked that no one remembers we've been here before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
Shame on you slashdot.
...to link to them, instead of the damn video in the first place?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
(warning: unbelievably unctuous narrator included)
I'm curious how they deal with occlusion, as the demonstrated environments are fully-realized, yet - unless you're popping that laser-scanner in 100+ locations - there's no way that there aren't going to be surfaces occluded from the scan?
-Styopa
This company has been promising a Voxel based game engine for around a decade or so, and STILL has not delivered (to the public).
"Not many would argue that current console and PC graphics technologies still haven't reached a level of 'photo-realism.'"
Their "technology" would only be useful for places like museums and historical sites that want to create static 3d virtual tours. Everything they are doing relies on laser scanning an existing object/environment. This would do nothing for the next Mario or Zelda game.
dropped the video at wow....
from 2008
http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/070693370
Yes! Now I can recreate 1997's Myst!
Their demos are not very nice and mostly vaporware. For people interested in non-vaporware next generation rendering technology, I suggest you check out this video, based on Path Tracing which is a form of stocastich Ray Tracing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It looks to me like this technology is getting closer and closer to the mainstream, and the results are eons from any raster-based engine.
This tech is great for maps. If Google Maps implemented it, that would be awesome. Instead of seeing through a lens mounted on their car, you could walk around the environment and see everything recorded from their car. It could be useful for film and television, as buildings and backgrounds are often CG that gets touched up anyway. This would just streamline the process.
But this will never be used in games until animation and full shader support is available on a per-object or per-face basis. That won't happen any time soon because the entire scene is one big object.
Euclidean has not made a rendering engine; they've invented the 3D photograph.
Its not voxel yet. to be voxel those elements must have each one the material of voxels, not surfaces materials.