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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.
Oh wait, use the higher-quality video link at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The 360p version of that beats the 1080p version of the original.
This company with it's impressive-looking but completely static scenes shows up every few years. Honestly, I didn't see anything that couldn't be done in that video with any modern engine targeting high-end video hardware. It's a bit of a cheat if you only have to show the terrain. I'll be more impressed when I see a demo with physics, animation, and dynamic lighting, because that's where things tend to get tricky. They mentioned in the video that they do have animation working - I'll be curious to see how it looks in the next video.
This company seems to be trying to solve the problem of how to accurately capture and reproduce the real world, but how many games actually want to capture real-world data? If you're in the business of creating fantasy worlds of any sort - and that's precisely what most games are - there's nothing in the real world for you to scan. There's a reason no one else is working this way, I think. As far as the game industry goes, I'm guessing it will probably remain a very niche product, if it's viable at all. I just don't see them throwing away 15 year's worth of maturing polygon-based tools and technologies anytime soon.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Here's a 2011 interview
I’ve revisited voxels at least a half dozen times in my career, and they’ve never quite won. I am confident in saying now that ray tracing of some form will eventually win because there are too many things that we’ve suffered with rasterization for, especially for shadows and environment mapping. We live with hacks that ray tracing can let us do much better. For years I was thinking that traditional analytical ray tracing intersecting with an analytic primitive couldn’t possibly be the right solution, and it would have to be something like voxels or metaballs or something. I’m less certain of that now because the analytic tracing is closer than I thought it would be. I think it’s an interesting battle between potentially ray tracing into dense polygonal geometry versus ray tracing into voxels and things like that. The appeal of voxels, like bitmaps, [is that] a lot of things can be done with filtering operations. You can stream more things in and there is still very definitely appeals about that. You start to look at them as little light field transformers rather than hard surfaces that you bounce things off of. I still wouldn’t say that the smart money is on voxels because lots of smart people have been trying it for a long time. It’s possible now with our current, modern generation graphics cards to do incredible full screen voxel rendering into hyper-detailed environments, and especially as we look towards the next generation I’m sure some people would take a stab at it. I think it’s less likely to be something that is a corner stone of a top-of-the-line triple A title. It’s in the mix but not a forgone conclusion right now.
In 1999, he was working with 3d "light maps".