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Euclideon Teases Photorealistic Voxel-Based Game Engine

Posted by timothy on from the how-many-holy-grails-are-there? dept.

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.

89 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. This makes me nostaltalgic by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not only that we're talking about voxels, but also we're actually Slashdotting an origin server.

  2. "Photorealistic" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    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???

    1. Re:"Photorealistic" by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing about voxel raytracing is that it usually requires less fancy programming and design work to get your graphics up to snuff.

      Rasterization, while extremely efficient, requires layers upon layers of programming cleverness and hours of skillful modeling and texture creation to pull off a "photorealistic" look(let's be honest, it's not that good either). If you could just throw out all the lightmapping and the real-time-self shadowing hacks, and the ambient light simulation, and a bunch of other stuff that's cropped up over the years to make up for the fact that we're not raytracing, you might choose to.

    2. Re:"Photorealistic" by i+kan+reed · · Score: 1

      Duh, more gpu cores.

    3. Re:"Photorealistic" by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    4. Re:"Photorealistic" by i+kan+reed · · Score: 1

      I am, in no way, endorsing this company. Just that overall level visual impressiveness might not be the primary target.

    5. Re: "Photorealistic" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I like how you mention modern warfare and call of duty yet they're one and the same.

    6. Re:"Photorealistic" by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      They are only raytracing primary ray intersections though. www.Caustic.com already does this on the new PowerVR Wizard chip. You could Lidar Scan a scene and tesselate the point cloud into a mesh and you would get just as high of quality as this voxel system. The only reason this looks even slightly acceptable is because they're just projection mapping real world lighting directly onto the voxels. But baked in lighting would work with projection mapped geometry too. Without a real shader model though and shortcutting the whole lighting process you end up with very weird artifacts. So if you have a bronze pipe organ all of the pipes have reflections that are "Frozen" instead of proper specular shading. Adding reflections and global illumination and soft shadows and all of the nice things that Raytracing makes easy would be harder with their voxels than a traditional game engine. And you would still need those thousands of artists to create specular maps, bump maps and write shaders.

    7. Re:"Photorealistic" by Delwin · · Score: 1

      More GPU ram actually, but close enough.

    8. Re:"Photorealistic" by Delwin · · Score: 1

      It's voxel raycasting. That means that lighting is trivial. Physics gets easier too as you don't have to deal with single sided triangles and can trivially subdivide objects. ... animation however. That's the killer with voxels. I'm curious to see what happens with them.

    9. Re:"Photorealistic" by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 1

      You're missing the point. Their technology isn't solely for the purpose of gaming. They are soon to start pursuing it for games, but this is already being commercially leveraged for a problem domain that was sorely needing the help. Point cloud mapping of real life for engineering and planning.

      --
      Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
    10. Re:"Photorealistic" by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      That is why I loved the NovaLogic games, thanks to Voxels you didn't get that "pop in" when you changed your view distance (like with sniping) that we saw in so many games back in the day. I never understood why their voxel tech didn't take off, they must have been dicks when it came to licensing or something as their games in the late 90s/early 00s looked a lot better IMHO than the other guys while running smooth on (what was then) not even a midrange system.

      But as far as graphics goes...the games ALREADY have better looking graphics than we can really notice while playing so do we really need even more? Personally I think we have gone backward, with games like Far Cry and FEAR 1 having MUCH better AI and a better overall experience than todays games simply because everything has been sacrificed on the alter of graphics. How many games have YOU played that this summary is apt? "The graphics were amazing, gameplay blew chunks" because I have played too damned many that fit that description. Maybe I am weird but I'd rather have a game with Far Cry 1 or even no One Lives Forever 2 graphics that was FUN with a capital F than have another really pretty and boring as shit sandbox to play in. We have seen what that gets us, games where we get the "fun" of shuttling around our fat cousin to get drunk and get fatter...blech.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    11. Re:"Photorealistic" by exomondo · · Score: 1

      This company with it's impressive-looking but completely static scenes shows up every few years.

      It's nothing particularly special. Unigine has done something similar, Atomontage is also similar, Voxel Farm is lower resolution but supports more interactivity, there's various SVO demos, this one is particularly cool for high resolution detail.

    12. Re:"Photorealistic" by Time_Ngler · · Score: 1

      how many games actually want to capture real-world data?

      It would work for more than real world data. You could take any CGI scene from any movie done today, turn it into voxels and use it in their engine.

    13. Re:"Photorealistic" by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Even if it isn't real, you might want it to look realistic.

      Otherwise why do they have special effects in movies that are works of fiction?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    14. Re:"Photorealistic" by kmoser · · Score: 1

      The lighting is too perfect. That's why it still looks rendered.

    15. Re:"Photorealistic" by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      I'm a game developer, and they're claiming their engine to be suitable for game development, so I'm just evaluating it on that basis. If it works well in other domains, good for them, but I know nothing about those industries. However, game engines have a lot of *very specific* requirements in order to make them practical. At the moment, generating game assets by 3D scanning objects is simply a non-starter for all but a very specific set of games.

      Polygonal-based tools and pipelines are deeply entrenched in the industry right now, and I suspect anyone who cuts against the grain is going to make it pretty hard on themselves for a very minimal visual payoff. That tends to happens to pioneering technologies, even if they later become mainstream. Just my opinion, obviously, because we haven't seen anything more than static renderings so far.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  3. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Meh by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the stuff at the end is fairly close to photorealistic, assuming the photo is low-resolution. What it *isn't* is camera-realistic. Their camera engine uses pans and zooms that in no way reflect how a physical camera would move through real space -- this makes the entire effect look fake.

      What they needed to do to make the demo a "wow" demo is put the camera inside the physics engine, and give it the mass and movement of a real camera. The results would have been much better.

      The one bit of the video where I thought "hey, that's actually decent" was on the zoom-in on the stair tread, as the zoom was similar to what you'd get on a camera on a tripod, and the stair looked pretty photorealistic. For the rest, our brains enter the "uncanny valley" not because of the images presented, but because of the surreal way they are presented.

    2. Re:Meh by wagnerrp · · Score: 1

      What they needed to do to make the demo a "wow" demo is put the camera inside the physics engine, and give it the mass and movement of a real camera. The results would have been much better.

      That's why head tracking demos that allow you to shift your head to get a slightly different viewpoint on screen are so effective.

    3. Re:Meh by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      I thought the messed up street with gravel looked real.

      The stairs and most of the rest looked "close... but not real".

      Plus, it replaces artists with

      a) on site camera requirements.
      b) site licensing fees and gaining permission to "film".

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    4. Re:Meh by exomondo · · Score: 1

      the stuff at the end has better texturing but it's *not* photorealistic.

      That's because what it is is basically a high resolution 3D image. They use laser scanning to produce a high resolution point cloud and then display it, the ability to display that much data is impressive but currently it's using baked lighting (whatever is captured), no animation and seemingly no volumetric data. It's all well and good to display an image but it's not particular good from an interactive perspective if you don't have any context, like what's a tree, a rock or grass? You could individually scan those objects and place them in a scene but you then need to re-light them all, which is doable but they don't seem to have demonstrated that.

  4. So... by Arkh89 · · Score: 1

    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...

    1. Re:So... by danknight48 · · Score: 1

      They're just showing a cloud of points with some color.

      Array of dots.

      As we are wise and ignoring the bullshit marketing words.

      struct Voxel{
      unsigned long Id;
      vector4 Colour; //r,g,b,alpha
      vector3 vLocation;
      float fScale;
      };

    2. Re:So... by Ferrofluid · · Score: 1

      A point cloud, while similarly named, has nothing to do with cloud computing.

    3. Re:So... by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      "Point Cloud". Where have I heard that term before?

      Ah yes
      Time Scanners

      For a PBS show, it's surprisingly repetitious, and a lot of the dialogue tends towards the "gee whiz--look at the cool technology we have". It has the flavor of a Discovery Channel type show. Despite this, there are interesting bits and pieces throughout.

  5. Static lighting only by MobyDisk · · Score: 2

    Here's the direct YouTube link, BTW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

    Another potential problem here might be dynamic lighting.

    1. Re:Static lighting only by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Static lighting only by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      Ahh Sorry, that video probably isn't using the voxel engine. That's why it looks so good, but they can't really move around freely. It is more like Microsoft Photosynth.

    3. Re:Static lighting only by canadiannomad · · Score: 1

      Here I was watching it at 144p...

      --
      Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
    4. Re:Static lighting only by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Indeed! Lighting has always been their biggest drawback. Their static lighting, even using lightmaps, is a FAR cry away from Dynamic Global Illumination.

      I'm much more impressed with Unreal Engine 4's realtime global illumination and and architecture real-time

      Another thing the Eucliedian guys don't get is is that polygons are "good enough." Photorealism is a red herring of computer games. All the photorealism doesn't make a game FUN, only the potential to NOT break immersion. When game design breaks immersion the easiest all the photorealism in the world won't save it -- ironically, it makes it worst! What do you mean I can't climb that fence?

      Cool tech of course with their compression for voxel data, but until they have real time dynamic lighting and global illumination ... *yawn*.

    5. Re:Static lighting only by Somebody+Is+Using+My · · Score: 1

      As important as the rendering engine may be, the major hold-up on making worlds "photorealistic" is that it takes a lot of work on the part of the artists and level designers to create those worlds. While the video harped on how current-generation engines have lots of repeating textures and models, voxel-based engines aren't going to magically solve that problem. Be they polygon- or voxel-based, the worlds will still have to be put together by artists. Even with voxels, the level designers will still reuse trees, boulders, cars and various other assets because it is too expensive (in time, if not money) to create unique items all the time, especially since the reward is so minimal. Game-design - often requiring three or four years of work with hundreds of artists and modelers - is already expensive enough; adding more polygons or voxels will just add to the time and cost.

      The next major graphics revolution will not be from some new engine that produces images through voxels, polygons or ray-casting; it will be with the development of ever-more sophisticated procedural engines which take the workload off the artists, allowing them to create ever more varied and detailed worlds without requiring all the extra effort (and expense). Procedural engines are in their infancy, but in time they can be "trained" to create ever more sophisticated locales without requiring hundreds of man-years of work. Instead, those artists will instead be tasked to add unique flourishes to the generic algorithmically created worlds.

      So I look at TFV and say, "well that's nice for specially built static images" (although honestly, I didn't find the rendered scenes all that convincing, especially when compared to some high-end polygon-based engines) but in the end it isn't going to make that much more of a difference since they are trying to solve the wrong problem facing the industry.

    6. Re:Static lighting only by Creepy · · Score: 1

      First off, many genres of games don't need dynamic global illumination, so that is less of an issue that you make it. In fact, the only games I've played lately that have a global illumination model were Guild Wars 2, the Sims 4 (and yeah, 3 is generally better, but it isn't terrible) and Tomb Raider (2013 version). I have dozens of strategy, adventure, RTS, and racing games that have no global illumination at all. I don't play a lot of shooters outside of the few I know don't make me sick, but yeah that market uses a lot of global illumination.

      Second ray casting and ray tracing both can support forms of dynamic lighting, assuming that's what they're using, and I seriously doubt they are doing something else like marching cubes to extract polygons, The problem id had with it in RAGE (which was also voxel based) was the GPU just couldn't keep up for lights and shadows, so they didn't put it in (and are working with hardware manufacturers to make next-gen cards more voxel light/shadow friendly). Techniques like real time radiosity tend to leave blocky shadows due to needing unacceptably large patch sizes. Real time photon mapping (a faster technique than radiosity) tends to create "grainy" images. AFAIK, there really isn't an acceptable solution yet.

      In college I wrote a radiosity renderer that was certainly not realtime on a 100Mhz processor with some dedicated graphics hardware (an SGI Onyx, I believe), but it rendered scenes with eye catching detail, including dust particles in the air, which is really difficult to simulate with polygon renderers, or at least was last time I tried (but rendering took something like 72 hours... sigh).

      Where polygon rendering tends to look fake to me in that architecture video is with curved metal objects. Something doesn't quite look right, especially with the sinks, but maybe it's because reflections are missing. Some polygon based graphics actually run something akin to mini raytracers in a hardware shader to get reflective curved surfaces (in fact, I've written one for shadows and I could do curved surface reflections with it).

    7. Re:Static lighting only by multimediavt · · Score: 1

      Cool tech of course with their compression for voxel data, but until they have real time dynamic lighting and global illumination ... *yawn*.

      Yup, wake me when it runs something non-static and real-time immersive. Until then get off my lawn and let me go back to sleep.

    8. Re:Static lighting only by kram1032 · · Score: 1

      Look at the corner of the wall in the cathedral. They ARE using the voxel engine in that video. It doesn't look as great as they try to make it sound though. Lots of artifacts from scanning etc. Perhaps it could be made to work if they went in and hand-edited those faults. Meanwhile, in the forest footage, which seems to be scanned at higher resolution, you can see how nothing at all moves. As for animation, a while ago, sadly on a different computer, I actually got a video of an animated hummingbird from them. That was before they went into their current ultra-stealth-mode. Provided that that video was not fake (it certainly didn't look like it), they can indeed do animations just fine. Though I'm not sure why they wouldn't just show that off already. Some guy said he interviewed them and he'd soon release that interview. Maybe that contains more info than those super pretentious, not-as-real-looking-as-they-wish videos.

    9. Re:Static lighting only by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > The problem id had with it in RAGE (which was also voxel based)

      How do you come to THAT conclusion?? The world was represented and stored with a **polygon** mesh.

    10. Re:Static lighting only by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Indeed! Lighting has always been their biggest drawback.

      This! Granted, I used to do a bit of 3D work, and have a more critical eye. but the lighting screams out NOT photorealistic. I could appreciate the imagery, but again, it had no animation, merely camera movement. So in the end, I was pretty unimpressed. At no point did I even think that any of the images were photos.

      Photorealism is a red herring of computer games. All the photorealism doesn't make a game FUN, only the potential to NOT break immersion.

      When I think of Photorealism, for some perverse reason I think of the ancient text game Zork. No photo-anything, yet I'd get and keep total immersion. In games, I liken photorealism to feature creep in office programs. It's great if it serves the purpose.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    11. Re:Static lighting only by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Your reference to text adventures is spot on! We were lost in the imagery that the text prompted our brains to create!

      And yup, agreed that the lack of animation seems conspicuous too!

    12. Re:Static lighting only by exomondo · · Score: 1

      They released a video 6 or 7 years ago and were claiming "yes we can do animation", now many years later they still can't show animation.

    13. Re:Static lighting only by mjwx · · Score: 1

      Indeed! Lighting has always been their biggest drawback. Their static lighting, even using lightmaps, is a FAR cry away from Dynamic Global Illumination.

      I'm much more impressed with Unreal Engine 4's realtime global illumination and and architecture real-time

      Another thing the Eucliedian guys don't get is is that polygons are "good enough." Photorealism is a red herring of computer games. All the photorealism doesn't make a game FUN, only the potential to NOT break immersion. When game design breaks immersion the easiest all the photorealism in the world won't save it -- ironically, it makes it worst! What do you mean I can't climb that fence?

      Cool tech of course with their compression for voxel data, but until they have real time dynamic lighting and global illumination ... *yawn*.

      This, there is too much emphasis on photo realism and not enough on making environments believable and imersive.

      I'd rather a building look a little less real if I can blow a decent hole in it with a rocket launcher where I want to. This is something that surprised me about the original Operation Flashpoint. you could actually blow holes in buildings that you could walk through. Of course only in certain spots and as long as the building had an actual interior (this was just swapping out the model for a pre-damaged one). Battlefield Bad Company 2 did something similar some 12 years later (hey, consoles are catching up right).

      We've jumped the graphics shark, I'm replaying X3:Terran Conflict at the moment and some of the background images are breathtaking, but dont add much beyond being an insta-kill wall if you decide to fly into a planet (OK, they are very nice to look at as you haul an NPC's lazy arse across a sector). What I want are objects I can interact with, give me a building that deforms and collapses, ships and cars that ablate and crumple as they get damaged where you damage them. What we need is a proper deformation engine, not simply swapping out models or bits of models for pre-damaged ones.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    14. Re:Static lighting only by Namarrgon · · Score: 1

      It's not just creation cost, it's storage cost. If every tree is different, you need a complete dataset for every tree.

      Notice how they didn't tell us how big any of those scenes were? The only number they mentioned for a laser-scanned scene was 3 terabytes (presumably after their compression), and I don't see anything close to that making it into a consumer release.

      Still nicely done tech for professional fields; I just take issue with their whole "infinite detail! polygons are DEAD!" hyperbole.

      --
      Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
  6. Impressive but a bit much... by Tyr07 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Impressive but a bit much... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      However, I could still easily tell that these were not real world images.

      I was thinking they weren't blurry enough. The camera pans should have depth-dependent motion blur compensation to make the look more convincing. Since they have the 3D model, this is simply a matter of having the time to program the algorithm - all the parts are well-known. They'll be hearing from Hollywood when they get that and perhaps a bit more accurate lighting (but, hey, throw the thing on a tracing farm for Hollywood money). We're probably not too far from principle location photography consisting of a small crew with a .1mm laser scanner for blockbuster-level movies. Even with the cost of the render farm, it's still cheaper than housing hundreds of people for weeks or months. All the data in this video says we're only 7 Moore's doublings away from realtime photoreal, which is pretty darn amazing.

      While the narrator is talking about a thousand artists on a game, I don't think he's implying that this technology replaces them all. If somebody needs the chandelier in the cathedral to swing ('cause Nightcrawler just ported onto it e.g.) then they will still need modelers to handle all the mechanics. But I bet this tech saves them a bunch of time on modeling and texturing. They can either do with fewer artists (the crawls at the end of blockbusters are insanely long) or the existing number of artists can do more amazing things.

      I'd still rather see five fewer modelers and one more great writer, though.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  7. Building Simulator 2015 by awrc · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  8. Where's my dinosaur? by OzPeter · · Score: 2

    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?
    1. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Where the hell do I find a dinosaur in this day and age so that I can laser scan it?

      Same place the movie studios get one.

      You have your model builders build you a high quality model you can then scan.

      From what I can tell, most stuff done in CG starts out life in the hands of your model builders and scupltors.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Just find whoever is maintaining Slashcode.

    3. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by chaosdivine69 · · Score: 1

      I agree 100% and was just about to chime in and say the same thing. Now especially with 3D printers being cheap, you can print out models of any kind. Scan them in, skin them and go nuts.

    4. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      The museum of natural history?

      If Skyrim has skeleton archers and beserkers, why not skeleton dinosaurs?

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    5. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      You don't scan everything at once. That is not what they appear to be doing.

      Instead you scan each thing seperatly and then put them together as needed. Sort of like what they do with things, for polygon models, today.

      Half of what is being dismissed, is not what they were saying...

      Not that think it will work, they don't give enough info to know.

    6. Re:Where's my dinosaur? by RivenAleem · · Score: 1

      Which comes first, the cloud point model, or the 3D print of the cloud point model!?

  9. Vapor by The+Raven · · Score: 1

    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.
  10. Welcome to the world of photo-shoped video by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Welcome to the world of photo-shoped video by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 1

      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.

      I think Walmart has already solved that design problem. They're called "cankles".

  11. Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

    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?

    1. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > Didn't John Carmack of ID Software vanished voxel-based engines back in the 1990's as being technically inferior

      /sarcasm That is why Mojang was bought for $2.5 billion dollars from Microsoft because it had an inferior voxel engine. :-)

      Oh wait. Voxel engines are NOT the problem. It is the world interaction that either breaks or makes the games. Successful games are about FUN first, graphics second, regardless of what sequelitis EA & Ubisoft is trying to shovel this year.

    2. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by Tharkkun · · Score: 2

      > Didn't John Carmack of ID Software vanished voxel-based engines back in the 1990's as being technically inferior

      /sarcasm That is why Mojang was bought for $2.5 billion dollars from Microsoft because it had an inferior voxel engine. :-)

      Oh wait. Voxel engines are NOT the problem. It is the world interaction that either breaks or makes the games. Successful games are about FUN first, graphics second, regardless of what sequelitis EA & Ubisoft is trying to shovel this year.

      Play control. It's been the defining factor of a good game since the NES days. Without good play control allowing you to interact in a game it will suck. That's why WoW does so well and COD. They are responsive to your actions. The Battlefield games on the other hand and are clunky and slow even if they look realistic.

    3. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      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?

      Yes. He also tweeted about Euclideon in 2011. Apparently he seems to be somewhat optimistic about the concept but sees hardware requirements and production issues to be possible blockers.

    4. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 3, Informative

      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".

    5. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by Creepy · · Score: 1

      Early graphics hardware was designed to texture triangles and didn't contain a bunch of highly parallel general purpose units like today's graphics hardware. Since raycasting (and raytracing) and voxels can be done in parallel, voxels are making more sense again. You can make entirely unique terrain without overlapping and blending a bunch of textures using disk streaming methods and some structure (Carmack used a sparse voxel octtree in RAGE [here's a BSD licensed example of a sparse volume octtree).

      But as I said in other posts, don't expect fancy lighting and shadows until next gen cards are available (in fact, they maybe are by now, but they're way out of my price range).

    6. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Indeed. There are a few more terms that should be included for good game games but I didn't want this to turn into an essay. :-)

      Play Control is definitely one of the key ones. In contradistinction to "floaty controls". Your example of BF feeling clunky while WoW being polished is spot on. I'm not sure I would praise COD, but I can see why you did. It is all relative. :-)

    7. Re:Voxel? We don't no stinking voxel! by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      vanished - having passed out of existence; "vanished civilizations"; nonexistent - not having existence or being or actuality; "chimeras are nonexistent"

      Do you speak English, motherhumper?!

  12. Like last year ... by YoungManKlaus · · Score: 1

    and the year before.

  13. Vaporware/Scam/SnakeOil/Etc. by virgnarus · · Score: 1

    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.

  14. The real truth about photorealistic games. by blueshift_1 · · Score: 1

    So as well all know... the better it looks, the worse the gameplay will be - and the storyline will be even worse.

  15. Time-Lapse photography by tommeke100 · · Score: 1

    Looks like National Geographics already scanned the universe from earth.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  16. Where's the interactivity? by DigitAl56K · · Score: 1

    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?

  17. So many problems by gman003 · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:So many problems by Creepy · · Score: 1

      1) While I don't know specifics, I'm sure streaming, probably oct-trees, and possibly compression/decompression of nodes in the oct-tree.

      2) You need to add or modify the scene in an editor and create animations if you want those. No dynamic lighting or shadows at this time, pending hardware advances (it can be done, just not very well in realtime).

      3) Laser scanning can quickly build rooms identical to real world rooms without having to go in and model everything. The flaw with it is anything behind any blocking objects won't be seen, so I suspect you end up with a partial model of a room. It is great if you want to observe the world from a single point, but most of the time you want to move around (this is my main skepticism so far). It is possible maybe with software to take several laser readings and then assemble the complete room. As I said, though, this is where I'm skeptical.

      At the end of the video they say they can do animations and a demo of it will be coming soon. With them, that means around 2016+, but other companies and researchers have demonstrated voxel rendering and RAGE proves animation can be done with it.

  18. the technology is amazing by Karmashock · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:the technology is amazing by DigitAl56K · · Score: 1

      It's more complicated than that.

      Polygon-based engines support (and modern games heavily depend upon) things like:
      * Dynamic lightling and shadows
      * Deformable environments
      * Transparency
      * Reflections
      * Fast collision detection
      * AI route planning

      Now go back and look at that demo video and tell us where you see those things.

      Also, polygon based engines are still pretty efficient because of:
      * Texture re-use
      * Bump mapping to improve realism
      * Shaders to implement things like motion blur, ambient lighting, etc.
      * LOD maps
      * Spatial partitioning

      Laser mapping is cool because it snapshots a static environment at a moment in time. It would take a lot of effort to produce a polygon model ground-up with the characteristics you'd want for high performance in a modern game. But there appear to be numerous benefits over what has been demonstrated here so far. Perhaps a better approach (for games, at least) would be to work on a project that helps generate or enhance a polygon-based model from the mapping.

    2. Re:the technology is amazing by ledow · · Score: 2

      Don't be fooled by the hype.

      In that same way that some have taken hi-res scans of the Mona Lisa in every spectrum (visible, UV, etc.), there are companies capable of taking these laser scanners and doing just the same - without the voxel bollocks.

      At no point is that engine rendering "hundreds" of voxels in between every point that the laser scanner scanned. What they've done is taken several laser scanned, merged them together to get an almost-3D representation (of the backs of objects the laser can't penetrate etc.) and then found a method (dozens of "I'd do it this way"'s spring to mind as I think of it) to merge them into a set of points, with colouration that a modern graphics workstation can render a static scene from. There are ALREADY people doing this with laser scanners and running the point data to get vectors that you can then plug straight into a conventional 3D engine.

      They've just hyped up their way of doing with some voxel ("3D pixel") bollocks. Watch the demos - you can't manipulate or see a single 3D pixel - because it's not there. The 3D pixel data no doubt existed from the merged laser scanner data but it's just TOO LARGE to store, and they mention that themselves. All they did was do that, then cut out the hidden pixels (hidden surface removal - where have I heard that before?), and combined it with colour data from the laser scanners to provide some kind of "colour" to the pixel (i.e. a texture).

      To then get that into streamable-from-a-hard-disk format, there's either an immense amount of cheating, or an immense amount of bullshit. My guess is that they just put it into a compact format without the unnecessary information and then plug that through a very high-end OpenGL workstation to render those shots. Because, at the end of the day, they haven't made their own graphics cards - they are still rendering data the same as everyone else. And if they are "cheating", they may well be unable to do this in anywhere near real-time and every single pixel change in the scene would require whole new data to be recompressed, optimsed, polygonned, stored and sent to the card.

      There's more than a whiff of bullshit, more than the presenter silly voiceover even, about what they are claiming and what they are doing. They couldn't lie. Not legally. But they aren't telling you the truth.

      And, whenever I saw the "infinite detail" demos, I always wondered why they stopped at about the resolution that a normal game stops. At that point, even when they show you it zoomed it, it looks blocky and you can see individual pixels - I suspect those are individual pixels on a texture on a vectorised surface generated from their data, but nobody but them can prove otherwise. And if that's the case - people have been doing this for decades. Almost any 3D scanner project has something like this - every computer vision student has knocked something similar up in their career. How to get a 3D vector interpretation from 2D pixel data from multiple angles... it's a classic.

      The proof of the pudding, as all these things, is in the eating. If this is going to revolutionise games, check the reviews of the first game that uses it. If you're right, all you lost was a few days of pre-order on a game. If you're wrong, however, you've lost nothing except a bit of pride.

      You can't buy this. You can't use this. You (probably) can't write a game in this engine. So why hype it? But, increasingly, why believe in the hype while those are true?

      Too much fancy posturing and hype and not enough actually getting stuff done. A handful of static scenes aren't impressive - have you ever seen ray-traced Quake or similar evolutions of existing game engines? Looks stunning. Nothing ever came of it because it wasn't what you thought it actually was. By the time PC's were powerful enough, simple 3D graphics techniques were wiping the floor with it.

    3. Re:the technology is amazing by chaosdivine69 · · Score: 1

      I think this has a lot more application than just games. I mean, there's archival of buildings, objects, knowledge, record keeping, procedures, etc. People forget how to manufacture items when record keeping isn't done properly or is lost. Now you can accurately scan objects, deconstruct them virtually and figure out how to rebuild things once those who originally built them have long passed on. It's happened already with engine parts with NASA. Military parts and items from WW1 and WW2 even. Think about ancient things like the Pyramids and other monuments (like the Easter Island statues). Today, we're still trying to figure out how things were done back then because we don't have an accurate blueprint or information to go on. However anything we build today, could and should, be archived in 3D with instructions on how it was completed. It preserves knowledge for generations to come.

      How about law enforcement? Like scanning and matching criminals in 3D in a searchable database is much more revealing than scanning 2D pictures. It would help for non-criminals too. Say someone dies in some fashion and is partially decomposed. But they got scanned when they got/renewed their drivers license, and now the police can accurately see what the person once looked like and can match their identity.

      The more I think about the implications of this, the more excited I become. Couple this technology with 3D printing and you're going to be able to do some really amazing things.

      How about the medical field? They're figuring out how to 3D print items

  19. Dubbing by donscarletti · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Oh, looking at the time I've used up one minute and twenty seconds of this video (audible snigger) and according to Youtube statistics, I've only got about one minute and forty seconds to show you something really interesting and get your attention before the majority of you decide you're bored and move on to something more interesting (slight snigger at the end of sentence). How inefficient of me to use my time to show you all of these video clips of all of these nice real world places we filmed when we should have been showing you some amazing new lifelike computer graphics!.

    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
    1. Re: Dubbing by donscarletti · · Score: 1

      As far as I know he's Australian and a Queenslander at that. It's not his accent anyway, it's just the smug, condescending tone he has.

      --
      When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
  20. You can do it in minecraft by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 1

    You just need to mine a lot of stuff beforehand

  21. Absolute GARBAGE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    "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.

  22. These people AGAIN? by DHalcyon · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. Didnt I read this 20 years ago? by peter303 · · Score: 1

    Voxelization is 4-D calculation. Every five years 16x faster computers double the rendering speed. After 20 years you see significnt progress.

  24. Photogrammetry by acid_andy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Photogrammetry by Ashley+Nixon · · Score: 1

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  25. The OP video was wrong by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:The OP video was wrong by HannethCom · · Score: 1

      One of the reasons the videos look fake is because the lighting is static. Light is never 100% static. Most people's eyes pick up on this and know that there is something wrong, but can't explain why. They just know it is fake because something looks wrong.

      The other problem is that the movement is too linear. Even with a steady cam and rails, you still get small irregularities in movement and shaking. The video was perfectly going from point A to point B with out any flaws at all.

      It is these, and probably other flaws I'm missing that tells us these computer generated scenes are not real, even though they are scans of actual places.

      What I found funny was in Lord of the Rings there was this one fly through a valley. I though it was bad CGI, turns out, even though there was some CGI in the shot, it was the real model elements that looked fake. Going back frame by frame I realize the problem was that too much of the model was in focus and a lack of depth by dust particles was making it look fake.

      --
      Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
  26. Hothardware paying Timothy? by argStyopa · · Score: 1

    ...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
  27. Re:Euclideon? Not them again! by Creepy · · Score: 1

    But John Carmack is the entire opposite, and his previous game, Rage, uses voxels for the entire terrain, so I think the technology is feasible. Really the main problem is lighting as raycasting and raytracing both need very expensive algorithms for soft shadows and soft lighting and the hardware to do it justice is not quite here yet. The methods I've seen for realtime result in either blocky shadows or grainy lighting.

  28. Re:Euclideon? Not them again! by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

    Ofc the technology is feasable. It is just not 'en vouge'.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
    An over 20 year old game, featuring an voxel engine. It was a spearhead game at that time. Super realistic helicopter simulation (as far as I can tell, I have no helicopter license).
    A bit to easy to play perhaps ... but I surely spend 1000 hours playing that game.

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  29. Re:Euclideon? Not them again! by exomondo · · Score: 1

    Ofc the technology is feasable. It is just not 'en vouge'.

    It's precisely what he said, while the basic premise is feasible (and demonstrated in your link and with games like Minecraft and the various sparse voxel octree demos on youtube) the issue is that dynamic lighting for raytracing and animation of high resolution voxel meshes is prohibitively expensive.

  30. Vaporware, meanwhile Path tracing is getting bette by BillKaos · · Score: 1

    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.

  31. Great for maps by duck_rifted · · Score: 1

    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.