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