Tuesday 9 August 2011

Unlimited detail engine?

This has been making the headlines across the Internet so I thought I would post something about it too (despite the many reservations/criticisms of this that have emerged). This is Brisbane-based Euclideon's video of its engine, which showcases the replacement of traditional 3D polygonal graphics with point cloud data (i.e. floating atoms) in order to add incredible amounts of detail to the limited capacities of the current polygon approach, all in real-time.



This has sparked off controversy as it's quite a bold claim (and a huge shift from the way of currently doing things). People such as John Carmack have claimed that it could work but not on current technology and would also lead to very challenging production issues. There are also other unanswered questions (how would animation or physics be incorporated in this radical shift from polygons to a new approach etc.) so at the moment this has yet to convince many people. It will be interesting to see Euclideon release something more concrete on this in the next few months.

2 comments:

SiENcE said...

How does the technique work behind that? Do you know how it works?

I can't see any animations even in the trees.

Christos Gatzidis said...

There's a lot of scepticism around this and given the sparsity of information about how the technique works it is understandable. Animation definitely is one issue. Hopefully the people behind it will make more information available soon...