Unlimited detail rendering technology

[Manu]

I came.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=player_embedded

[Sarah]

It’s a scam!

Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

Source: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam


Yesterday we posted a video from Euclideon – a Australian company that claims it can revolutionise video game graphics, increasing visual fidelity by 100,000. This morning we spoke to Euclideon's CEO Bruce Dell – the man Markus Persson calls a "Snake Oil Salesman" – to ask a few questions regarding Euclideon's ‘Infinite Detail' technology.

"I think what I would like to make clear is that this is not the finished product," says Bruce Dell, CEO of Euclideon. "We feel like a mother who put cookies in the oven, and now everyone is surrounding the oven chanting ‘are they ready yet? Are they ready yet?'

"Give us time and the cookies will taste just fine!"

Instantly we recognise the voice - it's the voice from that video. The voice that claimed Euclideon could revolutionise video game graphics, the voice that claimed a new technology called ‘Infinite Detail' could increase visual fidelity by a factor of 100,000. The man Markus ‘Notch' Persson, the creator of Minecraft, openly called a "Snake Oil Salesman".

It's 9am in Brisbane, and we've just woken said Snake Oil Salesman up.

"No! No, this isn't a hoax," Bruce Dell laughs, in response to our first, obvious question. "If this was a hoax then we've convinced the Australian government it was a hoax. We've convinced our board of directors and investors it's a hoax!
"We have a government grant – so no, it is not a hoax! We have real time demonstrations."

The response to Euclideon's demonstration video, which we posted yesterday was instantaneous and fairly mixed. Some were cynical, some called it a hoax, others were more receptive – but it was hardly a convincing demonstration. Markus Persson, writing on his own personal blog, was perhaps the most scathing in his criticism.

"They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding," wrote Persson. "It's a scam."

But if it's a scam, then the Australian Government is the mark, having invested 2 million dollars into Euclideon and its technology.


LOOKING FOR SNOW WHITE

We asked Bruce to explain the technology and how it worked.

"Well, basically anyone who is technical is going to say you can't run that many polygons," he began, "but in the past we were trying to explain it in simple terms so people could understand.

"A good analogy would be this: imagine you go to a library to find a book - say… Snow White. Imagine you go to a library and those books aren't on the shelf; they're all lying on the ground. At the moment systems that run point cloud data are doing that, they're putting every point on the screen and there is no order to it. Now imagine you go to a library and all the books are on the shelf and in order – you go to the ‘S' Section, then look for ‘SNO' and it isn't long before you've found the book you need.

"One system is looking at thousands of books," he continues, "and the other system is looking at ten labels. That's the basis of a search algorithm like Google or Yahoo – they sort through all the knowledge in the world really quickly because it's categorised.

"We made a search algorithm, but it's a search algorithm that that finds points, so it can quickly grab just one atom for every point on the screen."

According to Bruce Dell, it's all about efficiency.

"So think about the difference," he says. "If you had all of the points you are seeing on the screen, like in our demo, it's going to take forever. You'll be waiting for a long time. But if you're grabbing only one for every pixel on the screen, then you don't have a trillion dots, you have… well, pick a resolution and do the maths!

"That's the difference. In layman's terms that's how we're doing what we're doing. The workload is so small that at the moment we're running software just fine with real time demonstrations and we're still optimising, because we keep finding more efficient ways to do this."

That appears to be all well and good, but most criticism from the games industry has come from the detail Euclideon has been a little more coy on: animation, physics …

"[V]oxels are horrible for doing animation," wrote Markus Persson in his aforementioned blog, "because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It's possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it's not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do."

According to Bruce Dell, the reason no animations have been shown is simple – Infinite Detail is still a work in progress.

"We have animation," claims Bruce, confidently. "We're certainly going to do a lot more work in that area. I have faith that you'll find our animation quite satisfactory, but we have no intention of releasing anything in that department until it looks absolutely 100% because if we release it now, I assure you that no-one will take it as ‘that's where we're up to and we're still working on it', they'll just scream ‘it's not perfect yet! They can't make it perfect! This can't compare to polygons!'"

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

We spoke to an Australian physics engine developer with experience of Bruce Dell and Euclideon. His company dealt with Bruce Dell years ago, when Euclideon was seeking funding for the Infinite Detail project. Said company declined to fund the project, citing issues with memory management, particularly when it came to animations.

According to him any live demonstrations given by Euclideon featured poor art and assets, so it was difficult to gauge precisely how hardware intensive Infinite Detail actually was.

The developer in question asked not to be named, but his primary concern wasn't with the ‘Infinite Detail' tech itself, which he claimed could work with adjustments – the issue was the toolset and the investments required to move an entire industry across to a new standard. Currently every game developer in the world is using tools dedicated to polygons – convincing an entire industry to toss years of investment and research would be a difficult task indeed, especially with an unproven technology.

Bruce Dell disagrees with that assertion.

"I see comments from people saying the games industry will never use this," he begins. "Well, this industry isn't quite so old and stubborn. The games industry is actually quite open and we're in contact with quite a lot of players in that industry."

According to Bruce, the sheer efficiency of his technology will win developers over.

"The present polygon system has got quite a few problems, but not in terms of graphics. Polygons are not really scalable between platforms – if I were to make a character on a PlayStation 3, I can't put him on the Nintendo Wii because he uses too many polygons, so I have to completely rebuild him. Imagine we weren't doing a polygon game, say we were doing a 2D game, if I drew a character on the PlayStation, he's just a bitmap image – this can easily be rescaled. You could do it in Microsoft Paint! ‘Infinite Detail' data is like a 2D bitmap image in that rescaling its size is easy, whereas polygons can't scale like that.

"The big thing is – if you make a game using the present polygon system, you have to rebuild it to rescale it. You don't have to do that with Unlimited Detail.

"The industry's response was, basically, what you have is really good, you do not understand that the industry is used to using polygons and our tools are very good. I took a look at those tools and thought yes, they are very good. We want to get things to the stage where the artists don't have to change anything, just that now they're using unlimited detail."

Not all developers have openly dismissed Bruce Dell and his ‘Infinite Detail' technology, but even the most optimistic have opted for a ‘wait and see' approach. John Carmack, for example, mentioned Euclideon briefly on his Twitter account claiming that "production issues would be challenging" but wondered if the tech might viable "a couple of years from now".

Even Bruce Dell himself admits that he needs time. Come back later, he says, perhaps sooner than we think, and we might get the final product.

"Basically we're in the middle of a trilogy and this is like our Empire Strikes Back," he explains. "We disappeared for so long that I think everyone thought ‘oh, they're dead'. So we thought we'll release a one year report, tell everyone we're alive and then disappear again.

"The intention is to come out again, once we've finished, and then we'll be releasing real time demonstrations."

Source: http://kotaku.com/5827192/euclideon-creator-swears-infinite-detail-is-not-a-hoax

It's garbage so far.

[Shidoshi]

They don't really explain explain how they make this unlimited detail run that fast.

Anyway, looks like we are kind of moving in the same path that art did, towards the lifelike until we get so close that it's no fun anymore to just copy real life. Then we'll be back to making fictional and new designs/styles.

[Link]

That's pretty cool.

[Lozmaster]

That video is so full of shit. Sarah already covered pretty much everything with the quote from notch, but I can't help but raise an eyebrow every time the video compared what is obviously prerendered footage with real time game stuff

[Nikkey]

That video is so full of pomegranate. Sarah already covered pretty much everything with the quote from notch, but I can't help but raise an eyebrow every time the video compared what is obviously prerendered footage with real time game stuff

Yeah. Nothing new here - this is old technology.

[Zelkova]

Dammit! Sarah beat me to it! F555555

[Derosis]

And you believe every word Notch says as well?

(I'm throwing the topic off a bit, but it's still in tune with it. Get off my back if you think i'm defending the guy, I am not. I'm not mentally handy capped; I know how voxels work and know they've been around for a while).

[Sarah]

Notch made good, valid points and the guy did a really terrible job defending his product. His main defense was "THIS COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE A SCAM BECAUSE WE GOT THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT TO INVEST IN US." That just makes the Australian government wasteful; it doesn't legitimize his claims. Until he provides some fluid animation algorithms he shouldn't expect anyone to buy this. He's not the first person who's tried to sell voxels like this.

[Devil]

Best looking voxel game so far: Comanche 4 (2001)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QiqbbE06nk

Best known voxel game so far: Minecraft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBmUO5YUPyI

It's not really something new, it's just the these people try it again, 10 years later with more powerful PC's... ;)

[Stereo]

Minecraft doesn't really do voxels, if you stick your head in a block you can see that it's just drawing the surfaces :p

[Devil]

Minecraft doesn't really do voxels, if you stick your head in a block you can see that it's just drawing the surfaces :pI thought it's also possible to combine Voxels and Pixels, not sure how, but somewhere I read it's called Poxels (!?).