ideas for TAtmosphere

[Darkhog]

In case of voxels and animation of them, I think we need to stop thinking in terms of skeletal animation. We should treat them as... 3d sprites. In 2d sprites, you can't move thing by 0.5 pixel, so why we are trying to move voxels/rotate them by fraction of voxel size? We shouldn't.

//edit: And I'm still waiting for Euclideon's technology to go public. If it is as awesome as they say it is, it should revolutionize graphics. Just imagine Crysis, even first one, running on nothing more than i7 and intel's gpu.

[phibermon]

Euclideon is a total scam It's just an oct-tree voxel engine that's searched from the leaf nodes instead of the root from what I've heard them say about it. It has all the same downfalls I've already described. All that has been seen is a voxel engine demo with no *proof* of what hardware it's running on (would it of killed them to go into the device manager and show us?).

Trust, total scam. There are professors of mathematics, graphic algorithm experts, that have dedicated years of research into voxel engine rendering techniques, it's from these kind of people that the concept came from in the first place, first demonstrated at Siggraph.

You can't just skip over the mathematics, they're lying, we're talking hardcore computational theory, it can be shown that you need to do the calculations without even doing the calculations.

Plus any form of interaction with that voxel world can only happen in the classical oct-tree way, so essential things needed to make it a game engine will force it to work in the classical sence anyway.

It's no good rendering anything for a game if you can't calculate it's position, you don't want to walk thru walls and you'd like your bullets to hit your target.


And even if a bunch of coders really have some amazing new way of culling visible data that the worlds finest minds couldn't think of, the amount of data storage required to store a voxel world? say the biggest quake3 level, at a voxel resolution so you could walk right up to a wall and voxels were one pixel in size, you're talking many terabytes of data.

And to top it off go and read any technical info they've released, it's how they say it and what they don't say, total frauds just looking to get a government grant, which they did.

nearly 3 years ago this was all said, where is that tech? where's the updates? where's the latest videos? Their aren't any.

Even if they really genuinly thought they were onto something, then they have no doubt hit the inevitable conclusion that their solution is not viable when all required functionality is concidered.

[SilverWarior]

In case of voxels and animation of them, I think we need to stop thinking in terms of skeletal animation. We should treat them as... 3d sprites. In 2d sprites, you can't move thing by 0.5 pixel, so why we are trying to move voxels/rotate them by fraction of voxel size? We shouldn't.

Since most voxels have size greater than 1x1x1 pixels it is nothing wrong when you are moving them for a raction of their size.
As for skeletal animation of voxel based models you can always replace a series of voxels with a proceduraly generated 3D model to save processing time.
For instance you have a character made from voxels. Each character part is made from searies of voxels which you then join into a 3D model. You then atach this 3D model to skeletal bone for your character animation. After that everything is almost the same as with 3D character models.

If you want to see some nice voxel based character animations I would recomend taking a look at game Timber and Stone: http://www.timberandstonegame.com/
In Timber and Stone evrything except for fire particles is made with voxels.

[phibermon]

And I've just watched all the latest stuff from them, they guy makes several large terminology errors, describes absolutely nothing new, claims that a textured poly mesh can be converted to unlimited detail, when it's limited to begin with. Then he gives a measurement in cubic mm for the accuracy. It's total crap, models or any kind of poly data has no inheirant scale, it could be 1 meter or a million, it totally depends on what scale factor was chosen for units. there's no standard, to suddenly claim a resolution in mm in this context screams somebody that doesn't know what they're talking about, certainly not the developer of the worlds most advanced graphics engine.

[phibermon]

Since most voxels have size greater than 1x1x1 pixels it is nothing wrong when you are moving them for a raction of their size.
As for skeletal animation of voxel based models you can always replace a series of voxels with a proceduraly generated 3D model to save processing time.
For instance you have a character made from voxels. Each character part is made from searies of voxels which you then join into a 3D model. You then atach this 3D model to skeletal bone for your character animation. After that everything is almost the same as with 3D character models.

If you want to see some nice voxel based character animations I would recomend taking a look at game Timber and Stone: http://www.timberandstonegame.com/
In Timber and Stone evrything except for fire particles is made with voxels.

It's no good I'm afraid, yes you can attach voxel oct-tree structures to a skeletal node and produce animation like this.

But when you're talking call of duty level of quality, where the join between arm and body is smoothly interpolated between the bone states, you can't do that with voxels.

You can store the animation like a sprite, frame by frame but this adds a whole new set of problems, first the storage required for a detailed character with the amount of animations we see in a game like GTA, would be totally beyond anything we'll have even in the next 2 years. Next the animation might be dynamic (like GTA) so fixed animations are again useless.

You can animate with polys then convert the polys to voxels, but in realtime? and why not just use the polys?

[SilverWarior]

But when you're talking call of duty level of quality, where the join between arm and body is smoothly interpolated between the bone states, you can't do that with voxels.

That I agree becouse for such level of detail you would need to dynamically change the size of some voxels and this would result in much more processing required than when using polys.

[laggyluk]

main problem in voxel engine would be animating objects as phibermon pointed. here's pretty good explanation why http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNZtx3ijjpo (maybe in other part, my connection is slow so couldn't check)
btw anyone played ID Software's Rage? terrain there was rendered using voxels if I recall correctly. Maybe future is mixing both polygons and voxels as they shine in different domains.
Still for our 'indie' purposes high detail voxel engine is no better than traditional one. both take a mountain of money to shape decent content