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[Modulo]

However I am also concerned about the ability to animate and manipulate the point cloud data in large scale (at least until PC's are powerful enough, which we are almost there I think).

if you poke around on the website you will see some proof of concept video from an earlier version which shows animation. It's crude looking but fairly smooth.

[foxfiles]

has anyone checked if they issued some patent(s) on their tech?
If I'd be them and had found something so revolutionary, either algorithmic or other super smart method or process,
and had been granted 2.2 Millions $US from my Gov,
1rst thing I'd do would be to protect my innovation ASAP... 
cause of course such a claim is not only impacting gaming, but medical imagery stuff and other scientific apps.

[PRiME]

I'm pretty sure they would have, however the technology is based off point cloud system so I think they only patented their search engine system for it.

[foxfiles]

sure they cannot patent voxels or point cloud, however Yes they have at least one patent, I've found it but I don't want to do more now...

[PRiME]

We probably won't be hearing much more till another year anyway. See what they have to offer then. I will actually be living in the same city as them so maybe I will drop by to check it out sometime.

[foxfiles]

Just to give some precision about what I was saying above : I looked more seriously and NO, at this time they have no active patent.
I see that they tried several times to issue one but the status is now or elapsed or withdrawn. All that sounds a bit weird.

[PRiME]

Its their project, not mine, I really don't care. As always I will wait and see if anything progresses in a year. If I never hear from them again then sure it be nice to know what happened (like owner took the 1million and ran LOL).

[foxfiles]

I do agree with you, it is their project and I think that if they got helped with money from their country Govt. there is surely something serious behind.
Maybe they did not patent because, or it is not "patent-able" or it is a strategy to hide the most what they have found, as long as it is not mature.
Wait and see...

[PRiME]

Its probably a wip, I will drop by their office sometime and ask the man himself what the deal is and let you know.

[angrypig]

First i really don't like the hype around the UT because there is always a catch, especially if someone doesn't release any papers or something about the technology. And please don't argue with such stupid things like patents there are lots of game studios that produce papers with revolutionary algorithms every year without patents.

I believe that a voxel engine can be done on current HW, but there will be limitations and problems like high memory demands, problems with deforming objects etc. Without clever streaming it's not possible to create scenes comparable to current games, because it just won't fit into memory. It can be partially solved with a procedural generator but as you all know such generators can't be used for everything, and there is no such thing like a magical compression that can solve the problem, compression always comes with quality issues.

In my opinion the future is in hybrid engines where the specific technology is used for specific task. Voxels have a few nice properties like implicit occlusion, transparency, LODs, these properties can be very useful is some cases.

Also i don't think the triangles are obsolete, currently they are the most efficient and the fastest way how to render a 3D scene, and polygon rendering is still evolving. A good example is SM5 with hardware tessellation controlled by shaders. SM5 cards are able to render scenes that have film quality, and UT is very far from it and they won't reach such quality until they switch to GPU.

There are other projects that are farther than UT and aren't afraid to talk about limitations and problems with specific technology because we all know there is no such thing like a magic god formula that will solve all problems of the 3D rendering...

Very nice project from our neighborhood Atomontage


GigaVoxels


Sparse Voxel Octree


CentiLeo GPU Render


VoxLOD: Boeing 777 (337M triangles)


And finally my favorite project, which is also openly discussing problems with super high detailed scenes. There are problems not only with memory (this issue can be partially avoided with streaming) but also with authoring tools, 3D scanners are not the solution and they are often used for polygon models too, Artists have to work with such objects making corrections modifications placement into scene etc. And if your scene has 100 billion polygons/voxels it is big problem...

Mega Meshes - Modelling, rendering and lighting a world made of 100 billion polygons

[PRiME]

Well the UD tech demos I would think use up very very little memory. You must remember game titles use same textures and objects over and over and over so I believe the whole memory and storage issue is a null. The real problem I predict is complex or large deformation, however like I said there are many things the engine can be used for so a hybrid may be the way it goes until faster PC's come out that can render entire planets with such systems.

[foxfiles]

AngryPig, my intention was not to put you or anyone else under pressure or under questioning regarding this very hypothetical techno from this UD guys.
I would say that my goal was instead of trying to reassure you in investigating a bit about them and look for eventual "patent" they would have filed.

We and I know very well that you are very aware of all the advancements in your CGI domain...
without doubt about your awareness, seeing the impressive work you are doing.

But talking about patents, I do not know a lot about the gaming industry, but if you say that many revolutionary discoveries are freely put, let's say "on the market", by the studios who made these discoveries, well I must say that I am missing something.  Because it is not the case in other industries...

As long as I know,  most of the "opened" research work is being conducted, at least in my part of Europe, by people employed by Public (not Private) Organisms, Research Institutes, Universities Labs, Schools and so on : if they issue freely their results, it is also because it is their way to justify the public money they spend.
And they are also required to do so, like Scientists who must publish to continue to receive money (from us, tax-payers) to fuel their work...

Now I shut my mouth, at least in this thread.

 

[ZeosPantera]

Someone released the Angry in angry pig.

{That is his longest post to date btw}

[angrypig]

There is no way to store 2M point cloud into very little memory. This is the trickery used in their presentation, non-developers think they have something magic. No they don't, but it is hard to explain to someone who don't have the programming background.

SVO is one of the most efficient way how to deal with voxels memory problem and it still needs more memory than polys and textures together. (read the paper about it and do some math yourself). And what is more important the polygon model with the same memory footprint has much higher detail than voxeled one and the polygon model can be easily tessellated in real-time with very little performance penalty.

SVO from Nvidia: http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~samuli/publications/laine2010tr1_paper.pdf

Hmm in our game there are very few repeating textures, there are ~1000 unique textures for terrain. Yes there are some textures for objects/trees which can be repeated but instancing is useful and efficient feature but in case of UT it is necessarily due to memory and performance reasons. Another nice example is the Rage with virtual texturing (no repeating textures).

There are other limitations in their presentation that are obvious to all 3D developers. I just tried to show you other projects like Atomontage which is much further then UT and doesn't have to hide/hyping anything or Mega Meshes that showing problems of very high detailed scenes and memory issues...

What they really invented is mega instancing, they should make Repeatcraft where the whole world will be made from same rotated rocks elephants and other nice atomized objects from their repertoire.

Please don't believe in magic...it works in fairy-tales only...

AngryPig, my intention was not to put you or anyone else under pressure or under questioning regarding this very hypothetical techno from this UD guys.

No problem if the discussion stays constructive...

But talking about patents, I do not know a lot about the gaming industry, but if you say that many revolutionary discoveries are freely put, let's say "on the market", by the studios who made these discoveries, well I must say that I am missing something. Because it is not the case in other industries...

SW patents are evil destroying the industry and slowing down the progress (the protection time should be much shorter in this time and this is not the only problem...), we are happy there is at least a small part of the industry where the patents are omitted. It is mainly because if we found interesting way how to do stuff someone can take it improve it and use it and we can do the same and the result is that we can use more than we invent which save time for everyone. Another important thing is new algorithms are part of marketing in game industry... (mega texture is very good example)

Now I shut my mouth, at least in this thread.

Please don't, just keep the discussion constructive...

[Juggernautz]

Yep. In the industry, most companies will have their own proprietary engine or toolsets which are considered 'secret', and most definitely are not allowed to be shown around to the public or staff from other companies. Those companies or people that are capable of coming up with some great new tech, shader or AI algorithm will usually keep it for internal development, or license it out for other companies to use for a (usually quite large) fee. Some examples of this are UDK, SpeedTree, PhysX or Havok etc. Middleware. However, the source code (the real nuts and bolts of the program) will usually remain 100% secret property of the original developer.

HOWEVER, there are numerous websites and conferences around the world where these kinds of technical discussions are held and ideas are often shared fairly freely. For example, John Carmack (despite his huge ego) has given numerous talks at events like GDC where he discusses the technical details and some of the inner workings of their new engine tech. Similarly, at these conferences, you can usually get vast amounts of detail about how various companies handle art assets and their pipeline, what metrics they find useful, development post-mortems etc etc. This information is undoubtedly extremely valuable. Awesomely, these discussions are becoming more and more open with the booming indie games industry, and the availability of cheap SDKs (Software Development Kits) and standard scripting languages. Modding communities and user created content are also a great driver for software advancement, and it should be obvious that allowing modding dramatically increases the shelf life of many titles.

Aaaaand.... that's the end of my rant.