procedural textures, ProFX on gamasutra
category: general [glöplog]
Those are some very nice procedural textures indeed.
The Gamasutra article is about this site:
http://www.profxengine.com/index.php
I wonder if they patended the operations used by many coders in the scene, like in Aardbei's and Blackpawn's texture generators.
Comments?
The Gamasutra article is about this site:
http://www.profxengine.com/index.php
I wonder if they patended the operations used by many coders in the scene, like in Aardbei's and Blackpawn's texture generators.
Comments?
AFAIK, you can't patent anything that's already been done by someone else, so if they've patented something used in other apps, it would be void. ;)
Textures look nice, would be interesting to read a bit more on how they're computed. Can't find an awfully lot of information on their site.
Textures look nice, would be interesting to read a bit more on how they're computed. Can't find an awfully lot of information on their site.
false. you can't patent anything that isn't new - in patents jargon: that isn't patented already.
if you have proof that you were doing it before, you have the right to continue doing it tho.
if you have proof that you were doing it before, you have the right to continue doing it tho.
When applying for a patent _all_ prior art in the public domain can invalidate your application, not just patents (eg papers). By prior it means prior to the date you invented the idea or the date you submitted the application, depending under which patent system you are applying. Of course the patent officers dont find everything :-) which is why some patents are later made void in court.
The confusion comes from the fact that lets say, gencha, has a texture system he _hasnt_ made public. It uses the same technique as profxengine which is then granted a patent as there was no public record of the technique. If gencha can show that his non-public system used the same technique prior to the priority date, he can continue to use it. If not, its pay the license baby.
The confusion comes from the fact that lets say, gencha, has a texture system he _hasnt_ made public. It uses the same technique as profxengine which is then granted a patent as there was no public record of the technique. If gencha can show that his non-public system used the same technique prior to the priority date, he can continue to use it. If not, its pay the license baby.
mmmm, yes, that's what I thought as well. :)
Looking more closely at the picture, it doesn't seem as advanced as they would like you to think it is, and it can most likely be done with the "usual" magic tricks.
As far as I can see:
The brick pattern is relatively straight-forward to do, and is far from being "revolutionary" since there are several articles about this in lots of articles and books out there, and has been for a while.
The "fence-grid" thing looks remarkably similar to FR-08's end-part with a gradient layer blended over it. ;)
The bolts is one of the easiest texgen tricks I can think of, it's basically just a matter of plotting pixels within a given radius on a given 2d-coord.
The shading details looks like perlin noise, and the rectangular shapes aren't exactly rocket science either.
It's just a matter of doing basic shapes, and controlling the size and position of them.
Now, with that said, even though it looks like old tricks, it may be that they use new, faster algorithms or something. I doubt it though. :p
Looking more closely at the picture, it doesn't seem as advanced as they would like you to think it is, and it can most likely be done with the "usual" magic tricks.
As far as I can see:
The brick pattern is relatively straight-forward to do, and is far from being "revolutionary" since there are several articles about this in lots of articles and books out there, and has been for a while.
The "fence-grid" thing looks remarkably similar to FR-08's end-part with a gradient layer blended over it. ;)
The bolts is one of the easiest texgen tricks I can think of, it's basically just a matter of plotting pixels within a given radius on a given 2d-coord.
The shading details looks like perlin noise, and the rectangular shapes aren't exactly rocket science either.
It's just a matter of doing basic shapes, and controlling the size and position of them.
Now, with that said, even though it looks like old tricks, it may be that they use new, faster algorithms or something. I doubt it though. :p
...and the above comment was off course directed at
Actually, looking at the screens of the content creation tool for this, I have to say that it looks a lot like the visual stacking principles of a certain intro tool. :o
It says that the patented technology is for 'procedural textures that can be "locally edited"', in other words, you can manually edit the bits of the texture you don't like and it will remain procedural. I'm sure someone posted a link here a week or two back about some academic who'd worked on exactly that - one of his examples was a texture consisting of random-looking sticks, except in one corner the sticks had been dragged around to spell out some text. Hopefully someone remembers the page I'm talking about... would be interesting to see if this is actually the same guy.
Anyhow - you can patent anything you like, as long as you have better lawyers than all the people who invented it before.
Anyhow - you can patent anything you like, as long as you have better lawyers than all the people who invented it before.
Whops I missed that part. I take back everything I said. :p
Now that you have HD-DVD and Bluray with 10s of GB of memory they start using procedural textures?
Right.
Right.
Some time ago I read about a really interesting looking method for texture generation in wich you give an initial image, and the method divides the image in 8x8 sections, then every section is calc by a procedural function (similar to Fourier transform). I don't remember the name of it...
non-moving video?
texel: JPEG is the name. :)
well, there are algorithms like this one or [url=http://cg.cs.uni-bonn.de/docs/publications/2005/nicoll-2005-fractional.pdf]this one[url] that *actually* generate textures from a sample image :)
