pouët.net

in general, commercial stuff + IT sucks, no mater which technology is used or who promote it...

Talking big, of course, but the renderings are not ugly at all.

It reminds me of the game Outcast:

The game was quite power expensive IIRC, and the voxel technique was not used much after it.

Another game with a funny (but not used afetrward) rendering technique, based on ellipsoids, is Ecstatica:

Outcast is legendary - modern FX eons ago - DOF e.t.c. - still looks awesome today - started playing it again (u need to get patch 2 to run it under windows).

more gumph from UD - interesting

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=105528666147262&topic=28

and a animation vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8A4bsfKH8

full text from the FB group posting:

Is it ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8A4bsfKH8

Received this video from UD today, along with a short but informative email, posted below. Cheers guys !


Thank you for your interest in Unlimited Detail,

We are at present building the commercial SDK and Demonstrations.

The planned form of the SDK is as follows:

IMPORT OF DATA:
Data can be imported from a variety of sources. We expect to directly
support some popular scanning and modelling applications and file
formats for both point cloud and polygon style data. The SDK will
provide a simple way to import data from any source.

ENGINE:
The Unlimited Detail Engine displays 3D models or groups of models
which may be positioned, rotated, scaled and viewed from any direction
and with any projection. The technique allows geometry of unlimited
complexity to be displayed at interactive frame rates without the need
for 3D acceleration hardware.

ANIMATION:
Unlimited Detail supports Animation. (Please see attached video clip
of an articulated bird. And remember this is a simple first attempt
for R&D purposes so it doesn’t look “polished”)
In addition to animation, we will be supporting dynamic and
destructible environments.

MEMORY STORAGE
The Unlimited Detail rendering technology does not require significant
system memory to run. The geometry may be compressed, instanced and
streamed to allow the best mix of runtime and disk based storage as
well as support unique geometry.

SHADOWS:
Unlimited Detail will have both real-time shadows and pre-calculated
lighting as well as a variety of advanced lighting options.

DEMONSTRATIONS AND DOCUMENTATION:
Demonstrations will be available for a great variety of industries,
mining, architecture, science, medical, games, and
movies/entertainment. In all cases these demonstrations will use
industry specific data and will be downloadable from the website.

PRICE :
Pricing will be chosen in such a way that this technology can be
accessed by all, including those in developing nations were graphics
cards are not commonplace and software based 3D graphics are vital to
industry purposes.

MAILING LIST AND WEBSITE:
Nearer to completion we will be releasing short newsletters to inform
interested parties of our progress, we will also have a new website in
a few months as there have been comments about the inadequacy of the
current website, whilst we do agree with the comments please
understand we are primarily creators of technology and the recent
media wave was unexpected. Please expect a more commercial incarnation
of our public image soon enough.
Downloadable Demos will be available before the SDK release date

Thank you for your interest.

Kindest Regards
Bruce Robert Dell

i wonder, does the animation works like sprite animation, with 'voxel frames',or is it based on transformation of a model, like in polygon animation?
i believe the latter would be the best solution, but the bird video looks like it's done with frames to me.

yup looks like static keyframes with no interpolation

Which decade is he living in? Graphics for machines without a GPU?? 15 years ago that might have been something he could sell, but I doubt that such a market exists at all today, even in "developing nations". Even mobile phones have GPUs these days...

there are no gpus in tv games (you know, the kiddie-ones that require 4 AA-batteries and a SCART-input on to the tv).

however, i bet that it wouldn't make financially sense to add UNLIMITED DETAILS to Bob the Builder, Scooby Doo and Handy Manny games for 3-6 year olds...

i doubt it would make financial sense to add a high end CPU to those things instead of a $5 gpu either ;)

Mmm. Because the one thing we've learned from the PC demoscene in the last couple of years is that traditional CPU-bound algorithms can never be ported to the GPU...? :-)

isn't the reign of the GPU supposed to end any soon ?

ah damn, no more Larrabee :S

disregarding the merits or lackthereof of the technology, i think hes making a real error in saying things like "it's not polished because it was just done for r&d" or talking about what "will be done" rather than what's finished now -for a product he's trying to sell. it's of little wonder everyone thinks he's full of shit when the demos are so ugly and unpolished and nothing seems concrete.
show the real deal or don't show it at all. spend a few thousand dollars and get a proper 3d artist in to do something real with it - it'd be well worth the investment.

he could easily find an artist willing to do some good demos for free in return for a reasonable % of the profits if he can do a convincing enough demo. Perhaps the demo isn't convincing enough, or he's wanting to keep all the money for himself? If it's the latter, it's also a mistake I think.

I think a more serious problem with his presentation is the totally irritating tone of voice he keeps using. Also when he's talking about the shortcomings in the rendering, like it's below him to fix the shadow bugs.

NOT TO MENTION THE MUSIC!!!

psonice: Royalties to tec-demo artists? Are you INSANE? That's like giving stock-options to the washing-lady...

kusma: between having no cash and butt-ugly artwork and never selling it, and giving 5% of the company to a decent artist who'll really help sell it, better give the stock options to that wash lady :) There are better options if he has some cash or friends, if not I'm just saying he has no excuses if the product is as good as he thinks ;)

i honestly wish he would succeed, a voxel comeback would make me laugh :D

yeah the music/voice is the product of ten years in a vacuum scoring a madman solution - and living in brisneyland probably doesn't help :)

The anim sucks major ass - no backgrounds and no smoothies :( which ever way you look at it - nothing is solid till we get a .exe.

I think he's using a bottom up tree - he said in a interview that :
"
9.) What exactly is point cloud data, and how does it work?

Think little 3d atoms, X,Y,Z and some property coordinates like colour and texture.

However we store it all in a zipped format that recycles any common structures. So its all nice and small in the end."

which is exactly what happens with a bottom up self referencing tree - u can search for common node paths!

Yeah I want it to succeed also (well actually I just want the "pure" algo - fed up with 2.5d gpu cards and all the horrid bodges that go with 'em )

The technique most likely could be ported. But that is not the product he is trying to sell. He doesn't even make any claims of portability to GPUs. On the contrary, he claims the GPU is superfluous, because his technique runs fast enough on the CPU. That viewpoint alone could explain his difficulties in selling this.

It runs at low res compared to a GPU, at low framerates compared to a GPU. That's likely running on a pretty fast system, and it probably means the CPU is 100% busy leaving no time for the rest of the software using it to run without lowering res/framerate even further. That can't be helping too :)

By the time the software is ready, I guess the hardware will have caught up. But then the GPU hardware will be massively more powerful too.

rasmus: Who are you to deny Bob The Builder UNLIMITED BALLS!?

smash: Stop talking about _any_ of that stuff (tech or business "strategy") as if it was intended to make sense. Or are you looking for yet another way to do deferred zombie rendering?!

hyde: who are you?

kusma: you should always pay your artists! (assuming their work makes it into the final release)

no I think it was running on a shitty old laptop (no ghz but I recon 1-2ghz) - 1 core @ 1024x600 (resolution wtf?) @ 28.1fps
coded in C by someone who didn't know what a data cache was. Which is all good news - I found another interview where BD said that they hope to get double the speed when they start to optimize. Greg somebody joined and is now CTO in charge of optimizing/vid card support (guess that means handling blitting to vid mem?).

ID tech 6 is very very similar (well this is all from guess work - so I'm probably massively wrong) - but John "I invented 3d" Carmack said there is currently no gpu ready for ID Tech 6.

there's the post from when greg left his company and joined up with BD (THQ?)

http://www.somedude.net/gamemonkey/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=419

yeah, it sounds like some midi track with the wrong instruments put on the notes:p

i wouldn't buy this package for all money in the world judging from their presentations.