Atomotage Working to Replace Polygons With Voxels

Why do people keep using comparison talking points between Euclideon and Voxels? It is clear that Comanche is not what Euclideon does...they do pixels, not voxels, and 3d scanned items, not hand made polygon art.
 
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Voxel Farm has been around for awhile. Too bad Everquest Next fell through and it'll be some time before we see it in a real game.
 
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Voxels don't have to replace poly meshes and there are many uses for them (illumination, shadows, particles etc). Just give me good gameplay and you are free to choose any renderer or art style you like. Nex Machina was already mentioned, it uses a combination of polys and voxels, but yes arcade games are certainly one of many video game genres that fit very well.

Edit:
Galvin said:
Didn't nvidia make voxels support in hardware or is that their next card?
Click to expand...

J3RK said:
"Good question" ... "Just read that Housemarque licensed the Unreal engine. So I guess they're moving away from their voxel engine?"
Click to expand...

NVIDIA has:

GVDB for (rendering, compute and simulation of sparse voxels for CUDA, not for the DX/GL graphics pipeline).

VXAO for voxel accelerated ambient occlusion (example).

VXGI for global illumination using voxel cone tracing.

The company has been interested in voxel technology since at least 2010 and the ball really began rolling when they hired Cyril Crassin in 2011 (GigaVoxels since 2008). This guy's head is literally in the clouds and is responsible for GIVoxels/VXGI. Icare3D

And of course, you can thank John Carmack (see history and roots in this GigaVoxels source).

Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees
VoxelPipe: A Programmable Pipeline for 3D Voxelization
Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing
The Basics of GPU Voxelization

Housemarque can implement their existing voxel technology into Unreal Engine. The above VXAO and VXGI uses DirectX 11 or 12 and Unreal Engine 4.

I know the techniques in these videos are not using voxels, but it shows how classic games could be digitally remapped into a 3D environment.





 
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blkt said:
Voxels don't have to replace poly meshes and there are many uses for them (illumination, shadows, particles etc). Just give me good gameplay and you are free to choose any renderer or art style you like. Nex Machina was already mentioned, it uses a combination of polys and voxels, but yes arcade games are certainly one of many video game genres that fit very well.

Edit:




NVIDIA has:

GVDB for (rendering, compute and simulation of sparse voxels for CUDA, not for the DX/GL graphics pipeline).

VXAO for voxel accelerated ambient occlusion (example).

VXGI for global illumination using voxel cone tracing.

The company has been interested in voxel technology since at least 2010 and the ball really began rolling when they hired Cyril Crassin in 2011 (GigaVoxels since 2008). This guy's head is literally in the clouds and is responsible for GIVoxels/VXGI. Icare3D

And of course, you can thank John Carmack (see history and roots in this GigaVoxels source).

Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees
VoxelPipe: A Programmable Pipeline for 3D Voxelization
Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing
The Basics of GPU Voxelization

Housemarque can implement their existing voxel technology into Unreal Engine. The above VXAO and VXGI uses DirectX 11 or 12 and Unreal Engine 4.

I know the techniques in these videos are not using voxels, but it shows how classic games could be digitally remapped into a 3D environment.





Click to expand...


Nice! Thanks for post that. I just hadn't been following the tech in a while, other than owning the Nex Machina, and Voxatron games. They're the most recent examples I've seen using them in a gaming context. I hadn't really thought about just using them for only a portion of the rendering process (as in lighting, etc.)

While I've had several games over the years (Comanche being one, and maybe some others, Outcast...) I've seen them used a lot more in scene demos, tech demos, etc.
 
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J3RK said:
Nice! Thanks for post that. I just hadn't been following the tech in a while, other than owning the Nex Machina, and Voxatron games. They're the most recent examples I've seen using them in a gaming context. I hadn't really thought about just using them for only a portion of the rendering process (as in lighting, etc.)

While I've had several games over the years (Comanche being one, and maybe some others, Outcast...) I've seen them used a lot more in scene demos, tech demos, etc.
Click to expand...
Thanks. It is a little disheartening to see the posts in this thread mentioning Novalogic games as if these two companies are remotely using the same techniques, have the same problems or limitations.

Also, the "here we go again, deja vu" posts or "remember those technologies, where are they now?" type responses completely disregard the hard work of attempting to reinvent the wheel while ignoring standards in place over the past 20-30 years. It takes a lot of creativity and an open mind, which is why you usually only see this stuff in the demo scene.

None of this tech is a sham or scam. Posting visual comparison YouTube videos to Crytek or Epic engines completely ignore the fundamental technical reasons why these projects are so important.

The advantage I see with both company's approaches is artists will no longer have to rebuild the same environments, characters, objects etc at different levels of detail over and over again, which takes a lot of time and manpower. LOD systems are a total waste of development time with less than desirable results (the pop snap effect as you get closer to things).

For the Atomotage video, I am not sure how independent their adaptive scaling system is to have different thresholds and prioritizing where the details are needed most (when the guy was spinning and punching, the detail level was changing on him but the background was also scaling along with him).

That old video about Euclideon said their search algorithm goes out and grabs one "atom" for every pixel on the screen, so "infinite detail" is possible at the expense of storage capacity. Also lighting, occlusion, shading, animation, physics, collision etc has to be written from scratch so it remains to be seen how efficient their engine will really be after everything is properly implemented, optimized and available to developers.
 
I think Novalogic gets mentioned so much because in general (and gaming specifically) in a place like this with a bunch of older (in general) gamers and graphics enthusiasts, that was probably the first time it was used heavily and visibly. Not to mention Comanche is a game that a lot of people really enjoyed. So it kind of just naturally sticks out as "the major" voxel game.

There have been others, though not a huge amount, but the difference is, it wasn't the main hyped feature. I know it was mentioned with Outcast, but it wasn't the big, new thing. It was just a new game using a tech that people hadn't seen in a while.

I wouldn't call these the most important demonstrations of the tech, just the ones that spring to many people's minds, especially on a PC gaming and tech forum.
 
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