Euclideon (Unlimited Detail Technology) Status Update...

[klingonscum]

Every time I hear Euclideon's narrator on these videos, I keep hearing John Cleese narrating that "How not to be seen" skit from Monty Python's "And Now For Something Completely Different"...

"In this Geoverse scene, there are over 47 trillion pixels, most of which have learned the art of not being seen..."

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

--Tim Gray

 

[MavericK]

DAAAHHH TAAAAHHHHH

 

[SonDa5]

Get what you want out of that video but to me it looks like a marketing commercial to promote their technology and they admit that they are having problems with their ideas because data storage is so immense with their program so they found ways to lower quality of data to save space. Also this doesn't look like any type of rendering software but more of a data retrieval program of a massive image like data design.

 

[Youn]

Seems like they shifted focus. They said animation was next, I guess not.

Yea, and lighting... but ya know, if most of the folks contacting them were from Geospatial then as a company they did the right thing focusing on them.

I agree his voice is kinda... oh, I dunno, rude sounding? I kept expecting him to say something like "We have proved all of you wankers wrong so you can now go gently fuck yourself"

The video was good though. No complaints. As always I'll wait until we can experience it before believing or judging too harshly

 

[extide]

So he says the act of loading is transfering stuff from the hard drive to ram, then goes to say the reason why they do it so efficiently is because they get the data directly from the hard drive... then says temporarily to ram... so it's the same shit.

No, the difference is these guys don't need to load the whole file into ram first, they can 'stream' the data. Of course it goes into ram before it's displayed... it's physically impossible to show something on-screen without data being in ram.

 

[jpongin]

For those wanting to know more about this potentially being used in games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclideon#Criticism

That quote is from July 2012.

At face value, they are using a massive index for which their algorithm can search 1 point per pixel at run time, in real time, straight from data on disk with some RAM caching mechanics.

As the way I naively understand indices, you build them once, and unless the data changes, you don't need to ever build them again. The index building process can be quite intensive depending on how complex the index structure is. In this case... it's more on the complex side.

So here's the thing with gaming engines... Modern gaming engines do much more than just pre-determined animations - it also utilizes physics engines which does real time animation based on a model (a physics model). If this is true, Euclideon's index cannot be static - it would need to dynamically be rebuilt in real time as the points of an exploding building are constantly moving and changing according to the physics model / engine.

Anyway, would be pretty damn exciting to see how they figure this out.

 

[djsb]

So here's the thing with gaming engines... Modern gaming engines do much more than just pre-determined animations - it also utilizes physics engines which does real time animation based on a model (a physics model). If this is true, Euclideon's index cannot be static - it would need to dynamically be rebuilt in real time as the points of an exploding building are constantly moving and changing according to the physics model / engine.

Anyway, would be pretty damn exciting to see how they figure this out.

I always thought that the quickest/best way to go about that would be a mix of technologies. For instance, using Euclideon for hyper-realistic displacement maps and non deformable terrain (like skyboxes), and using traditional 3D methods for everything else.

 

[Youn]

IMO it's not going to be really cool until we see organically destructive/malleable environments, fluids/physics/animation, sound (like modeled sound of those little gravel bits shifting around under your foot...lol), global illumination/caustics, etc... to incorporate that into this "new" tech will probably take some new innovations, give it time... I've no doubt others will figure out how it's done, I mean in theory we can do this, just not very quick yet, carmack and others probably have a good idea but don't see the benefit in tackling it just yet and will wait for the right moment... timing is everything and euclideon is simply ahead of their time, maybe...