MOOF Clan

Interesting vid on using the point system instead of polygons for 3D rendering

Dear god I wanted to punch the narrator in the face.

It's interesting, but the demo looks crap. Absolutely nothing in the demo looked "normal" or lifelike. The lighting model they were showing sucked balls.

... Judging by their logo this could just be because they dont have any artists though.

He also seems fixated on shooting down N64-era 3D, rather than the interesting stuff such as tesselation, let alone ambient occlusion and whatnot. Polys are far, far from the end of their lifespan... none of his comparisons even showed any bump mapping.

Also, what are they going to make the little dots with? The tool chain will be critical, and they're going up against some heavy establishment.

I can see potential, but if they want to be taken seriously they have to demo something that compares with a shot like this (from Crysis) :
http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/16b4h.jpg

*edit* made the image a URL instead of inline...

"I could've been lots of buckets"

Nice

Saw that a little while back. I seriously doubt its the future of 3D. Best I can tell its SVO with a slightly different partiotinning algorithm. They need to CUDA'ify or OpenCL'ify it. There is some damned impressive CUDA SVO demos ... Carmack has talked about using SVO as well so that he can mega-texture'ify geometry.

ify.

Yeah, I love that quote on the barrel as well

Btw Steve. The tool chain is easy on this sort of thing. What you do is you generate an octtree for a model (Split he scene into 8 axis aligned octets). For each cube you specify whether it contains a poly or not (ie intersects). If it does contain a poly then subdvide that octet into 8 further axis aligned octets. Rinse and repeat until you have the "point" density you are after. This is a Sparse Voxel Octtree (or SVO). Octtrees are REALLY easy to do CSG with as well meaning if you could get an SVO (or Unlimited detail technology) engine going then you really could blow holes in the scenery just by subtracting octrees from each other.