It was about a year ago when we first brought you the news of “Euclideon Geometry’s Unlimited Detail Real-time Rendering engine all based on Voxel-rendering. Haven’t heard much from then but now they’re back with another video showcasing their engine and some information.
Hi everyone. We’ve been working very hard and we hope you like what we’ve made. This is just our 1 year report, after which we will probably go quiet again while we finish our work. This demo only shows what was ready at the time, we have a lot of really good stuff here but we are keeping it secret for now. (Yes grumpy forum people, we do have animation, but you’ll just have to be patient.)
I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it, until I saw Notch (Creator of MineCraft) discussing it. He saw the same thing I originally noticed:
In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.
The technology is interesting yes, but I still think there is a lot of smoke-and-mirrors in their presentation. They’re heavily constrained by memory limits so the bulk of their demonstrations rely on heavily tiled space making it nothing but referencing to a single memory block. Trying to do this for anything unique is going to hit the memory wall really quick, as mentioned in this other post by Notch:
* One byte per voxel is way lower than the raw data you’d need. In reality, you’d probably want to track at least 24 bits of color and eight bits of normal vector data per voxel. That’s four times as much data. It’s quite possible you’d want to track even more data.
* If the data compresses down to 1%, it would still be 1 700 three-terrabyte hard drives of data at one byte of raw data per voxel.
All that said, watch the video and decide for yourself. Fact, or Fiction?
Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD] – YouTube.
Fiction. Even if they aren’t doing sparse voxel octtrees and are instead doing progressive LOD point clouds, the data limits say that they must have repeated memory accesses. This kind of thing (rendering large point clouds) was being done by Levoy et al 10 years ago at Stanford. Nothing new to see here.