| Q&A |
 Unlimited
Detail Technology (UD),
Bruce Dell
May 2010 |
| |
 |
“Polygons
were great and served us very well in the past but because
of these issues the 3D industry in recent times has
taken a turn towards researching better systems that
don’t need polygons, [...]. Raytracing seemed to
be the way forward, but its still very slow, and is
very hardware dependent, UD is about 200 times faster
so in a merit based world it would be the best path
forward.”
|
|
| |
|
| Q1 |
3D
is mainly a questions of triangles (polygon), why are you using
Voxel? |
| A1 |
The
main method of making 3D graphics in games today is called the
Polygon System. It has been around for a long time now, it began
as a way to make games were you run around in hall way games
like Doom and Wolfenstein. The polygon system builds things
out of little flat shapes with pictures on them, that’s
why in the past games looked a little bit “angular”,
and they still look angular if you go up close to the bases
of trees or objects that are meant to be round. The polygon
system has a few major problems: the artists have to build there
objects to strict polygon budgets, they also have to build the
objects multiple times at different polygon counts (about 4-8
times), so that they can do distance model swapping. If an object
is far away then they use a small model made of few polygons,
but if the object is close up then they use a big model made
with many polygons. Have you played games and noticed objects
changing in the distance and popping up and doing strange things
? That’s because of distance model swapping. Polygons were
great and served us very well in the past but because of these
issues the 3D industry in recent times has taken a turn towards
researching better systems that don’t need polygons, the
company Id is doing a lot of work in to a ray tracing system,
ATI, NVIDA, Intel and many other smaller names have all been
doing research in to 3D without polygons. Raytracing seemed
to be the way forward, but its still very slow, and is very
hardware dependent, UD is about 200 times faster so in a merit
based world it would be the best path forward.
|
| |
|
| Q2 |
3D
graphic cards accelerate triangles rendering, can Voxel compete
with such hardware power? |
| A2 |
The
present polygon system has a use by date, what we mean is the
polygons are getting smaller to make objects look more rounded,
as this continues to happen the time will come were the polygons
are so small they are all only a few pixels big. At that point
there not really polygons anymore there more like little 3D
floating atoms. When this occurs the polygon system has evolved
in to a new system, one that is more like our real world. Our
world is made of atoms, and ideally we would want to build our
3D artificial worlds out of atoms as well. The reason we don’t
is because the computing power to look after and organise all
those trillions of atoms would be huge, and only super computers
would be able to do it, and even then there would be volume
limitations as to how much could be processed.
You gain a much higher appreciation of Unlimited Detail technology
when you understand that is making all its objects out of little
3D atoms. It doesn’t need a super computer it runs on any
ordinary computer, we even think we can make it run on a mobile
phone, it doesn’t process thousands or millions or billions
of atoms, it processes unlimited atoms. You could store the
entire world in 3D form and Unlimited Detail would run it all
with no problems, you could begin in outer space and then fly
down to the earth then the ground then the grass then the ants
on the grass then fly in to the cells of the ants, and you could
have this power running on your home computer. Now please don’t
misunderstand, we aren’t talking unlimited memory here,
we are talking unlimited on screen geometry. They are quite
different things, the one gives you lots of objects the other
lets you show those lots of objects. |
| |
|
| Q3 |
Voxel
have a huge memory footprint. Is it necessary to have a 64 bit
system and a large amount of RAM to handle large 3D scene made
of Voxels? |
| A3 |
Because
of the way we redirect and recycle data we cant put a direct
figure on the amount of points we can hold per gigabyte. It
is like asking how many pictures will fit in a win.zip file
that is 1 gig in size ? , the answer is: simpler pictures compact
much smaller then complicated pictures. In the same way we are
running off a data type that is literally zipped
while it is being used, the unusual thing is that it doesn?t
have to unzip first, we run it in its compressed form. A rough
figure to use is that objects in our format are about 8% of
the size they use up in polygon format. |
| |
|
| Q4 |
On
your video, it is clear that Voxels overpass rasterisation to
display a large amount of 3D data with a lot of details? What
kind of PC are you using for this vidéo, what would be
the frame rate of the same scene made of triangles? |
| A4 |
 In
those demonstrations we aren’t using any part of the graphics
card ( except sending a frame to the screen ). Whilst it is
dual core, we are only using one core, we run at about 28 fps
at the moment in one core, this is expected to speed up a lot
in our next version. If we tried to make the “pyramid of
animals demo” out of polygons and run it in real time,
I think it would slow down to movie rendering speeds ( minutes
per frame ) |
| |
|
| Q5 |
Do
you think that your technology can be used to display 3D content
on the internet? Can it stream 3D voxels? |
| A5 |
Yes
and Yes ! |
| |
|
| Q6 |
Excepting
3D scanning and few programs like 3D coat can generate voxels
content. Is it a constraint to adoption of voxel? |
| A6 |
Unlimited
Detail gives total artistic freedom, and you can use it in a
number of ways :
1) You can make your polygon objects at the highest quality
on 3dS max, maya etc, and then convert them in to 3D atoms.
2) You can use voxel or point cloud based editors that are more
and more appearing on the market.
3) You can laser scan data in from the real world, using either
out door large laser scanners or indoor small laser scanners.
4) You can combine all 3 techniques to make sub parts and then
collage and mix them together in a point cloud/ voxel editor,
once imported.
|
| |
|
| Q7 |
What
are your plan about Unlimited Technology? |
| A7 |
 We
didn’t expect the resent media wave, we thought that we
could just hide and appear from no where with something brilliant,
but unfortunately we got caught working quietly in our corner,
and so now we have a lot of people saying “that doesn’t
look good enough yet !”, but on our end we feel like a
mother who put cookies in the oven and little children are pulling
them out and saying “they don’t taste right !”
a bit of patience and the cookies will be fine.
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”)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ndumvromniq/bird_articulated.wmv
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 |
|
|
| |
|
 |
|
|
