the're back! Euclideon Makes World’s Most Realistic Graphics

[Pottuvoi]

I dont have a deep understanding of 3d engines but would you need normal mapping for a non-flat texture[voxels are 3d so would they need normal mapping] being lit via ray/path tracing.

You do not necessarely need normal mapping as long as you can create normals to use for lighting.
Having per-voxel normal would certainly be the best way to do it though.

also because you dont like the way they advertise their products deosnt mean it is a bad/improper way to advertise.

True.

I have been following them for a long time and I'm frustrated that they haven't really gone forward.
They have had ~7? years to do something with their octree sorter/rasterizer and still haven't had proper success.

It's either problem in advertisement, implementation or incompetence or just matter of paranoia trying to get patent on technique and trying to keep secret so no-one can steal it.

IMO, creating a open environment where people could have tried the tech and give positive word on it would be a lot more effective method to sell it.
Another way would have been open source and technical paper at Siggraph / GDC, the tech would have evolved from what he had.

Sadly none of those alternatives happened and we have a tech that people pretty much know how to do, but cannot use due to the patents. (even though it's based on old ideas.)

 

[MisterMac]

One has to wonder - if the tech truly had some sort groundbreaking merit or just that secretsauce angle to a well known problem...



If it is truly groundbreaking.....who would be the prime big player to move this forward?

....Intel?

 

[Subyman]

Here's what they need to do. Add a spectrometer to the laser scanner. Turn off the sun. Blast the area with lasers. Read the backscattered light and use the composition of every surface's atomic makeup to recreate material properties.

 

[f1sherman]

Here's what they need to do. Add a spectrometer to the laser scanner. Turn off the sun. Blast the area with lasers. Read the backscattered light and use the composition of every surface's atomic makeup to recreate material properties.

but if they did this, instead of earning money by firing few artists, they'd be Nvidia's biggest customer :ninja:

 

[Mark R]

I dont have a deep understanding of 3d engines but would you need normal mapping for a non-flat texture[voxels are 3d so would they need normal mapping] being lit via ray/path tracing.

If you want to do dynamic lighting, then yes, you do need surface normals. Ideally, they would be measured or pre-computed, but you can do normal estimation "on the fly" if your dataset permits. I did this for a voxel engine that I wrote, which used a true 3D voxel grid. At render time, it would determine the edges of objects by examining neighboring voxels, and from that compute a normal for the purpose of shading.

The technology demonstrated here appears to be a basic method of capturing real data, with its natural lighting. I would imagine that with a scanner capable of measuring color, albedo, surface shininess, etc. you would be able to build a dataset capable of supporting dynamic lighting rendering; it wouldn't be perfect, you wouldn't adequately replicate radiosity, etc. and shadow computation might be a problem (but if their (presumably octree based) search algorithm works, then may be it wouldn't be).

 

[Enigmoid]

New video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMpqqCCrFQ

Even if this never makes it into gaming this is a huge boon for historical monuments and National heritage sites, etc. Would be awesome if you could view every important site like that over the internet.

 

[MisterMac]

New video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMpqqCCrFQ

Even if this never makes it into gaming this is a huge boon for historical monuments and National heritage sites, etc. Would be awesome if you could view every important site like that over the internet.

They can make the scanning work in a static enviroment.

wouldn't google be incredibly interested in this for StreetView?
They'd have an epic solution - if one could scan proper for mapping.

But it still makes me wonder - how Euclideon is so unique and how someone randomly can create such Tech.

Why hasn't our large favorite techies done a similar solution or figured it out?

 

[schmuckley]

Are they asking for donations again?
I remember these guys from a couple years back.
They make scamming work in an internet environment.

 

[Subyman]

Another way they could make normal maps would be to do two runs with the light sources at different angles. They could then calculate the normal maps from the known positions of the light sources and the difference in the amount of light received by each surface. This would require a controlled environment. They'd need to do it at night time, so their light sources are the only light sources.

Again, this idea could be interesting with more technology behind it.

 

[Kippa]

From my understanding, they use a laser scanner to scan objects. That wouldn't do away with modellers as you'd still need someone to create the physical model in the first place to scan. In my opinion a computer modeller would make objects much more quicker and efficiently than having a physical modeller and scanning their object. Another point is that one of the limitation of polygon models is their complexity which in part is limited by either video ram or system ram to hold such detail, with the shift to 64bit apps and ram becoming cheaper I can't see this becoming an issue.