If each point in the point cloud defined a texture, bump map, gloss map, etc. and additionally a radius, you could in theory make some shapes out of relatively few points. To get actual flat surfaces it would probably be good to stick in a normal as well to slice a flat plane off of the sphere.
Meh what do I know 
It looks like theyâre doing something extra clever.
Cas
@Bonbon-Chan :nice,
[quote]What I donât like too is that we simply replace a bunch of triangles by a bunch of voxels. When zooming, it will be the same problem
[/quote]
this is normal that at a certain level you cant get more detail (inded the only way would be to use mathematical equation to infinitly create more detail but thatâs out of this topic)
anyway, I think that you should not dsiplay a plain square or circle to display a point but rather draw a true cube viewed by the correct view angle (or a precomputed shape equivalent to the cube viewed by the current correct view angle) : voxel nearly often use quad/big pixel wich is not rendering the best , IMO better to render the cube seen from the correct angle
And their claim about this running on a Wii, making it âmore powerful than a ps3â makes me want to cry.
This is a desperate fund raising attempt, thereâs nothing revolutionary here, and VOXLAP is already more impressive.
[quote]No flat surfaces
[/quote]
I noticed that too, got a little idea but was not sure why it could be a problem ?
Now that someone mentioned dynamic terrain⌠Reminds me of Red faction guriella and bad company, where destroying the terrain was the main idea. With this tech it will be impossible to do this. Also for physics to work with it the point cloud will need to be converted to geometry, not sure how that will happen.
heu⌠I wont agree IMO this will be the exact inverse ? why would you want to convert the point cloud to geometry to perform physic ?
EDIT: I mean in an octree every point is a child of a branch you could define a branch as using a certain material and then break it in a certain manner : small part / big part that all inherit of their original branch material, an it would not look as weird as current destruction in current engine, where destructed part are usually precomputed
If you played Red Faction for example, you would know thatâs not what I mean 
In that game, you can destroy buildings and objects and such, when you destroy them, youâll see them break down realistically. E.g think about what would happen when you shoot a bazooka on a house for example, would you see a plain hole appear in the house, or would the wallâs bricks would fly out, the roof would slide down, various objects inside it would fly etc etc. In other words, once the terrain is destroyed, it is effected realistically with physics.
Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ofYAlaikYA
I think that you mean terrain destruction being like in Worms game, where shooting the ground would make a hole in it basically, but thatâs not entirely realistic.
not only, at first yes, this is perfect for worms like destruction, but it also enable better destruction of arbitrary shape using some kind of breakable properties to an object, like a particle system that could transmit break energy to all its neigboord, and depending on material propeties it will give small part (like for ground) or big/straight cut for wood and such. also new created particle may get the correct color /material without the need for the designer to prepare a texture of the inside of the material.
you can also merge different material like a house with a door made of wood : the door will break like wood and the brick like brick, realisticly even for differents bomb explosion location
EDIT: not really related but you should have shown me this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh1OqUysW3E cryengine have really take some advance in 3d world, with a full wysiwig editor⌠cannot imagine the project sizeâŚ
thnks very interresting, NB: here is the homepage
EDIT: double thnks here is a better explanation that I could never madeâŚ
haha very nice, they should render twice the size to perform a little antialiasing and that would be perfect :), cool video
EDIT: just tried it, it is available on sourceforge, getting out of jail is painfull but it is interresting to test it, interresting also that in the download there is an animation tools, to animate the game voxel object
Huh, thatâs voxels? Looks ugly.
hey that reminds me of minecraft (the beginning at least)
This video isnât allowed to be played in germany, because it âcontains content from Sony Music EntertainmentââŚWTF? ???
damn your crazy, I love its retro looking !
anyways thatâs a good starting point showing animation and destruction are possible, time to defend it , as it render well on very low configuration you could imagine render it 8 times its size and get a perfect antialiased version,also comparing this to minecraft is not the best idea as it is completly different rendring process⌠there are much more cube and all render smoothly with a very low configuration, so I can imagine that probably this technic could have also be used to make minecraft, it would just requiere to render real cube rather than square for 3d point, no ?
Once Wolfenstein was that ugly using polygons and sprites. Then 3D rendering got nicer later on. Right now we have it ugly using voxels, its just a time until it is improved.
Animation using octrees may not be that hard. A branch in the tree could be combined with a transform (translation/rotation) like in a scene-graph, and parts of the tree replaced for animation.
For polygon based geometry, you can render a closed space environment without overdraw using a BSP tree, which only works with static geometry. The 2-D BSP Tree canât handle sloping walls, floors and ceilings, but a 3D BSP tree can.
Now I wonder what would happen if you shrunk the mesh size down to a single voxel. Each voxel has a vector normal associated with it and a finite size. Only voxels on the surface are retained in the database. Could this be worked into a variant of a 3D BSP Tree to give a database which would give you the draw-order of voxels from any position in the landscape. We would need to count the number of pixels drawn so to know when to stop rendering.
However, I donât think it does anything for anti-aliasing. I also canât see how this would work for open environments (I mean with some sky showing), as some pixels would never get filled, so the entire database would get searched every frame. Maybe it has multi-resolution voxels and multi-resolution raytrace cone sizes. That would help eliminate area of sky at lower cost. Maybe help with anti-aliasing too. My head hurts.
Donât forget the arrogant assumption that if anyone doesnât view you as the new messiah of graphics, itâs obviously because of politics or because they just have a vested interest in pushing ever more polygons (never mind that there is much more to conventional graphics techniques than that).
So, whereâs the tech. demo that I can run on my pc right now :persecutioncomplex:
At this stage it just sounds like another start-up trying to get rich quick, not unlike Ageia.