Monday, January 6, 2014

Dinosaur Killers

Here are another two asteroids:


Both asteroids are around 10 Km diameter. Extinction-Level-Event material for sure.

The lighting in both shots is a bit flat. It helps showing there is some color variation in these bodies. Also this is a new deferred renderer I'm trying out, did not have time to write any shadows and ambient occlusion for it.


10 comments:

  1. Do they move relative to one another yet? And is this just a side project or an actual Voxel Farm game/simulation in the works? Either way, it looks great but it could stand to be a bit more lumpy, if you ask me.

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    1. No movement in this prototype. This is not a game, it is just a demo of what Voxel Farm can do. So far we have been showing Earth-like vistas and landscapes. We would often get questioned about space objects.

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    2. I actually thought they were rather lumpy for asteroids =P. Check here for some reference images =P: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=asteroids&espv=210&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=CYTKUtevCc7HkQXTuIG4BQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1858&bih=994

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  2. Sounds like you're building your own basic 3D engine around VoxelFarm. Wouldn't it make much more sense to spend your time developing an API to connect any number of modern 3D engines? (Ogre, UDK, Unity, Unigine, etc).

    Or is this maybe just you using it as a basic testing suite internally?

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    1. I keep asking myself the same question. It is not a simple matter. Certainly my goal is not to build a rendering engine. Voxel Farm is about content creation, its output is meant to be fed into traditional rendering engines. Naturally integration with rendering engines like CryEngine, Unity or Unreal is part of what we do.

      The problem comes when we are showing someone a demo. Imagine a demo that uses Unreal Engine. It may not be clear to the viewer if a particular feature on screen is coming from Unreal or from Voxel Farm.

      Being able to assert a demo is 100% Voxel Farm code makes this simpler. The viewer can usually extrapolate how the rendering would look if a commercial rendering engine was used. For instance these asteroids would be 100x better if we were using something like Unreal or CryEngine to render them.

      Also have you tried coding a deferred renderer from scratch? It is one of those secret pleasures of life :)

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    2. hah no I have not tried developing a deferred renderer from scratch before. I'll put it on my list of things to do before I die. ;)

      I'll be honest I'm not sure I see how anyone getting a demo from you guys could mix up what part of a demo is VoxelFarm and what is the client-side renderer, but I'll take your word for it given that you're in the thick of it.
      Its just that I see the above render and think it could look so much more spectacular thrown into any of the top engines at such a small amount of effort. But I'm just being selfish - The more time you spend on things that aren't directly related to VoxelFarm the longer I have to wait before potentially getting my hands on it hehe. ;)

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    3. Well, when looking for an engine for anything, it's nice to know immediately what's what, that way you can go through more engines in less time so you have a greater scope to look through, and can make a better decision,.. I reckon...

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  3. Please don't do any SSAO, that stuff needs to die...

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  4. Can Voxel Farm use occlusion culling to make any type of geometry without performance hiccups? What is the worst case? (for example, a swiss cheese like asteroid and with tunnels like a ant farm, or maybe a big city map with all the build interiors)

    Is it possible to mix voxel objects with diferent voxel density and use Voxel Farm to make furniture in a build?

    Is there currently any limitation for Voxel Farm representing a planet the size of planet Earth and detailed enough for the human scale?

    Can Voxel Farm make geometry streaming from hard disk?

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    1. Patrick:
      from what i've seen, yes ... read through this blog!

      That pretty much answers all your questions ;)
      Surely streaming from hard disk is against the whole idea of procworld ... Miguel's whole concept here is that you would have a function defined that would generate the right voxel information but like any voxel engine i suspect that there's nothing preventing from you from doing that.

      Miguel,
      Correct me if i'm wrong here?

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