Interior Mapping - New Next Gen Tech in the making?

Squiggly_P

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=498735

There's a demo with source and a paper included, haven't read the paper yet. The results are pretty damn impressive, tho. According to the author, the rendering of the interiors in this manner costs very little in terms of GPU / CPU usage. Neat stuff.

I didn't see a thread, so sorry if it's been brought up already :P

Tumerboy

I can't tell if this is actually cool, or a complete crock.

Jonathan

You can do some cool tricks with a BumpOffset node in the UE3 material editor to achieve similar results. Haven't looked over all of the documentation at the link, but it seems interesting.

hawken

and because games like GTA4 are updated via the console & internet connection, Rockstar could steal this code and implement it into the game on an update.

Someone should steal it soon, the guy is offering for free.

Asmuel

Free? I find it hard to believe that it could be as good as it seems, if the author is stupid enough to give it a way. You'd think he'd be flying to back home from Scotland carrying a dufflebag full of money.

MoP

Our technical director looked at it and said while it did work for specific cases, I'm pretty sure he said it only works if they're perfectly aligned on a grid or something.
I haven't looked at the tech behind it yet but it seems like it might not be quite as awesome as it first seems.

sprunghunt

Jonathan wrote: »

You can do some cool tricks with a BumpOffset node in the UE3 material editor to achieve similar results. Haven't looked over all of the documentation at the link, but it seems interesting.

I've tried something like this In UE3 already. It should be perfectly possible. The example I made looked pretty good but had some issues that became apparent on closer inspection.

Toomas

While it might not work well when its in your face still it could be used to give some depth to windows on upper floors which is better than the plain painted on window.

AstroZombie

The shader cost vs building actual geometry is actually more until you reach 100+ buildings in view at once. Still would be some cool tech for GTA-style sandbox games.

_Shimmer

a combination of real geometry on low street level and this shader on upper floors would be quite nifty. The demo was quite impressive in a way. Its really hard to tell if its a shader or geometry.

SHEPEIRO

sorry but meh, im not quite sure why this is cool

Rob Galanakis

LOL! I saw this thread 2 years ago on the OGRE forums.

AstroZombie is right though. The pixel shader is very often the bottleneck on the GPU, and extra geometry costs are on the vertex shader (meaning: to do this technique you need resources on a pipeline piece that is already usually the hardest working). I can't see this getting very much use (I think I'd rather have Parallax Occlusion on nearby buildings and then a very LoD or no interiors), but it is a very cool technique I'm sure architectural visualizations and some games will utilize.

I've tried something like this In UE3 already. It should be perfectly possible.

No, it won't. The technique uses a custom raycasting function that you wouldn't be able to reproduce inside of UE3 without an insane network of math nodes (and even then, you may not be able to), or a custom node for the raycaster.

sprunghunt

Professor420 wrote: »

No, it won't. The technique uses a custom raycasting function that you wouldn't be able to reproduce inside of UE3 without an insane network of math nodes (and even then, you may not be able to), or a custom node for the raycaster.

I didn't do something exactly like it. I did something that looked visually similar using a series of images, bump offset etc. As I mentioned it had a few graphical glitches that were noticable when you looked closely.