Ugly as hell (IMO); Also seems to be Voxel based. (?)
Voxels can be pretty cool if you can coax pretty results from it. Bad visuals from it look like everything is made from Legos.
On the positive side, everything is easily made destructible. Shadow Warrior had Voxel sprites for some items in the game... Things like lamp posts.
You can do some really neat things using Voxels... IIRC the game "Outcast" was Voxel based.
They differentiate it from voxels. It's entirely different as voxels still have a resolution (in world space) and thus aliasing. To get "unlimited detail" you'd have to have the voxels at an infinite or near-infinite resolution. This makes it so that for each pixel of your screen they look up with a search algorithm what to put in that pixel based on a point cloud, basically.
I'm not defending their technique necessarily, but in other videos they clarify that what you see is "programmer art" meaning these are technical demos and the art direction is defined by the ability of the programmers doing the code. They praise current games for their art direction and what they achieve with so few polys. On a non-artistic level I still thought it was ugly. Tons of artifacting and flickering, but they explain in another video that it's because of the newness of the technique and their code. But I think a lot of why it looks like an 80s or 90s tech demo is because of the material lighting and coloring, etc., in addition to the art direction. Maybe those are technical things they're still working out.
There are already similar workflows like zBrush that use the basic idea, though they call their tech "pixols", and still inevitably conform the idea to polygon-based workflows... but the tech is already there for them to export to this "pixel cloud" format if they wanted. And instead of "textures" the color detail would be attributed to the pixels, which zBrush does with Polypaint.
I'd honestly rather see tessellation support beefed up in GPUs (and future consoles), with a focus on improvements to the tech in the next version of DirectX. AMD tessellation performance is behind Nvidia's, though, and it becomes less valuable to developers with this divide (to the point where it may not run well on even high-end AMD GPUs). It's still a good solution with less pain to transition to than something like voxels or "Unlimited Detail". Can't imagine animation on that system, though they do have videos, it seems wasteful animating millions of points. With tessellation, you can use the workflows you're already used to as an animator, designer, etc. and still get a high LOD near the camera and lower LOD as you get further away. It works as a continuous LOD system and would make it easier in many ways as it could also abolish the LOD "pop-in" system just as Unlimited Detail does.
Though of course by 2050, if I'm still alive, I hope to see 360-degree surround, virtual reality with some kind of Unlimited Detail technology. I'm impatient so maybe 2020 would be better.
» Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:16 am 
