[Laa-Yosh]

From one of the artists

Ok so I had a chat with one of the lead programmers on the Agni project and
this is what I can tell *y'all*

The Machine was just a high spec PC with a single high end consumer gfx
card, one you can buy off the shelf. Definitely not the kind of card most
people have in their PCs to be sure, and probably beyond the spec of what's
going to be in the next-gen consoles, *but*(!) the assets they used for the
Agni demo came straight from us (visual works), they weren't built as
real-time assets, meaning they were a mess for realtime playback. Even so,
the Luminous guys managed to get 30 fps in the dragon resurrection scene,
with the skeleton, blobby particles, 100,000 instanced insect particles and
4 fully rigged, hi-rez, unoptimized characters. The lighter scenes went up
to 60fps. With purpose-built assets he was sure he could get better
performance from cheaper hardware.

The hair is a combination of polygonal strips with Marschner shading for
the base volume, overlaid with hair that uses technology based on Sara
Tariq's work for Nvidia.

From talking to Remmy it sounded like the biggest limitation for him was
working with our meshes and rigs, he's hoping that as we integrate the
pre-rendered and in-game cinematics departments our assets will get lighter
(we have toenails on characters....that wear shoes.)