[london-boy]

Originally Posted by LunchBox

Oops! Sory for the fragmented post...

I meant real geometry on where the industry is headed.

Well it really depends. Today's top CGI obviously has more geometry than any game. But a wall will still be a flat surface. The tiny little grooves you might encounter in a wall will not be fully 3D for a long time if ever.
Shaders will rule our world for a long long long time, and we already have machines capable of calculating more polygons than they can show us.

Until it's cheaper to move a 2M polys model than it is to move a 100K one with normal maps that looks pretty much the same, we'll stick to faked geometry. The 100k model will become 200k in time, to a point where we can't distinguish the 2 versions of the model - could be 2M and 1M, don't know.

Displacment maps will help, like Parallax mapping is helping a lot too.

[Jawed]

Completely crap post removed - I'm obviously not thinking straight today. Hahahaha

Jawed

[Acert93]

Originally Posted by expletive

Is the # of polys per scene a zer sumo game with vertex and shader operations?

No offense intended: A complete sentance with recognizable words will help us understand your question better. Right now I can BARELY make out what you are saying, let alone know what you mean.

I.e. the more polygons per scene, the less vertex and shader ops the xenos has.

Depends on the game and what you are trying to do. But a lot of polygones means a lot of vertex work in general. Think of the old days where the CPU did the transformation and lighting (T&L) and the 3D chip (not even a GPU!) did the hardwired pixel tasks. It had a hard limit on the number of triangles it could work with, but the CPU was doing all the actual work in regards to vertices.

[expletive]

Originally Posted by Acert93

No offense intended: A complete sentance with recognizable words will help us understand your question better. Right now I can BARELY make out what you are saying, let alone know what you mean.

Depends on the game and what you are trying to do. But a lot of polygones means a lot of vertex work in general. Think of the old days where the CPU did the transformation and lighting (T&L) and the 3D chip (not even a GPU!) did the hardwired pixel tasks. It had a hard limit on the number of triangles it could work with, but the CPU was doing all the actual work in regards to vertices.

Ya sorry i posted that last one on my way out the door and now realize on its own it doesnt make much sense.

i'm going to go off and read everything suggested before going on with this.

I'm just trying to understand the relationship between two spec: the 500 milllion triangles/sec and the 50 billion shader ops/sec. Understanding these are theoreitcal maximums, i'm just trying to understand how increasing one towards its maximum impacts the other (or if they even impact each other at all).

That said ill read whats available here and hopefully its all there. Thanks for attempting to decrypt thus far.

J

[Laa-Yosh]

Originally Posted by LunchBox

I meant real geometry on where the industry is headed.

Well, I'm not sure about ongoing research, but the practical side is that we'd rather not get into multi-million polygon meshes yet.

First there's the hardware limit. There are a few new releases from the traditional 3D apps that will finally support 64 bit hardware and WinXP, which will finally make working with 5+ million polygon scenes actually possible. But loading all that data from disk, and especially moving it around the network when you send it to the renderfarm would still be a nightmare. Large movie VFX studios like ILM are already close to the limits of storage technology as far as I've heard.
And even with 64 bit, manipulating an order of magnitude (or more) higher amount of data will be slow, even something as simple as moving objects around. Most highend studios nowadays actually try to minimize workign with the real data and use highly simplified representations. PRMan for example supports things like archiving out an interpreted RIB file of your geometry (static or animated) to speed up the scene's parsing. It also allows several mechanisms to generate data at rendering time; even something as complex as an animated character can be built and articulated from a sort of "parts library". The hard truth is that artists tend to push the technology so far that the 3D application barely manages to handle one detailed character at a time, or about a dozen of medium detailed ones. Crowd scenes require techniques like the ones I've mentioned above.

So the tough stuff comes with the workflow. You want to animate those models: bind them to a skeleton and pant the weights for each vertex, apply simulations, morph between blendshapes etc. This would be close to impossible with a model that has millions of vertices... the current tools were not developed with such complexity in mind. Just think about how much disk space a facial blendshape library would take up - a hundred shapes are pretty common for a single character even in everyday movie VFX!

The trend nowadays is to work with a relatively simple mesh, somewhere between 5.000 to 200.000 polys, that gets subdivided at render time, and static detail is added through displacement and normal maps. Research goes into applications like Zbrush, that can replace the time consuming process of modeling something from clay, scanning it, then rebuilding an animation-friendly mesh from the pointcloud data and extracting displacement textures for it. The whole workflow can still use a lot of streamlining, even if it can now be done on a single PC-based workstation with off the shelf software.


Of course using a 20-25 million poly mesh (it seems to be the sweet spot for a highly realistic character) and having the ability to manipulate it would be very cool. But neither the hardware is strong enough for it, nor are there any clues on how it would be possible AFAIK. We'll probably see a lot more of displacement stuff in the upcoming years instead - so PS4/X3 will probably concentrate on HOS and subpixel tesselation/displacement, too. But that's like 5-6 years away

[Acert93]

Good info Laa-Yosh. It sounds like tools need to mature a bit before we get massive meshes.

Originally Posted by Laa-Yosh

Research goes into applications like Zbrush, that can replace the time consuming process of modeling something from clay, scanning it, then rebuilding an animation-friendly mesh from the pointcloud data and extracting displacement textures for it. The whole workflow can still use a lot of streamlining, even if it can now be done on a single PC-based workstation with off the shelf software.

Zbrush is sooo cool! Just had to say that I have seen a couple demos. It looks like fun to use and user friendly. I wish I was an artist because Zbrush looks like an awesome creative palette!