L. Scofield
Veteran
I guess this will shut up those people who say nobody pushes the XB360 
Mega Meshes - Lionhead
- Thread starter L. Scofield
- Start date
Lionhead had an interesting presentation at GDC2011.
'Modelling, rendering and lighting a world made of 100 billion polygons.' .PDF
Very impressive, would love to see a future adventure games to use this tech.
'Modelling, rendering and lighting a world made of 100 billion polygons.' .PDF
Very impressive, would love to see a future adventure games to use this tech.
Kameradschaft
Regular
That looked pretty good and Lionhead really needs a new engine for the Fable
series - Fable 3 was so outdated in the visual department and on top of that it also had frame-rate/tearing issues.
Hopefully we will see a new game from them with this engine as it looks great for a fantasy action/adventure game like Fable.
series - Fable 3 was so outdated in the visual department and on top of that it also had frame-rate/tearing issues.
Hopefully we will see a new game from them with this engine as it looks great for a fantasy action/adventure game like Fable.
So many polygons, and I could still count the arc segments on that life preserver.
Nice that they agree with me that artists should be kept away from native textures though This to me, even though it doesn't have the graphical glitz of Epic's demo, is more important for the next generation. It's tackling the true bottlenecks, the ability for artists to produce next gen assets in reasonable time in the first place ... the rendering is the easy part.
Their work is incredibly impressive to me ... I think this is the greatest step forward since SVT/Megatexture (and grander in scope to boot).
Nice that they agree with me that artists should be kept away from native textures though
This to me, even though it doesn't have the graphical glitz of Epic's demo, is more important for the next generation. It's tackling the true bottlenecks, the ability for artists to produce next gen assets in reasonable time in the first place ... the rendering is the easy part.Their work is incredibly impressive to me ... I think this is the greatest step forward since SVT/Megatexture (and grander in scope to boot).
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dragonelite
Veteran
Lucid_Dreamer
Veteran
Could this be considered an evolution of Factor 5's meshing tech?
I am overly impressed with it, really. Apart from Crysis 2, everything seemed too quiet on the developers front for a very very long time, but in the last two weeks developers are truly breaking my moulds. They are thinking outside the box in such a way that I didn't expect such evolutionary and revolutionary features in modern games.So many polygons, and I could still count the arc segments on that life preserver.
Nice that they agree with me that artists should be kept away from native textures though
Their work is incredibly impressive to me ... I think this is the greatest step forward since SVT/Megatexture (and grander in scope to boot).
Let me tell you that in 2005 I thought 512MB of RAM for next gen consoles was unbeatable and developers would achieve amazing things. I thought they were all-powerful, that we would see prodigious things, but lately Crytek, DICE, idTech5, etc, surpass all belief.
GI seems to be the new standard lighting, all seasoned with HDR, etc, and graphics I thought I would never see this generation.
That being said, I can't believe this comes from the same company that created Fable 3, which I consider one of the worst games ever created (nothing unexpected since it is a work from Moll-inator).
WARNING; extreme criticism below.
I am someone who desperately wanted to love Fable 3 because of personal reasons -it was a gift from someone very important in my life- but I have a terribly hard time playing it, and got bored of it with some combination of terrible dissatisfaction and lack of enthusiasm.
I also had to play Battle: Los Angeles for a while and absolutely hated it, but even that piece of rubbish paled in comparison to Fable 3, which is assigned next (below B:LA) in my list of worst games this generation. OH MY GOD. I have nearly played 8 hours of mind-numbingly tedious and awful upper-middle class posh emo angst, featuring some of the most stereotypical and unlikeable characters imaginable. I wouldn't wish that game on my worst enemy.
The art style is one of the worst EVER, and I mean EVER, created.
The extremely childish situations, the supposed British humour -huh?, you've gotta be kidding me, I still have yet to find it-, the extremely annoying grumbles while doing gestures, the easiness to gain people's trust while doing stupid, bizarre things while I lose precious time of my life holding A to perform a damn brainless gesture, marrying, falling in love in a matter of seconds... sigh.
There's also another factor. It's a Molyneaux game, one of the gloomiest persons in videogames, an overly emotional liar who over promised and of course underdelivered -he admitted it-, who received an award for... I don't know what and who is up there with the likes of Miyamoto and stuff -sigh-. I can't stand the Molyneaux or, for him, it's better to say Moll-inator (Moll-inane also seems appropriate).
but I have a terribly hard time playing it, and got bored of it with some combination of terrible dissatisfaction and lack of enthusiasm.I also had to play Battle: Los Angeles for a while and absolutely hated it, but even that piece of rubbish paled in comparison to Fable 3, which is assigned next (below B:LA) in my list of worst games this generation. OH MY GOD. I have nearly played 8 hours of mind-numbingly tedious and awful upper-middle class posh emo angst, featuring some of the most stereotypical and unlikeable characters imaginable. I wouldn't wish that game on my worst enemy.
The art style is one of the worst EVER, and I mean EVER, created.
The extremely childish situations, the supposed British humour -huh?, you've gotta be kidding me, I still have yet to find it-, the extremely annoying grumbles while doing gestures, the easiness to gain people's trust while doing stupid, bizarre things while I lose precious time of my life holding A to perform a damn brainless gesture, marrying, falling in love in a matter of seconds... sigh.
There's also another factor. It's a Molyneaux game, one of the gloomiest persons in videogames, an overly emotional liar who over promised and of course underdelivered -he admitted it-, who received an award for... I don't know what and who is up there with the likes of Miyamoto and stuff -sigh-. I can't stand the Molyneaux or, for him, it's better to say Moll-inator (Moll-inane also seems appropriate).
Playing his games makes me feel gross inside.
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The streaming part is similar, but AFAICS Factor 5 used progressive meshes while Lionhead isn't using geometry LOD during rendering at all.
Really the rendering part isn't what's impressive ... the modeling tools/workflow are impressive.
dragonelite
Veteran
The 100 billion is a reference to the source art assets artist make atleast that is what i get from it. So if im right the 100 billion model is used to extract normal maps from
Tools like 3D max and Zbrush have a limit on how many polygons the can use with this tool they can add more details.
It has been a long time since i played with 3D max and z brush.
the 10 bio number comes from the total amount of the world, at any time its cut down to 10 mio - you simply select a region to edit in full detail (in a separate window/program like zbrush apparently) while the rest is scaled down. and its all about the developing steps and not rendering engine.
its likely not even using something like megatexture, it just takes away the task of manually defining textures on geometry. why would you pay for the runtime overhead if you could just break down the textures once
its likely not even using something like megatexture, it just takes away the task of manually defining textures on geometry. why would you pay for the runtime overhead if you could just break down the textures once
It is using a virtual texturing solution similar to megatexture. They can't paint the textures directly onto geometry, and manipulate the geometry in the actual game world, rather than working on textures in 2D and tiling them onto 3D meshes. It seems like they can play, or script the camera to move through the level, and the toolset will record the highest MIP level required for each tile, but this has nothing to do with geometry LOD, right? They can then flag which tiles require more resolution, which is kind of interesting.
I'm still unsure how the LOD algorithms work. I can see how that might work if you were doing a real-time cutscene, and you knew the path the camera was going to follow, but in a game where the player controls the camera, how would this work?
during development sure, but I dont see how you couldnt create simple textures at runtime from a cooked "texel database" or virtual textures.
This is from the linked pdf:
I understand that as baking in lighting information into textures, and I think you could just map out the geometry offline/or just once runtime without handling those "megatextures" every frame like id does.
What the heck have I just watched? Is this running on current generation hardware?
The amount of geometry detail in this first video is simply staggering. No video game comes anywhere close to this. Will have to read that pdf later, but I expect it to contain a recipe for something to do with dark magic.
The amount of geometry detail in this first video is simply staggering. No video game comes anywhere close to this. Will have to read that pdf later, but I expect it to contain a recipe for something to do with dark magic.
I don't know. Party of the slide presentation is about generating the mips and compressing the virtual textures to fit on a DVD. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
"Having a single virtual texture space for all our assets makes life really easy, and
simplifies a lot of our material and shader code"
I havent red through the whole presentation, so Im probably wrong on this :smile:
All they say is they use Hoppe's polygon reduction technique, so presumably there is no runtime geometry LOD selection.
I know I may sometimes have an odd sense of humor, but even I think that's funny!What the heck have I just watched? Is this running on current generation hardware?
The amount of geometry detail in this first video is simply staggering. No video game comes anywhere close to this. Will have to read that pdf later, but I expect it to contain a recipe for something to do with dark magic.
I think the only recipe to success is that Molly hasn't been involved much, I guess. They kept it silent, much on the contrary to the typical overpromising and underdelivering of the Mollyneaux.
Be glad that he has a lot of capable people around working in the company, if that helps!
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