Procedural textures, is Microsoft making a mistake?

[Iron Tiger]

What Microsoft is developing is not procedural textures (that has already been done), what they are developing is something they call "Procedural Synthesis". Quoted from an earlier interview with Allard last year... "He went on to describe some of the demos being created behind the scenes: 'I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you."

Sounds like Bryce3D.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Procedural character generation and altering have one thing that's common in almost every implementation I've seen - the quality suffers greatly on characteristic features, like the face...

On the other hand, stuff like Weta's "orc builder" for the Massive scenes is already quite straightforward and easy to implement, it takes some time and Maya/Max/XSI scripting knowledge. Animation transfer might be a little bit more problematic for characters with different proportions though.

 

[The GameMaster]

Ahhh... it seems nearly everyone missed the concept I am trying to indicate, but that was to be expected as I only provided simplified examples. I will state that what Microsoft is trying to do with the procedural synthesis has not been done before, but it is very difficult to explain what it is until I analyze the details myself and at the moment I only have a idea of what they are trying to do. I guess everyone is going to have to wait until Microsoft shows the examples they shown to Famitsu and Allard and see them applied into gaming.

The GameMaster...