Unlimited Detail Presentation

FIRST We are going to present a new technology called UD. Unlimited Detail first started in 2002, about 10 years ago. In 2010 Euclideons technology appeared in most of the worlds media claiming that they have found a way to give computer graphics unlimited power; and many people didnt believe them. To understand why, we have to look at the current state of the industry. Were going to have to keep it a little bit simple for those that are new to an understanding of 3D computer graphics.

Here <picture> we have a picture of a space ship made out of little flat shapes called polygons and at present nearly all computer graphics are made using the polygon system. Now theyre not always gray and boring like this, normally they put pictures on them called textures.

Whenever new consoles or graphic cards appear they are trying to make them more powerful than the previous ones. When we talk about more power in computer graphics what we normally mean is more polygons because when you have more polygons youre things wont look quite so angular and sharp, theyll start to look a bit more round. Obviously an object that has 10 sides isnt going to look as good as one with 16 sides; ideally we would prefer to not have any flat sides at all and certainly thats were going to be in the future. There is a better way to do graphics instead of polygons which is used in medicine and the sciences and that is to make everything out of tiny little atoms instead of flat panels. Things in the real world arent made out of flat surfaces and so the idea is that technology will continue to progress and the polygons will get smaller and smaller and the objects will get rounder and rounder and then one day well have so much computing power we will abandon polygons all together and move to whats called the Point Cloud Data system [PCD]. PCD is where you make your objects out of little points instead of polygons, tiny little dots. The dots are all colored like little floating 3D atoms, then everything will be lovely and round and geometry will all be real and brick walls will all be real geometry instead flat pictures. The problem with doing that is that every single point takes up a little bit of time for the computer to process and the computer has to do mathematics and trigonometry, multiplication and division; so if you try to build your whole world out of 3D atoms and you would have trillions of them, then it would probably take the same amount of time to build 1 frame as it took the Egyptians to build the pyramids. There have been some fantastic demonstrations by ATI and SGI, even NVidia where theyve run millions, sometimes as much as a billion points of PCD on very, very big supercomputers. video [piramids] Have a look here weve got big pyramids made of some unusual looking animals, each made out of millions of points in total there are about 8 billion points running because theyve all been doubled and placed underneath to make reflections and all of this runs is software, were running unlimited amounts of PCD in software alone. This is the largest breakthrough in 3D technology since computer graphics begun. I think you could best understand its significance like this: theres 2 large companies called ATI and NVidia and they spend a lot of time and billions of dollars fighting each other trying to build bigger stronger GPUs with more polygons. At present the polygon count goes up about 22% a year and a lot of people do a lot of work building very, very powerful microchips to have it go up that 22% a year. Unlimited Detail doesnt increase the polygon count by 22% or 100% of 1000% it brings unlimited graphics power, you cant have more than unlimited; its the end of the race for geometry. Its a little bit like when colors started at 2 colors for a computer screen, then they moved to 4 colors, then 16 colors, 256 colors, 16 bit colors and finally 32 bit colors, it stopped there, it didnt go any further because our eyes cant really see any more than that. And so that was the end of the color race, Unlimited Detail is

the end of the geometry race and we can now leap over the next 20 generations of computer graphics cards and go straight to unlimited graphics. Polygons have a lot of problems, the first one is things look angular, the second one is they are rather limited, you cant have unlimited polygons. In movies, SGY movies their wire-frames are at least 500 times more complicated than what were seeing in games today and objects are geometrically more intricate. The best way to make things look like they have a lot of polygons is to use the model swap; perhaps youre familiar with the method. < model swap video > There is a system used in polygons called the model swap system where you have a lesser model, a medium sized model, a high polygon model which would imply 3 when really theres about 4-8 of them in a good game and as you move closer and further the models are being swapped which saves polygons when things are far away you are not using a complicated model. Nobody has been able to do a good transition between these swapping models. For the actual artist you could imagine the problems involved with having to build these objects multiple times, as for the costs in development that does push things up quite significantly. If you have unlimited point cloud data (trillions of trillions of trillions of points) then you dont have to save points or geometry by building multiple models, multiple times. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Graphics are definitely getting a lot better; if you compare Crysis 1 to Crysis 2 you see nearly double the polygon count <highlighted polygons pictures> but things still dont look realistic. <polygon ground video> Lets look at something fairly common: THE GROUND. The ground in nearly all games is a flat texture map, sometimes a bump map, with polygon pieces of grass sticking up from it. So we can see that the polygon count in games today are pretty low; <palm picture> if we look at things like palm trees and then compared them to say with a palm tree made using UD you can see that the polygon budget was very restrictive.

<40 mil poly tree video> Here we have another tree made out of 40 million polygons which by the way is normally the size of an entire map. Having unlimited polygons will surly make the 3D artists a lot happier by removing this burden from their lives; as for those who play games your graphics are about to get better, better by the factor of 100.000 times. <Adv Disp Mapping video> For those of you familiar with all this techno babble youre probably thinking: Advanced Displacement Mapping [ADM] shall fly down and save us. ADM are these advanced polygons and when you look at them from certain directions they seem sort of 3D, however from other angles they dont look 3D at all. They are also a bit slow to use so you cant use too many of them and they dont save round objects from looking like hexagons, but they do a good job on the ground but not as good as if we had unlimited point cloud data but certainly an improvement over flat ground. So they offer help but not salvation. The game environments up until now have been a bunch of tricks to deal with the low polygon budget; things like sprites witch are always facing you, objects in the distance which are really just huge flat textures, sometimes objects far away just disappear into the fog, and other times they just pop up as they swap between different models. Since in, the graphics industry, everyone is used to using polygons the team at UD has built a polygon converter that converts models straight from 3Ds Max, Maya and other 3D programs so its pretty much business as usual for the artist he just has total freedom now and there is no such thing as a polygon budget. By converting polygons to unlimited detail PCD we can run them in unlimited quantities. They are converted at a rate of 64 atoms/ cubic millimeter. If you are not sure how small a cubic millimeter is, thats a rate of 1 million atoms/ cubic inch; if youre still not sure how small that is,<dirt ground video> these are grains of dirt.

In fact there are 15 million converted polygons in every square meter of dirt which means in one cubic meter of dirt more polygons than you would find in any game that doesnt use procedural generation. < the rock video > If we look here at this rock you may think it looks rather real, thats because it is; its actually been scanned in from the real world. Scanning technology that brings things in from the real world has existed for quite some time, the problem was what it produced was so high in geometry it could rarely be used, in games especially it could never be used. <comparison video> You might be thinking of this and saying: Hmmm something doesnt add up here; how can you have unlimited graphics power?! Everybody knows a computer takes time to process whatever amount of tasks its given, if you give it unlimited tasks its going to take a very, very long time to process; if you give it billions of points youre going to have a problem; and so unlimited detail just shouldnt be possible. That logic is sound and good and wise and we all agree with it 100%, but UD is not based on the normal rules of making 3D geometry whereby we would have to do more processing to add more stuff on the screen. UD is basically a 3D search algorithm such as Google or Yahoo. If you think about Google, Google also seems like it has unlimited power, after all its searching through all the knowledge of the earth and it doesnt seem to take very long. UD is using the same principles; its just applying it to 3D graphics. It has an algorithm that searches through unlimited amounts of PCD and grabbing only the points that are

needed. How many are needed? Well it really only needs 1 for every pixel on the screen. If you resolution is 1024X768 thats all the points you need. So its algorithm is vastly different to voxels which is conventional ways of doing point cloud data which by the way is limited, avoid that, its different to polygons, theyve served us well but they have a used by date, its different to making scenes through ray-tracing, thats a very, very, very slow process. Its a 4th system which is very fast and has unlimited geometry.

Mishus part UD doesnt only apply to the games industry; many industries require working with the PCD system and one such industry is the geospatial industry. In the past if you were a farmer Industrys history and explanation. Current problems (point decimation, low res texture, loading times)