Two really cool ideas (for the future Unity?)

I though about deformation in games and I found this wonderfull contribution:

http://graphics.ethz.ch/~brunoh/s2005.html

And in the area I think Unity should improve, a very cool future reference to soft shadow realtime implementation:

http://research.microsoft.com/users/kunzhou/

This has got nothing to do with anything, just though I'd show you these really cool links!

 

Two of four of the authors are working for Ageia, so it remains to be seen if some of this is headed our way...

d.

 

Cool! The deformation looks neat and it seems they've come up with some tests too.. But I guess there's a money/evolution scheme to it too, so It might not be expected any time too soon.

:roll:

 

And for those who have a fast windows machine this might be interesting too:

http://graphics.ethz.ch/~brunoh/download/DefColStudio.zip

It's funny to try to build chains and squeeze one body through the other one... :O)


Greetings,

taumel

PS: Also with shadows! ;O)

 

About the shadows:

While I strongly belive that soft shadows are the future, I also belive that we should hard shadows first. Then when you have hard shadows, the next logical step it to blur the edges, for a simulated soft shadow look. I belive that this can be done on some current hardware.
While I like the idear of dynamic precomputed stuff like the leading research of Peter-Pike Sloan on PRT and this soft shadow paper, it is still top level research, and I do belive that it will be at least one or two years before you actually see it in games. Especially because they only manage to get about 15 fps for a simplified scene with a dual xeon 3.0 box. You need at least 40+ if you want to smack a real-time tag on an algorithm
Besides that I would like to keep as much graphics stuff on the GPU as possible, so I would be more likely to think that upgrated shadow mapping algorithms are the way of the future.

Anyways, I liked the ideas but dont expect precomputed radiance transfer or true nonfaked soft shadows in the near future. I would very much like to do it at one point, but not until it runs with 40+ fps on a majority of the consumer hardware, which I belive is 2-3 years ahead for the mac platform.

 

Hi Peter,

>>>While I strongly belive that soft shadows are the future, I also belive that we should hard shadows...<<<

I believe that realtime raytracing engines will be the future when there will be fast hardware for it but it will take some more years for sure...;O)

I once found this pretty amazing...(fast win-machine needed)
http://www.realstorm.de/realstorm/data/RealStorm_Bench2004.exe

As written before in another thread softshadows would be brillinat but i would be happy with a kind of stencilshadow system as well and hard edges won't be such a problem for me now and for quite some time. I would like to have a shadow system where i do simply have a command with maybe some options to simply turn it on or off without coding stuff or preparing gfx on my own. I strongly think that such a feature is missing in unity (by the way: as AA and a True-Type-TextEngine) and should be part of a 1.x release.

Hmmm last time i looked into shadowmaps was the source from the humus site. He also played with adding blurring mechanism to shadow maps. Do you know this one?

http://www.humus.ca/index.php?page=3D&start=8

>>>Anyways, I liked the ideas but dont expect precomputed radiance transfer or true nonfaked soft shadows in the near future...<<<

Yes but do me and yourself a favor and don't limit unity's featureset only to what would run well on the mac. This would be a big mistake as reality is that there are so many contract jobs which are pc only. I can't even make 1€ with a web-plugin only available for the mac for instance as my clients simply don't care about this platform. There are rare cases where they do but mostly they don't. It's nice and better if it also runs on a Mac but they don't pay for this.


Greetings,

taumel

<signature: do the win-port of the ide as soon as possible ;O)>

 

Not to start a religious war, but I put my belief in more arbitrary programming of the GPU than dedicated raytraycing hardware, but hey - lets have both

I do know the shadowmaps from Humus, but there are many other great papers out there too. But as Joe previously pointed out, we plan to have active shadows in 2.0

I belive that the speed and graphics capabilities of mac will soon reach the levels of regular PCs, especially when Apple makes the switch to the Intel platform. Then I bet we will see those new graphics cards and processors in macs faster.
That being said, Unity is very diverse in what you can do with it. Graphics wise (what I know most about), you can write your own shaders, and thereby basically make your game as heavy and good looking, or simple and fast as you wish. So we will not be limiting unity to what can run on mac only, but as of right now there are some outside limitations - eks: lack of latest shadermodel and glsl, which makes the latest and greatest impossible... It will be here soon though I belive (Call and ask Steve).

-peter

 

Hi Peter,

>>>Not to start a religious war, but I put my belief in more arbitrary programming of the GPU than dedicated raytraycing hardware, but hey - lets have both <<<

I think you've misunderstood me. I meant that specific piece of hardware as the new GPU, not in addition to a already existing GPU. I may have only looked a bit further into the future to a point where a bigger change comes... ;O)

>>>I do know the shadowmaps from Humus, but there are many other great papers out there too. But as Joe previously pointed out, we plan to have active shadows in 2.0<<<

Yep i know. This one just popped up my mind when you wrote about shadow maps... :O)
And yes i know that you plan it for version 2 but i feel it should be in version 1.x as it's fundamental and you're selling unity as a next-gen-dev-engine.

>>>I belive that the speed and graphics capabilities of mac will soon reach the levels of regular PCs, especially when Apple makes the switch to the Intel platform. Then I bet we will see those new graphics cards and processors in macs faster.<<<

Good point. So more reason to dig into these areas! ;O)

>>>That being said, Unity is very diverse in what you can do with it. Graphics wise (what I know most about), you can write your own shaders, and thereby basically make your game as heavy and good looking, or simple and fast as you wish. So we will not be limiting unity to what can run on mac only, but as of right now there are some outside limitations - eks: lack of latest shadermodel and glsl, which makes the latest and greatest impossible... It will be here soon though I belive (Call and ask Steve).<<<

You mean Steve Jobs? Better not...i would have to ask him a lot of questions about this and that i think he would leave beeing angry before i even ended half of my list...


Greetings,

taumel

 

A nice article on relief shadow mapping:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051003/watt_01.shtml

 

Hey

Relief Shadow mapping requires Relief mapping though, which currently cannot be implemented on a Mac. One could try to implement the shader in Unity, and then only see the result on SM 3.0 capable hardware on the PC, but it would be quite hard I guess. I personally hope that we will have better drivers and hardware on the mac soon, so we can at least match the PC in functionality if not also speed.
afaik the latest and greatest version of Fabios relief mapping does not even work on ATI hardware on the PC, making it unsuitable for current games. It is going to be very interesting to see it implemented in upcomming PS3 and XBox 360 games though, where I belive it is bound to be used extensively.

Shadow Mapping should work with Parallax mapping and our bump mapping too though, so in my point of view it is the better algorithm to implement, even though I also belive it is a little more time consuming to get right.

 

Hi Peter,

Fabios/Manuels Relief Mapping does not work on ATI due to SM3 wich actually isn't supported by ATI right now.

But at least this week when Fudo will come out it is...at least for the PC. I dunno if there is a manufacturer after offering a AGP-Version of R520 for the Mac...


Greetings,

taumel

<signature: do the win-port of the ide as soon as possible! ;O)>