Attached Link: http://www.elderscrolls.com/art/obliv_pc_screens_01.htm

I thought some of you might be interested in seeing what is quite possibly the state of the art in real time landscape rendering. The game editor (Bethesda Soft) described the way they are generating procedural forest as little ecoystems. The game will come with an editor (on PC) that will allow you to create virtual landscapes, populate them with creatures and 'walk' through them as a modification of the game.

Check out the link for some amazing screenshots.

(Only 2 more weeks and I will be able to give you a first impression of how smoothly all these details render...)

Message edited on: 03/09/2006 06:23

• agiel - www.linfa.net

That is pretty impressive. Thanks for the link. Mak

www.makwilson.co.uk

You an Elder Scrolls fan as well, agiel? And yeah, I got my collector's edition pre-ordered as well..... :P

My goodness. Some of those screenshots wouldn't go amiss in the galleries here. This is going to be realtime? Impressive. Hmm. If this quality of image can be done realtime on high end consumer graphics cards, e-on and its competitors should seriously start rethinking their render engines....

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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This is really quite amazing!! Thanks for the link!! :) Irene

well i agree with one thing, 3d applications needs to seriously start digging in on the gpu performance for more then just opengl preview, it needs to start helping out the cpu with the final renders, alot of seriously wasted performance there on most modern day rigs. make it optional if youre concerned with people without a decent gpu. however theres a big difference tho, even tho a game is real time its still like a big sandbox (a premade box with limits and posibilitys) compared to the virtualy unlimited things your 3d applications needs to handle, that sandbox environment helps out quite alot when it comes to games. but yes, 3d apps could be so much quicker to work with.

You know, I was thinking about this very topic recently. Perhaps 3d design programs are no longer on the right track on how they create scenes. At one point I understood how games didn't compete because they had light and shadow maps pre-rendered. But now, they do light and shadows in real-time.

The things in these games look fantastic. Look at Half-Life2 or Doom. On high high end systems you get things that look as good as what Vue can do but at 60 frames per second. The new add on for halflife even does hdri lighting. They do all this AND all the other things like AI and physics. Imagine being able to grabe a pile of boxes, throw them against a wall and let real physics decide how they lay there.

Now I know, when you get down to the nitty gritty and if you went in close you will really see how it isn't as good. But the point is, it looks almost as good and doing it fast. Take one oblivion scene. Any scene. Most are lower than what Vue can do, but make a simple scene in Vue. How long would it take to render? 5 minutes? 3 minutes? The game does it in 1 second! Now I am not saying it is a completely fair comparison, but there is some middle ground here.

As said above, perhaps these 3d programs need to really start taking advantage of what these vid cards can really offer more than opengl viewports. I think if the idea of how game engines work is combined with how 3d programs work would create an awesome program.

Ofcourse I have no idea how any of this works, so I may be way off. :)

Message edited on: 03/09/2006 11:50

Message edited on: 03/09/2006 11:52

Actually, I would scream if Oblivion renders these screens in 1 second :) I am expecting at least 15 renders a second, 24 would be nice. As for using more of the GPU, e-on is already trying to go in that direction with very detailed openGL previews. I haven't seen many 3D software trying to get that close to the final render from a preview. Even if it is not working as well as we would like, it is already a step in the right direction.

• agiel - www.linfa.net

mm its a step in the right direction having opengl previews, but its a big waste not using the same gpu for the render, of course together with the cpu, now is it hard to get your gpu to help out the cpu with the final rendering, not realy, in my humble opinion and it would for sure be worth it in terms of publicity and happy users.

agiel, Vue's openGL is decent, not more, not less. It gets pretty strange when displaying texture maps, and we know how resources intense it is. I'm not complaining, just stating that it's not the best around.

Caligari released their new version on TrueSpace 7 and it has a DirectX render engine, It looks good. I havnt had much time to play with it but it has the ability to make your own plugins right in the software via what they call a link editor, I think someone made a Doom 3 mesh importer. Any ways at least one company seems to see the value of the gpu.

Just remember one and all that the mantra of game engines is "Ignore the man behind the curtain". Doom 3 looks utterly fantastic....until you examine the unlit, untextured geometry, and realize how utterly lo res and lacking in detain it truly is. It is all lighting and texture tricks. HL 2 is pretty much the same way, with metatags on the textures that call to the sound engine, for instance. A barrel shape is generic; what it does depends on the texture applied. A rusty one creates a metallic clank; a wooden one an empty thunk. The ones marked explosive have a damage value that when exceeded, triggers the burning animation and the explosion. As for Oblivion....the system that Bethsoft is using is nothing more than instanced billboards once you get a couple of detail levels away from your viewpoint. The system actively swaps true geometry and billboards depending on depth setting. The weather effects animations in the distance are all pregenerated or instanced from the foreground. The actual polycount and shadowmapping load is nowhere near what the scene implies. And that is not a slam. Game engines are gorgeous....but they are also designed to display a precreated set of items and effects, and optimized to handle that. The apps we deal with here are geared more toward creating that content, and eye candy should take back seat to function. There have been a few freeware attempts to convert game engines to the display end of a modeller, and none of them worked. Games are built with one assumption; it will be the only app running, and can eat whatever the OS doesn't. Or at least -I- have never been able to run Doom 3, HL2 and Quake 4 the way I run Poser, Infinite, PBooost2, PSP8, etc.....

Attached Link: http://www.bethsoft.com/newsletter/devdiary_3.09.06.html

Well you have seen nothing yet ;)

Thanks for that link ! It was very illustrative of the challenges of displaying realtime landscapes with vegetation. That panoramic landscape is just amazing.

Message edited on: 03/10/2006 05:41

• agiel - www.linfa.net

Attached Link: http://www.speedtree.com/html/downloads_exe.htm

Oblivion will use a technology called SpeedTree, download some of the demos and you can see that some billboard instancing tricks are used for far away trees. It's still very impressive stuff though, the best I've seen in realtime.

Message edited on: 03/10/2006 05:52

Attached Link: http://files.filefront.com/SH3Film1mov/;4858287;;/fileinfo.html

On a related topic, if you'd like to see what some games have achieved as far as water dynamics goes, I made a short film about 2 days ago using the Silent Hunter 3 game for source footage, check it out.

"but they are also designed to display a precreated set of items and effects, and optimized to handle that."

Well yes and no and you can't forget about mods. Mods turn these games into completely different games. All new models and textures and worlds are used. Sure often they do take a bit of a performance toll but they still look great. Not only that most companies who make these games sell their game engines to be used in completely different games. The new Doom 3 engine and UT2007 engines will be used in TONS of different games. So yes, they optimized, but they are flexible to add in anything these mod makers can think of.

The ultimate point is, it looks good, incredibly good. Even if the final render is done in the standard slow way, imagine being able to set up a world and walk through it. Use physics to have objects lay around and just keep on moving till you find just the exact spot you want in real time. Do this in game quality and then do a final render. Now that would be awesome! :)

You can not compare game engines and development software. Vue Maya Lightwave and the rest, are creation programs. When you do a softbody simulation in those programs the software ahs to modify the base scene file it's self. Not just move or paint objects that are already defined. It is creating and modifying the environment, not just playing back and environment. It's like comparing apples and oranges. Just ask one of those systems to prepare a file that can exported for print and see just how well it responds. Even in this day and age people forget that the graphics engine has Nothing to do with render times. Rendering is done by the cpu, and since #D creation apps have to do a whole lot more than just display already created, textured and lit objects they will never be as fast as HW based graphics cards. #D creation apps do everything in SW. THen send the final result to the display card. While it would be possible to have a HW intensive 3D creation package it would be single task oriented and unflexible as HW is not nearly as modifyable or flexible as a SW based system.

Attached Link: http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/702/702491/vids_1.html

More eye candy with a video of a fly-through an amazing landscape. Less than a week and I will be there ! :)

• agiel - www.linfa.net

Listen to the soundtrack closer; you can hear the sound of feet in the grass. So that was character walking along terrain, not flythrough. Which is even more impressive.... I may finally have all my excuses to get and X2! (according to Bethsoft, Oblivion will support multiple threads).

Ran into a reference to a GPU based render engine for 3DS Max the other day - it's called RT2. Couldn't find any more info, but it's reported to be extremely fast.

With OpenGL 2.0 / DirectX 9.0c the graphics cards have highly programmable vertex shaders and pixel shaders. So a lot of the rendering tasks can be offloaded to the GPU.

The softbody simulation pnevai refers to is NOT part of the rendering step. 3D work consists of many steps, of which rendering is only one - but very time-consuming, especially in the case of animations - step.
I think rendering can be sped up by an enormous amount using the rendering capabilities of the modern GPUs. And that RT2 development looks promising.

Message edited on: 03/17/2006 12:21

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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OK, I don't own Vue yet, but I really need to learn how to do the Elder Scrolls-type animation fly-through  of landscape.

Can anyone please provide practical advice on how to accomplish the type of animation found in Agiel's link.

thanks