Just to clarify, this is basically a topic about voxels.
SamW wrote:They might be able to animate a 3d point cloud, not by doing animation, but by making a compressed point cloud 'movie'. Meaning each animation frame is just a different set of points that combine together into a 4D point cloud movie. If their search algorithm is good they should be able to go from frame to frame quite fast, but I don't know how much more memory such a 'movie' would take compared to the single object. That would depend on how well they can compress it.
Another approach is defining each voxel in spacetime as an RGBAt-tuple. So you basically have multiple RGBA-values per voxel, each is then set from a specific time on (t).
Ultimately, static voxel clouds are 3D matrices with one RGBA value per cell. Here, we have 3D matrices with multiple RGBAt-values per cell (at least 1 with t=0).
The advantage would be that there is no structural difference between static and animated clouds. They are formally the same thing, static clouds just have only one RGBAt-value per cell.
This doesn't transfer well to stuff like dynamic gradients and detail level junk though.
Ragdollmaster wrote:Besides the practicality problems behind implementing this technology, I don't really see how this is really too useful.
It's easier to make art for, for starters. You can just literally deform matter instead of deforming matter and then looking whether a polygonal equivalent looks cool. Or you can just laserscan actual things and directly use them as-is.
It's easier to process mathematically. Collision detection is rather trivial, for instance. Not the case for poly stuff, as any 3D programmer surely knows.
You can do a lot of awesome shit since you're actually talking about volumes and not surfaces. As an example, you could handle literal bulletholes instead of just placing awkwardly oriented decals on a surface. Terrains could be way more complex.
Most importantly: If voxels are dense enough, they are indistinguishable from reality with really simple lighting terms; but this goes a little beyond realtime code.
It doesn't seem very, uh... aesthetically pleasing. Obviously this is just a technical demonstration and, theoretically, it should look fucking beautiful, but really polygons are pretty useful as it is. After all, we already have three dimensional games that use polygons for this, and they run fine.
They don't actually run fine. We just sort of can deal with them. But it's really easy to get into messed-up situations with polygonal data, or to stumble onto hard problems.
Simply put, voxels are to polygonal surfaces in 3D what pixels are to vectors in 2D. So there's advantages to each side, but if you want to represent something as complex as reality, you would choose pixels in 2D and voxels in 3D, given infinite resolution.
