Pixar Animation Studios Open Subdivision Technology

[Mind Dragon]

I saw this on Slashdot (were they talk about the open source license used).

Open sourced with patents released. In beta.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3L9BOTEtw

[Mind Dragon]

Can a moderator move this to random?

[LostSoul]

...give it another generation or two for particle effects to reach the same level of real-time interactivity and I'd bet that traditional 3d renderfarms are toast. And as awesome as that is, I have to wonder what sort of artwork we'll be seeing if/when this sort of technology takes center state in games too.

fyi - the frog in the demonstration...that was over a million fully-textured and lit polygons *before* displacement mapping. All of it...in real-time. Just...wow.

[hooby]

Originally Posted by LostSoul

And as awesome as that is, I have to wonder what sort of artwork we'll be seeing if/when this sort of technology takes center state in games too.

As seen from multiple demos, subdivision (their own proprietary implementation, not open subdiv) is going to be a feature in Unreal Engine 4. Some of it is already in current gen engines - where it's mostly just called "tesselation" instead of subdivision. I'm very confident that it will be in every next version of bigger engines, like CryEngine, id Tech, Frostbite - and maybe even Unity and similar.

So why aren't we seeing more subdivision in games today?

Easy answer: DX9 does not support it. PS3 hardware does not support it. Xbox360 hardware does not support it.
It only works on PCs with pretty new graphics cards. That's too small an audience for publishers to throw money at such features.

That being said, I totally love the thought of Open Subdiv bringing that kind of technology which up to now was only available proprietary and commercially, to the open source community - where it is available for everyone to use - including small indie developers with no budget. That's what I think is really incredible about that story!

[gdansk]

Xbox 360's GPU does support hardware tessellation. It happens to cut the effect triangle/sec rate in half, so it's rarely used. ATI's hardware tessellation first appeared in Xenos and was later integrated in its desktop followup, the R600 GPU. Source