Atomontage Engine - The Future Is Volumetric, Atom-Based - Unofficial video-blog #1 (part 1 of 3)

This is an unofficial Atomontage Engine technology preview/video-blog #1 (part 1 of 3). Sorry for the low quality -- it was shot with a video-camera.

The video demonstrates some of the real-time capabilities of the engine. The static scene was generated in AE built-in content generators. It was generated with 16bit colors and without any super-sampling as well as without multi-sampling. All that resulted in the numerous small-scale artifacts. The generation took about 10 hours on two cores of an Intel(R) P7550 CPU so the generator is obviously not well optimized.

Atomontage Engine renders complex scenes on per-pixel geometry details in real-time. The renderer is accelerated and the engine provides some of the effects that are common in GPU-based solutions.

Some of the basic features of the engine are presented here including Depth-of-Field effect which blurs the voxels in close-ups, the Bloom effects which reduces apparent voxelization in views with a bright background, as well as the cast soft shadow and a proof-of-concept simple indirect illumination solution. All that in real-time.

Read more on the Atomontage homepage ( http://www.atomontage.com/?id=dev_blog#aug14_2010 ) .

(Please turn the sound off if you want to avoid the author's deadly voice;)

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• atomontage
• engine
• atom
• voxel
• based
• volumetric
• 3D
• real-time
• rendering
• physics
• thermodynamics
• chemistry
• dof
• bloom
• per-pixel
• geometry
• future
• game

[FischKopfD]

If you combine the physics of your engine with the graphics of euclideon, you would have one epic game engine...

[AtomontageEngine]

@FischKopfD Well no. As you can see in AE videos, AE doesn't depend on repetitious blocks of geometry, hi-res or not. And I haven't talked about it yet but in AE there's no artificial LOD limit (the same in other non-trivial voxel engines) so in fact the details in AE can be comparable with those in UDT. I will show that in future videos and also in the first executable AE demo. Dependance on massive instancing of geometry is a serious issue and no good sign of engine capabilities.

[lelela2211]

Do you think you will release some playable demo stuff in 2012 ? 

[AtomontageEngine]

@lelela2211 I hope so. Soon the generators will run in parallel on at least 6 cores (it was 2 till now), later maybe on 10. That's the performance boost I need to prepare the necessary huge amounts of data and tune the most relevant features so that they perform well on that data.

[metabog]

This would work well for an RTS where you don't have to zoom in too close.

[AtomontageEngine]

@cpp8 Thanks. A tech video will come out soon, and a demo might follow, I will see..

[YummiestGiraffe]

@Aluenvey Go outside and dig a hole in your yard lol.

[LolindirElros]

@Aluenvey play cortex command. Not blocky and diggable xD

[DavidPatMathis81]

@Aluenvey I wouldn't hold you're breath on that one. I promise you that all those rocks are hollow.

[Richdadful]

@faultybrain387 Wow then you have to give credit to this engine. The graphics are better than unlimited detail demo. Infact this looks on par with best games of this generation.

[faultybrain387]

@TheBlenderblob This is realistic. Unlimited detail boasts a complete voxel engine with 1 cubic mm atoms. This is more like 1 cubic inch atoms. That's why he uses DOF to blur the blocky effect caused by the large atoms. Plus he uses the atoms in tandem with mesh (a much better idea performance wise).

[mamaloney1]

This would be amazing paired with minecraft.