[HN Gopher] A Macro View of Nanite ___________________________________________________________________ A Macro View of Nanite Author : haxiomic Score : 60 points Date : 2021-05-31 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.elopezr.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.elopezr.com) | devit wrote: | This is one the things that it's surprising that it wasn't | available before. | | As far as I can tell this architecture was possible at least | starting from the introduction of DX11 hardware more than 10 | years ago, and it seems to be the most straightforward way of | rendering a realistic 3D scene. | HellDunkel wrote: | GPU memory has been a limiting factor but it also took | photogrammetry to capture models of sufficient detail to | justify the effort. | Jare wrote: | The architecture may be possible in the sense that feature-wise | you have the pieces (or most of them). But resources like | memory, bandwidth and gpu speed, would fall way below the | thresholds and tradeoffs needed to make this useful and not | just "possible". | bangonkeyboard wrote: | This is a lot less exotic than expected. | nynx wrote: | It seems like the magic part here is the knitting together of | clusters with different LODs. | | How does the streaming part work? I don't think this article | mentioned it. | HellDunkel wrote: | May be completely wrong but it looks as if triangles are | subdivided to approximate the next lod level while avoiding | cracks. | holoduke wrote: | Really impressive. I sometimes wonder if in 30 years from now it | would be still possible to write a 3D engine from scratch and | having the same graphical level of that time. | haxiomic wrote: | For those out of the loop: Unreal Engine 5 is in early access, | two of the most exciting new features are Nanite and Lumen | | Nanite is a system for efficiently rendering masses of geometry | (more so than using traditional methods) | | Lumen is a technique to enable global illumination (rendering | with multiple light bounces, traditional engines do 1 bounce + | trickery) by first converting geometry to signed distance fields. | Signed distance field techniques are very interesting, swapping | triangles for analytic surface equations, they can be used to | accelerate complex physics and lighting calculations. They've | only recently started making their way into big commercial | engines - starting with Media Molecule's Dreams game and now in | UE5 | | Lumen deep dive: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en- | US/RenderingFeatures/Lu... | | Signed Distance Functions, Inigo Quilezles: | https://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfuncti... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-31 23:00 UTC)