[HN Gopher] A Macro View of Nanite
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       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...
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-31 23:00 UTC)