[Antnee]

A guy at work showed me a demo today that has REALLY impressed me. You can download it from here.

Basically, it's a 3D rendered scene where EVERYTHING is mathematically generated. The shapes, the textures and the sounds. All that and it's only a 177KB file. Bear in mind that a megabyte is 1024KB and a gigabyte is 1024KB! A video (low res) of the demo is 164.3MB in size and the hi-res video is 197.6MB!

I've just watched it at 1600x1200 on my PC. Put that in perspective like this: a 1600x1200 plain white JPEG with a 60% quality level saved from Photoshop is 22.27KB in size. So you can only get just under 8 of these images to the size of the demo itself.

The actually content of the demo is not going to set the world alight, but if you can appreciate the awesome technical achievement of this demo then you should really take a look.

The required/recommended specs are as follows:

Minimum Specs:
P4 2GHz or Athlon XP 2000+
512MB RAM
Pixel Shader 2 capable graphics card with 128MB RAM
DirectX 9.0c

Recommended Specs:
Core2Duo or Athlon64 X2 >2.4GHz
1024MB RAM
GeForce 7600/Radeon X1600 or better with 256MB RAM


If you're impressed then maybe you might want to look at the earlier 'Kkrieger' demo which is the same kinda thing only it's a game demo that's completely mathematically generated and weighs in at only 95KB

Both are technically VERY impressive if you understand what they've done

 

[DAN]

Yes I can certainly appreciate that....

It's not using compression as such - more regeneration... reminds me a little bit of Wonka Vision! :lol

I'm guess in but over your average AVI file they seem to have acheived a reduction ration of around 50:1 - so using the same technigue perhaps a 2 hour DIVX for example could be regenerated into about 15mb, a DVD-9 into about 150mb and a HDDVD/BlueRay into 600mb....

The de-generation process would take days though! (unless you had a seriously powerful machine)

 

[Antnee]

No, this is nothing to do with compression or regeneration; this is a 3D world that is rendered on the fly (like a game) but all the textures and effects are mathematically generated. Same goes for all the models and the routes that they take. That 177KB must be mostly a whole load of complicated Direct3D commands. Some things like the swarm of cubes would have been done by telling it to send a load of randomly rotating objects along a predetermined path and your PC calculates it as it goes. It's not a video!

 

[DAN]

Yeah I know it's not video... what I mean is if the same principles can be used to regenerate a video environment...afterall it's stilljust coloured pixels.

 

[Antnee]

Yeah, but it's kinda like the difference between a bitmap image like a .BMP or a .JPG and a vector based image such as the type that you can create with Illustrator and Freehand where every pixel has a value on a bitmap but a vector image is made up of mathematical formulae. Because everything is mathematically generated there is (in theory) an infinite level of detail. It's basically fractal based. In that respect, there is no need for any ready made images and the like. Apparently this will be used in new games where a basic template for a person is created and then slight variances can cause totally different (and never the same twice) characters. When computer technology gets a bit better though then yes, you could well be looking at entire movies that are maybe little more than a couple of megabytes that are completely generated on the fly, rather than huge, pre-rendered/filmed productions. When that happens you could well be looking at the end of the film acting profession!

 

[DAN]

Well... I'd rather have a Buzz Lightyear than a Keira Knightley any day!! :lol

 

[Fordzoid]

If you two meet I bet you'd hold hands!! :smoke

 

[DAN]

Jealous? :kiss