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Atom-based code

Started by a2k Sep 27, 2000 at 9:55 PM 0 replies 250+ views

Original Post

Sep 27, 2000 at 9:55 PM

hello, fellow developers. Fantasy Edge over in the art forum brought up an interesting idea, but i would like to get feedback straight from the coders. felis, please don''t take this down right quick, cuz i need coders'' opinions. Fantasy Edge says: "...I actully think that atomic surfacing would run faster in some cases. instead of loading massive texture files, you load a library of textured atoms. its still texture mapping of sorts but each atom is textured a certain color and they are only 1 pixel. the instead of applying a texture on triangles, you place these atomic variables across the surface in an organized pattern. the code would make the texture, not the image and the code would be able to munipulate the atoms to make objects deviate from their models. who knows, this could be where true 3d efects begin. " Okay, now, i already responded to this by saying that texture mapping will be faster than any sort of atomic-based code. i just wanna hear what all the other programmers say. Oh, and also, don''t flame Fantasy Edge about this, he gets enough of that. just yer thoughts. a2k

fifty1

Sep 27, 2000 at 11:05 PM

The beauty of texture mapping is that it only requires 2D interpolation to colour each pixel across the triangle/polygon. I would think that an atom based solution as described would be very expensive because each atom has to be transformed using a 4x4 matrix. That''s a lot of mults.

Current hardware is highly optimized for texture mapping so any performance tests done today would give very bad results for atomic rendering as described.

Image-based rendering has a lot of potential I think. It''s advanced texture mapping that can give photo-realistic, anti-aliased images perceived from any angle, and is not computationally expensive at run-time. (It''s pretty expensive to compile though). That may be what MadKeith was referring to when he mentioned advanced textures in the original thread.

An interesting reference to image-based rendering is at
www.ramartworks.com/ibr/index.html
(sorry I don''t know how to make this a link)

I haven''t been doing this stuff for long though, so I could be *way* off...

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