Oh good lord that is a lot of blocks.

[fr0stbyte124]

Spoiler:

That's King's Landing, on the Westeroscraft server. 1:1 scale.

Rest of the album.
http://imgur.com/a/XfCkQ

In theory, our new engine should be able to hande this amount of geometry, but seeing it like this is quite intimidating.

[blockman42]

I was likening to "To Gloy" by Two Steps From Hell when I was looking at the album. What a coincidence.

[Keon]

TO GLOY? I was listening to Dagon Rider, then.

[҉]

Had I seen that picture out of context I likely would not have realized that it was Minecraft.

[Tunnelthunder]

The real question is could the fc engine handle it being burned down.

[cats]

So what? It's just a picture of a to... Oh. That's impressive.

[Iv121]

F88k O.O

[fr0stbyte124]

The real question is could the fc engine handle it being burned down.

Yes, after a fashion. But Westeroscraft never fails to challenge my use-cases. A sizable chunk of the town will need to be represented as heightmaps to keep the geometry down, but if it is treated like terrain, in which a few blocks of error here and there don't matter, the town is going to look like a mess. Particularly that church on the left. There are all sorts of configurations of mixed polygons and rotated heightmaps which could recreate what is here, but those sort of decisions have to be completely automated, and I haven't given that enough thought.

But this is a good thing. Better to have cases like this early on than wait until everything is getting wrapped up before even discovering the problem.

Take for instance, that wall around the town. It'll require two layered heightmaps regardless of the orientation, because of those reliefs in the ribs. Two isn't bad, but to do the same thing elsewhere could start requiring hundreds if no other tool is used. And at the same time, those fine details could be done by polygons alone while the base of the structure is heightmaps. But how do you automate a decision like that? It's not always easy to tell when a detail can be disregarded for the sake of performance and when doing so will look bad.

[cats]

I wanna bomb it.

[Error]

I wanna bomb it.

True Futurecraft reaction.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

Fr0st, how do programs like Chunky render images?

[fr0stbyte124]

While I don't know the specifics, most renderers which aren't time-constrained do a highly detailed lighting simulation, tracing the bounces of photons across every surface. By its nature, these kind of renderers prioritize accuracy and realism over speed or approximations, and are rarely calculated in the same way. That said, most modern GPU research is beginning to move away from dirty approximations and instead start doing proper simulation. We're still several generations away from being able to do the full-monty renderings in realtime.

The reason some renders look better than others, besides things like texturing and good material settings, is how much time is spent rendering. Stopping it early will lead to grainier results, but it is sometimes useful to do so if you are just checking your input parameters to make sure it is what you want.

[fr0stbyte124]

I may have spoken too soon. Looks like the Brigade engine is making some remarkable headway with it's photon mapping performance. Granted, the demos are running on a GTX680, but even then, the results are fantastic.

http://raytracey.blogspot.com/