Hate to start another thread on "H".

[Utforska]

Sounds very interesting, I'd love an OS X build! 

[ghostwheel]

That is cool! It's a good demonstration. I'm not sure what the point in using something like this would be. I suppose if you wanted to render everything instead of using real-time 3d for some reason. Though, I can't think of one.

( Windows )

Shucks, I wish I could've tried it.

I'm not sure I understand what it is though, in what way is it different from the style of Exile and Revelation?

[Kjell]

There are certain benefits of ray-tracing over real-time rendering .. but you could for example want to go with live-action film ( 360° lens ). That way you can simply use / rent a location instead of having to build it The possibilities are obviously a lot more limited compared to real-time, but it works pretty well in for example Railfan ( PS3 ).

@Utforska - Send you a PM

[Utforska]

Thanks for the OS X build - certainly an interesting effect! How many individual panoramas are there in this version?

You'd likely end up with way too much data (as well as way too long rendering times) if you tried to do something like this with hi-res, full color graphics though. And then there's the additional problem of adding in animation - you would need to render the same movie again for every single one of these panoramas, so you'd end up with a huge amount of data just to get away with that.

These guys have some interesting stuff going on - www.areograph.com. Their technology also makes it possible to turn a photographed or prerendered scene into a live 3d world. They seem to have the same problems with animation and moving lights etc though...

[Kjell]

That's the exact reason that animations are scarse / short in the Myst games. Their solution still works though .. animated areas are layered on top of the static background. Plus, you'll only need a limited range of angles. Once you get far enough from a animation, simply scaling / transforming the footage will be sufficient. And there's always the option of mixing in real-time 3D

Lighting pre-rendered scenes dynamically is not that difficult. Instead of rendering RGB(A), you use a deferred setup ( Albedo + Normals + Depth ) and calculate the required coordinates on the fly.

*The build uses 32 frames at 15 fps.