Procedural Textures the Future of Games?

An anonymous reader writes "bit-tech has posted an interview, with the head of Allegorithmic, Sebastian DeGuy. In it DeGuy again makes the statement that his software (which was used to make the Roboblitz game released on Steam recently) will be used to make games 90% smaller than what they currently are. He comments on why his procedural texturing technique is an evolution of the infamous .kkreiger. demo and how procedural texturing compares to Carmack's 'megatexturing'. The article includes some pretty extraordinary pictures of scenes rendered with just a few bytes as opposed to the ridiculous sizes of modern games." From the article: "Despite some similarities, technique-wise, we are quite different in several ways. First, the inner technology (the maths) that we use is based on modern maths. We use 'Wavelets', instead of classic maths method of 'Fourier Transform', which was the mathematical technique used in the past by all the procedural texturing techniques (including .kkrieger). Our technique works on a new mathematical model that I developed whilst studying for my PhD."

isn't it slow?

[Nf1nk]

I use a program called animation master, that hsa supported procedural textures, (they call them materials). The file size for thee things is generaly around one or two k, and they can be amazing, I did a dirty tile floor using it and it was still less than 2k. The downside is render time. it drove my near realtime render to a 30min crawl. I can't imagine using procedural textures for a video game it would just kill the frame rate.

Will it decrease loading times?

[CastrTroy]

Will this actually decrease loading times? It seems to be that as games get bigger, the loading times get longer, would the decrease in space needed make it require more or less time to load the game. Obviously reading the information off the disk would be faster, but I imagine you'd have a lot of computation to do to figure out what the texture is supposed to be. Kind of like how it takes less CPU power to decode a WAV file than to decode an MP3 file.

Re:Creation issue

[Andy_R]

U&I software's "Artmatic Voyager" (successor to the much better known but non-procedural landscape renderer Bryce), and it's 2D companion Artmatic Pro are excellent tools for creating procedural art. No programming experience is necessary to create quite stunning stuff, and there is a wealth of possibilities under the hood once you start building your own algorythms. Take a look at the Artmatic Voyager Gallery [uisoftware.com] for some beautiful procedural planets.

Re:Creation issue

[RightSaidFred99]

The ironing is delicious. You do know that traditional textures are often created in, you guessed it, Photoshop? Ergo, his question is perfectly valid, and his point is more valid. Do you need to sit down and write code to do these procedural textures, or can ordinary tools be modified to create them.

Please try to keep up with the conversation before you mock someone else.

Re:Quality

[Chris Burke]

Of course, there is a downside. Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game. Still, once the box is opened, the potential will be too tempting to ignore.

Yeah, I bet it will be a while until they are generating the textures on the fly every frame. However, as an intermediate step one could imagine being able to easily generate a larger number of textures for varying levels of detail, rather than having to pre-determine what levels you're going to include on the disk.

Re:Creation issue

[Control Group]

You're still missing the point. Procedural textures are procedural. There is no bitmap to edit, only a set of parameters to pass to the function of your choice. Converting the result of the procedure to a bitmap would be superfluous, as it would defeat the size gains provided by doing procedural texturing!

But unless you want your game levels to be made up of completely random textures, someone still needs to decide/design what the textures will look like. And the question is, can they do that in Photoshop. Of course, you know that, since your next paragraph is:

What you usually find in procedural texturing is a tool with various sliders and controls to modify the parameters (e.g. roughness, marbling, scaling, color, etc.) of the texture. When the artist obtains the look he's going for, he saves those parameters out.

Which is exactly what the original poster was asking about, and sounds like it could easily be a Photoshop plugin.

So, like Sean Connery on SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, despite your best efforts, you've answered the question. I'm sure the OP appreciates it.

Not only textures

[ichigo 2.0]

Not only textures, but animations, models & sounds will eventually be generated procedurally. Everything natural around is procedural, with the laws of physics, evolution and genetics deciding the look, feel and sound of our environment. Having artists produce textures, animations etc manually has been just a hack & shortcut to better graphics; now that it is becoming infeasible to produce the art required by the most realistic games manually, we'll finally start to get procedural games. I look forward to seeing a rebirth of the industry, with small developers being able to compete with bigger studios thanks to the increased cost-efficiency gained from procedural art.

Not procedural: Simply, compressed.

[TerranFury]

I'm not sure that 'procedural' is really what we want. Good textures often involve real source images, for instance.

Wavelets may be more useful to compactly encode textures generated more traditionally, and to provide better upsampling than traditional polynomial interpolation methods (bilinear, etc). Rather than generating points between samples using just the adjacent pixels, points are generated from a sum of wavelets generated by looking at all of the pixels.

An example of an image format that does just this is JPEG2000.

The interesting conclusion is that maybe graphics cards should be manipulating images in the frequency domain instead of as bitmaps.