| Soleron said:
The first step towards this is a technique called ray-tracing. Instead of using anti-aliasing, anisotropy, etc. to simulate light hitting the camera, we will simulate real light beams and follow their path from the camera to the source (a light bulb). |
I agree that in the future most 3D-models will be created by scanning an object which will actually mean that prop artists, make-up artists and costume makers will actually start to replace some of the existing artists. Games set in current realistic times might have lower costs for art than say a sci-fi game.
FYI - Anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering are actually needed when ray-tracing. Aliasing occurs when transfering continous data (say an image of a tree) into a descrete data structure (like the resolution of a monitor or a frame buffer). Anistropic filtering is needed to cleanup artifacts caused by viewing surfaces that are far away at a steep angle. The two descrete samples on a surface that are projected onto two adjacent pixels in the frame buffer may actually be 10m apart in the game world. All of the color data inbetween these points are lost. i.e. If a few red jelly beans were on a football field and it was viewed from distance then there might be a (incredibly small) chance that some (or all) pixel of the frame buffer would appear red. Move the camera slightly and it would appear to be green.
OT: OMG, Chrome does not have a spell checker.
