[GU]elmur_fud;2528170 said:
After watching that, it looks like they are using small chunks of rendered details that are then tiled over and over to achieve the appearance of realism.
Pointillism model count something like 50 maybe. Arranged into various blocks and then stuck together.
Old truck new paint.
Wut.
It's basically voxels in a way (if not straight up voxels, I wouldn't know the exact definition), and like someone mentioned, the trick is that it renders per-pixel rather than rendering everything and then squeeze it down into pixels. It basically discards every 'atom' that isn't caught and rendered.
The theory is sound and if it is, doesn't require as much processing power as our current way of rendering things.
So basically it's procedural generation and tessellation and he's just trying to make it sound a lot better than that? Because if it's not those things, then it would truly look realistic and have infinite detail like he says it's supposed to, BUT IT DOESN'T. You know why? Cause computers still have to render stuff and it's impossible to render "infinite detail". Herp derp.
Procedural is a way of generating the assets and not necessarily referring to the way it renders them. He's talking about how our current games use polygons for their 3d, while they want to use volumetric 'dots'.
I think the blade runner game used voxels, it's been so long since I've played it.
Edit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZaS6nbHLyI
It sorta ends up looking like prerendered 3d sprites, like someone in the comments points out, but it is infact realtime 3d voxels. There's a better example somewhere in the game where you can stand on a painstakingly slow rotating platform and watch your character spin around. It points out how it's not prerendered sprites since you'll be rotating at 60fps but it still takes you like a full minute to do a full revolution.