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Re:Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering wit... by gdubs on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:07AM (#25944031)
If I understand correctly, this is essentially using neural nets to compress the information representing a 3D mesh [1], similar to how neural nets can do image upscaling on 2D images?

Either way, the technology of Star Trek The Next Generation went through a period in the late 90s where it all seemed ridiculous, and now we’ve come full circle and it all seems plausible again.

More specifically: I’d love to see a generative adversarial network that can materialize 3D worlds in real time, like the holodeck. More and more the holodeck seems plausible as a system of nets upon nets upon nets. Nets for generating models, nets for generating stories...

1: In this case the meshes are not polygons, but rather signed distance fields. Metaballs are commonly made with this technique.

Edit: thanks for catching the spelling mistake. Metaballs misspelled as Meatballs is a plague that continues for over two decades. Usually I try to avoid the trap altogether and say Implicit Surfaces :)

Re:Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering wit... by ryandamm on Thursday January 28, 2021 @04:49PM (#25949822)
Re: GANNs generating 3D worlds, there are a couple startups that appear to be... well, sniffing around the edges, anyway:

https://www.wunderparc.com/ https://www.prometheanai.com/

I haven't tried either one out; someone in my industry pointed them out to me recently.

Re:Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering wit... by ben_w on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:57AM (#25944833)
For TNG-style holodecks, I think the future is smart-dust drones and beamed power.
Re:Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering wit... by dartmoose on Thursday January 28, 2021 @09:09PM (#25952743)
I don't think the point is compression, SDFs even when represented with a neural net have a much larger memory footprint and are significantly more expensive to render.

The main benefit of a SDF are that you don't have topological issues to worry about, which makes them great for reconstruction problems where a surface is evolving over time.

Re:Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering wit... by harperlee on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:23AM (#25944301)
Metaballs also, not only meatballs ;)