Coal is massively dirty, but even if you do run it through clean burning plants, the main danger is not the smoke.

Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive materials. Depending on the 'dirtiness' of the coal, the true problem is that by mining it or burning it, you separate those trace amounts. Larger amounts of coal ash or coal tailing(s) from even your average coal will give a geiger counter fits.

Do you want to know the fun part? The coal industry has buried studies and lobbied for legislation that makes TENORMS (technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material) unable to be regulated the same as any other radioactive waste. So if you live in a coal producing or burning area that creates ash or tailing ponds, you can be sucking up the same amount of alpha particle radiation as if you were in the vicinity of a nice large pool of nuclear waste.

Ain't coal grand?

Demo is all right, we really don't see anything we haven't seen before. Pretty much the onlything we havn't seen is mass scale destruction. Heck even small scale is so-so, mainly because of 2 things. #1 you really need a chunk of processing time for convincing physics calculation of a good amount of debris (We still don't see the level of particle effects the old AGEIA PPU demo's had) and #2 realistic enough fire effects. #1 is at least possible with tech that we have today, but #2 requires that someone actually create the effect for use in games.

Fire as you may have gathered, is probably the most difficult CG effect to create. Hollywood took 20 years after CGI effects started in movies before it actually didn't look fake. Today fire in CG is very manageable, but before that it just made more sense to record your fire on a matte backdrop and insert the footage over one of the final rendering passes of your 3d project.

The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

The shaders, unless they are geometry (the ripping of the skin/flesh in the Adam scene) could or could not be reduced in scope and complexity. I am not sure if they are scripted or dynamic. By scripted, I mean a geometry shader that reads vertex data from a VBO stream or some memory buffer instead of computing the vertices on the fly. It's still real-time, just not dynamic.

Most of the graphics you see here are standard applications of technology that's been around for a while:

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

The particle system seems pretty standard as well.

This is a great demo and I am extremely impressed with the art direction, but the engine itself is, after all, Unity with PBR for the characters, and maybe Global Illumation for the indoor scenes, which I believe they licensed from Geomerics.

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

I don't know as much about this argument as I'd like, but my gripe with it is that it assumes that there is a more efficient way of modeling reality, with 100% fidelity, than reality itself. It seems a lot to implicitly take onboard. How could you model the exact position of some subatomic particle without involving at least one such subatomic particle?

That is sort of right. Basically it is a law of physics, Boyle's law. The larger balloon has a lot more space for the air particles in it to move around, meaning less pressure (to a point). The small balloon has very little space, creating a condition of higher pressure, causing the air particles to seek a larger space to move into.

I wonder what the effect of plastic particles will be on them. I was thinking they may be screwed by the sheer amount, but maybe the low metabolic rates may do something about that?

It's a neat creature, and one that can survive in the growing oxygen free zones in the ocean.

Maybe life has found a way with this thing. =)

And another thing...!

I went back and watched the 18 minutes of singleplayer footage that's on Youtube. Everything about it looks heartbreakingly terrible.

Enemies still spawn out of mid-air(?)
The animations throughout are lifeless and robotic, especially the first-person ones.
Gore is just... Particles and a lame excuse for early asset despawns. There's NO blood splatter anywhere unless it's part of the environments (I know why; I don't care). Some of the deaths are cool, but are still static directionally-irrelevant animations.
The game slows time when you switch weapons... >.>
The enemies have a generic getting-shot reaction.
There's little 'punch' behind the weapons
And then their little faux-FPS camera work makes you question the whole thing anyway. With that particular video in general it's pretty gross anyway, with the faked audience audio/cheering in the background.

At least their VFX and Environment teams seem on point.

Except that you can't know all the properties of those atoms all at once. The Uncertainty Principle shows there is a fundamental limit to what we can know about particles. An exact replication would be impossible.

There is one particle missing.........

WHY did you call it the god particle??? COME ON!!!!

Neat! I remember seeing one of these at a science fair when I was a wee tyke. If he'd put the radioactive metal in line with the plane of the alcohol vapour we'd have seen a full-length supernova of particles in the bubble chamber.

They lost me when they started talking about "nano particles".
I don't need snazzy marking bullshit to help save lives.

I think you have to take really high doses of larger particle colloidal silver to turn blue.

Cool idea, but we need to start looking for ways to support the sheer numbers of people we have on this planet before we start cutting down on mortality rates further. That's just my opinion, probably not a popular one.

Plastic particles? Leeching? You've obviously drank the Kool Aid. Over time if the polymer (in this case polyethylene) degrades and becomes reduced in physical size, sure you get little pieces of plastic. Plastic particles don't leech from molded plastic parts, like these balls, as they are formed while the polymer is in a homogeneous continuous melt.