Alright so let's get straight to the point.

DirectX 11 is out along with the new NVIDIA and ATI cards which both support hardware tessellation. What does that mean?

Well you remember how in Zbrush you'd subdevide your model so you could get SUPER detail on it but then you had to bring it back down because the engine can't handle too many polygons?... well NO MORE will you have to do this because the new cards can calculate the models and add LOTS of detail to them as the camera gets closer... Now I konw talk is cheap, so here are some videos.

Water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfrSaIY0YQA&feature=player_embedded

Hair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrb8PSpkhkQ&feature=player_embedded

An example of the EVGA card with some demos of the graphics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzjNiDr05Fk

A ton of other games using this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pBLtZUJ9OA&feature=player_embedded

Now I know it doesn't look EXACTLY like films look but it is at least DEFIANTLY a step in the right direction.

Ambient Occlusion is also used as well.

"alright" you say, "That looks pretty good, but not all of us have tons of money to shell out for something like that."

Ok I thought the same thing... until I found one of these cards for around 380 dollars which I think is pretty good for the quality. I think the top price is around 499 with an average of about 400-450. (I thought these things would be like 600)

Now I know that some of you could argue that not everyone has these and if Reallusion did this, it'd be ignoring others... no, not really.

Take a look at Unigine.
http://unigine.com/products/unigine/

Now this is supporting all of the DX11 features... BUT I can also run the demo they give on my comptuer which can't even run DX10. They even have an openGL version for very low end computers as well. Take a look at the system requirements and you'll see that it supports a wide range of cards starting at the 700 series.

So iClone could still work with older cards.

Furthermore, I suggested a similar idea like this to those on the Second Life forum and they gave me a large "NO NOT EVERYONE HAS THOSE IT WOULD BE USELESS!"... which was somewhat arguable because everything would have been running inreal time plus it was all streamed too.

But here, the only person who's seeing it in realtime is you. And a lot of people watching may not be able to render these things, but most of them are fully capable of running HD content on their computers. So as a director, the choise would really be up to you as to what hardware you needed to render this.

Yes the story is the most important part of the film, but once you have your story and script all worked out, the quality of the visuals and sound only help to highten the feeling and emotional aspect of it. (at least this is what I believe, I'm not an expert in the field).

So in the end, this is up to you... do you think you could use these tools? Do you think it's worth it for RL to invest their time in making these features available in a future version of iClone?

Any comments?

EDIT:
These are just a few more poitns, you don't HAVE to read these, just something to consider.

When Avatar was created, the graphics in there were VERY NICE... even though I could still tell it was CG, it was VERY GOOD CG and I think DX11 with these cards is on the verge of producing just that in realtime.
When they made the story, they didn't HAVE to use that... they could've used other ways... had people dress up, designed all the sets in real life... but they didn't, they got the hardware and things needed... now this being said, they had a MUCH MUCH larger budget than we do. However, I think with this update, we could do things just as good.

Oh and also... yes I'm aware that there is dynamic hair... but this would be dynamic hair that DOES NOT go through the character.

... ok that's all.

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Thanks for all the research on this. Looks like supporting these features could be something for iClone 6 to aim at - once the graphics cards have come down in price, and people have gaming PCs with the kind of Power-Supply Unit and Cooling needed to run one of these cards. Which I would say will be in about two years (2012)?

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True, however I don't think you need a SUPER epic computer.

I don't have one of those epic cooling systmes on mine's and I can run it fine. I don't have one yet but the power supply I have is a LITTLE better... a 650 watt I think an also it says you really only NEED 2 gigs of system RAM to run the card and 200 megs of HDD space. So you don't need a SUPER computer to run it.

Hm yes I would love to see this in 6 (if not 5.5).

I just found out that this tech was around since last October.

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I don't think my computer is super-epic either. I have a pre-core-i7 quad core,
8 gb of some kind of DDR2 ram, a good 650 watt power supply, and did just add
an nvidia gtx 470 which cost $369 but only because I got the super-clocked one.
The regular ones are closer to $300.

If you do an advanced search on DX11 graphics cards on Newegg, the availability of low
priced cards is amazing. They start at around $40! That would be for a Radeon HD 5450.
So moving up to DX11 wouldn't be that expensive. My google-fu for you!

It think DX11 really needs to happen, especially with GPU rendering coming up.

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"I am not a senior anything."

Wow 40?? Geeze.

WEll in that case, maybe it's not so far away after all.

Maybe we will see this in iClone 5 then. Hm.

I wish I could change my poll sinec it's a bit different now.



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Yes indeedy:

http://tinyurl.com/274mlvv

The lowest priced one was a Powercolor HD 5450 at 39.99, actually $24.99 with
rebate.

If only there was more interest in DX11 in Iclone. it doesn't look like there is
much.


__________________________________

"I am not a senior anything."

Hm I'm going to assume that this can just RUN DX11... I'm guessing you won't be seeing Crysis on this... at least not the very nice looking version of it.

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I'm guessing one would want at least 1GB of memory on the graphics card,
to make somewhat decent use of Iclone, right?

The 1Gb ones start at $55. Sapphire brand radeon HD 5450.




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"I am not a senior anything."

FYI, while having one gig of ram on the video card is something you will want for sure, you also want a fast gpu if you want to use the pixel shader properties. Using the cards you are mentioning for 50 to a 100 bucks will give only 1 to 5 FPS at the most. IT is very hard to animate that way.

Cheers,
Stuckon3d




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True, but that's still a nice price and it's still tempting... but you do get what you pay for and compared to what cards used to be like, that's pretty darn good. I think spending 150-200 should give you a DECENT card... and then there's the epic ones taht we all know and love.

Plus you can just turn pixel shaders off until you need them.

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