Interior Mapping

[Zaknafein]

This whitepaper + demo piqued my curiosity. It sounds like a really elegant way of rendering the interior of skyscrapers or other buildings per-pixel, with no interior geometry involved!

http://interiormapping.oogst3d.net/

[ZaPPZion]

wow that looks pretty neat 
But there's raycasting used in the pixel shader, so it wouldn't it be slow?

[Zaknafein]

There's a demo and the speed compares to modeling the interiors with geometry. In fact the whitepaper boasts that the more buildings you render, the speedier it becomes.
But it's probably more optimized for SM3.0 hardware.

[Lenn]

Wow, very nice indeeeeeeed 

I've had a thorough look through it, runs at around 1000fps on my rig. I think higher resolutions would impact it though. Also the alpha mapped sprites inside (the people) get cut up by the sides of the building. Not sure how this shader would be implemented on convex shapes, ie buildings with holes in them, extrusions, or irregular shapes?

The other thing is, armies of artists would have to now spend as much time doing interiors of buildings as exteriors?? And artists cost money, lots of it.  Ask me, I would know. haha. Thus reason being why I would have doubts on how soon we will start seeing interiors in buildings. Gamers are pretty muched used to buildings not having interiors, and don't pay so much attention to them. But let's not go offtopic.

[jviper]

Well this is interesting, because they've found a way to do ray-tracing in Shaders? Problebly not real ray-tracing, right? I'll bet they meant cubemap lookup.