Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say and I was even about to post a Brigade engine video. LOL.
McClure kind of dismisses "ray tracing" offhand (and by implication/context, similar techniques like path tracing) with the premise that every texture would need to be manual developed by an artist.
The answer to that is as you mention 3d scanning and procedural generation.
There are quite a few path-tracing software (and even one or maybe a few hardware) efforts out there, and many 3d scanning companies.
I believe that the main thing that is holding these technologies back now is just people not knowing that they are realistic technologies, which keeps them from being mainstream. But once things enter the mainstream consciousness of engineers, you get an order of magnitude increase in the number of people working on them, starting with some of the existing working ideas and you start getting much more practical and inexpensive solutions.
I believe that within say 7 years Nvidia and ATI will either acquihire or build hardware themselves that makes real-time path-tracing, procedural generation, and real-time physics, convenient and efficient.
By the way, if you are interested in (realtime) ray tracing technologies, check out this forum: http://ompf2.com/
By procedural/scanned I meant mainly procedural that is based on 3D scanning (scans used for learning set), such as FaceGen http://www.facegen.com/ Lots of other stuff could be made this way, too.
McClure kind of dismisses "ray tracing" offhand (and by implication/context, similar techniques like path tracing) with the premise that every texture would need to be manual developed by an artist.
The answer to that is as you mention 3d scanning and procedural generation.
There are quite a few path-tracing software (and even one or maybe a few hardware) efforts out there, and many 3d scanning companies.
I believe that the main thing that is holding these technologies back now is just people not knowing that they are realistic technologies, which keeps them from being mainstream. But once things enter the mainstream consciousness of engineers, you get an order of magnitude increase in the number of people working on them, starting with some of the existing working ideas and you start getting much more practical and inexpensive solutions.
I believe that within say 7 years Nvidia and ATI will either acquihire or build hardware themselves that makes real-time path-tracing, procedural generation, and real-time physics, convenient and efficient.