Since the launch of Unreal Engine 5, there has been significant amount of hype regarding its potential to create “next-gen” games. The introduction of a new real time lighting system, Lumen, and Epic’s Nanite which allows artists to use film grade models, has been blowing peoples minds for what’s possible in the virtual world. While this technology is very impressive and has already proven it’s self in UE5’s latest Matrix Awaken Demo, there is another company which is taking a different approach and switching up the industry completely.
For almost the past two decades, the Atomontage Engine has been diligently worked on by a small team. The engine and the company was debuted during Slush 2020, where the lead engineers did a presentation on the engine’s capabilities.
Atomontage takes a different approach from industry standard polygonal rendering, it utilizes Voxel Rendering, which renders small atoms, or “voxels”. This method of representing data is extremely immersive for 3D games, as it allows models to have a solid representation. The use of voxels also adds deformability to worlds which is a struggle for worlds made up of triangle shells.
Voxel rendering has been around for a long time. In the early and late 1990s it was used in the creation of many games. For example, in the game Comanche Gold (1998) where the terrain was rendered using voxels.
So, why didn’t Voxel Rendering “take off” if it’s so great?
One of the major issues that voxels faced was their storage requirement. Billions of voxels, if not more, required vast amounts of memory which just wasn’t viable at the time. Although memory capacities have greatly expanded to around 4 to 16 GB (on average) today, storing billions of voxels without compression or efficient data structure design is impossible.
Atomontage
Atomontage has developed not only and efficient rendering algorithm, but a compression algorithm which can compress voxel data and even stream it across the internet.
The engine is also extremely performant. There are videos showing it running on integrated gpus on old laptop hardware smoothly. Check out their development blog and youtube channel!
If you’d like to check out the technology, Atomontage has public online betas that require no download that are currently available on their website, https://www.atomontage.com/
Thanks for reading, I hope you’re excited about this new tech as much as I am!
