Incredibly, the rocks you see in the video below aren't real. They were made by a computer. And not only that, the video, created by graphic artist Rense de Boer, was rendered in real time.
de Boer, who works at DICE, the company responsible for the Battlefield games, told Motherboard that his motivation came from the desire to see how far rendering could go. He said the project was about "pushing our limitations, or at least take another approach at how we create content for games to see how far we can take it."
To create these incredible virtual landscapes, de Boer first photographed the rocks he wanted to render in the real world. This step alone took five days. Then, using the rendering tool Unreal Engine, he went through a process called photogrammetry, which combines images taken from multiple angles to create the illusion of depth. "Plants and trees are built leaf by leaf, giving it depth that is needed to ensure realism and create a more believable world," de Boer told Motherboard.
To created these hyperrealistic renderings, he was provided with two Geforce 1080 Tis from the graphic card producer Nvidia.
But de Boer isn't stopping here. His next project is to "develop a demo environment that shows a Nordic forest with high details to be explored in real time," he says. "The content that comes out of this will find its way back to merge and become a full game."
Source: Art by Rens
