I was thinking of the rumors about metal clay, whereupon naturally deep in the earth metals like iron, gold, and titanium are all in a naturally clay-like state, albeit immersed with skin and bone eating acid. When exposed to acid, metals, stones, and all solids (assuming acid is strong enough and exposure is long enough to get good penetration) will assume a clay like state.
Thus this can be exploited in video gaming, in that now all models are solid. Allowing crafting in a game-like environment (like minecraft), except where the blocks are arbitrary densities and types of clay, and can be hardened or softened by the player with water(acid) and fire. (different temps) Note that enough fire will have the reverse effect, returning the hard to the soft, while the midrange is 'solid'. Also allow splitting and combining (splitting may be done hard or soft, harder when hard, combining may only be done during very soft or its weak) in arbitrary player controlled ways with +physics to make a neat crafting game potentially.
Clay based modeling/crafting
Getting that to run in Real-Time will be a pain in the butt.
You want your Clay to have near-real-life physical Properties like retain it's total Volume, accurate elastic properties, etc. right? You could do this by using FEM/FVM with a
graphics card based Solver. For small models this isn't a problem in Real-Time.
Next Problem would be the splitting and combining. Subdividing should do fine for splitting IF you only intend for Splitting "with a knife". If you want your model to split
based on stretching the clay, you've got yourself a nasty new problem.
One way to work around your Splitting and Combining Problem would be to use a Voxel engine. This could save you alot of trouble on the physical side, but you'd need alot
of Voxels to display any sort of geometry nicely. Which in turns means, you'll need alot more processing power for your Physics.
I have seen smaller tech demos of something like this being done, so it isn't impossible obviously. But these tech demos had one thing in common: they were very very
small. Nothing worthy of a fully fletched game yet.
So, I think your Idea has potential, but you'd need a very good team to get it done.
You want your Clay to have near-real-life physical Properties like retain it's total Volume, accurate elastic properties, etc. right? You could do this by using FEM/FVM with a
graphics card based Solver. For small models this isn't a problem in Real-Time.
Next Problem would be the splitting and combining. Subdividing should do fine for splitting IF you only intend for Splitting "with a knife". If you want your model to split
based on stretching the clay, you've got yourself a nasty new problem.
One way to work around your Splitting and Combining Problem would be to use a Voxel engine. This could save you alot of trouble on the physical side, but you'd need alot
of Voxels to display any sort of geometry nicely. Which in turns means, you'll need alot more processing power for your Physics.
I have seen smaller tech demos of something like this being done, so it isn't impossible obviously. But these tech demos had one thing in common: they were very very
small. Nothing worthy of a fully fletched game yet.
So, I think your Idea has potential, but you'd need a very good team to get it done.
Author
working on it now, note that all models are 'hallow' models like normal 3d models, not filled in voxel models. I'm just gettin started with some custom code based cube xna code, gonna try a 100% resource free version of minecraft in c#, maybe with recipes or something, gonna generate the cube size & texture based on internals of the cube, splitting generates 2 new cubes and deletes the old, reverse for merger. Makin it stretch is extra hard but kind of unnecessary. Code will generate the cube and texture, I'll probably have a way to chop up the cubes later by players with a player db and maybe some physics, also can auto-link new cubes to existing cubes as per minecraft (note: is a shell), while having each cube's texture be unique and also allowing me to spawn huge cpu effienct cubes (compared to lots of small ones), can also hide small ones that are far away for faster rendering.
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