there are some interesting paper about this, indeed.
best so far that I've found: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/perfecthash.pdf

Thank you for sharing! This is very interesting.

I've been thinking about this, and despite all the talk of how parallel this stuff could even get you'd need to solve the problem of storing hi-rez point clouds to begin with, modern games take more than enough room already without the terabytes and zetabytes you could get into with point cloud stuff.

But of course there's been talk of procedurally building/rendering stuff (whatever you want to call it, not directly artist authored). And to my thinking the best looking procedurally rendered stuff today is also the stuff that is hardest to impossible for anyone to render in games, which is small repetitive details.

So, assuming then that some sort of "sparse voxel octree/point cloud dark magic" could be rendered well enough in parallel, what would people think of using such to render individual hairs/leaves/blades of grass/etc. All of which would take way too many polys to actually render just using geometry, wouldn't take almost any storage, and wouldn't really suffer from the usual procedurally rendered problem, i.e. looking highly repetitive. I mean, one strand of hair on someone's head looks like any other strand of hair on that same persons head after all.

@Frenetic Pony

(whatever you want to call it, not directly artist authored)[/quote]

The essence of procedural generation has no fundamental relation to artists' involvement.

So, assuming then that some sort of "sparse voxel octree/point cloud dark magic" could be rendered well enough[/quote]

By rudimentary function, Unlimited Detail seems to render quite well. The problem is how these systems lack explicit mechanisms for any procedural abstraction. In this sense, Unlimited Detail is surely limited. Polygons win because they are so malleable and have much further limits. This greatly helps with both of the most identified issues of voxels: non-atomic dynamics (animation) and definition (impractical memory consumption for game maps etc). For example, in animation, rather than applying a transformation to a set of some geometric vertices (which mostly just define the spatial character of a model, and little else), you must apply it to the entirety of a Euclidean-regular volume, which requires a comparably greater mass of "points" to be manipulated, than the polygonal geometry.

what would people think of using such to render individual hairs/leaves/blades of grass/etc. All of which would take way too many polys to actually render just using geometry, wouldn't take almost any storage[/quote]

Okay. A rule-of-thumb (which I hope Euclideon holds): with large masses of data, its best to take advantage of loops, recursion, hierarchy and all such forms of procedure ( procedural! ); and avoid algorithmic approaches which would otherwise target atomic manipulation (SIMD's envy).

I mean, one strand of hair on someone's head looks like any other strand of hair on that same persons head after all.[/quote]

Problem: each individual hair still has an elusive curvature.