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Atomontage 2024 has been released, presenting its new Virtual Matter streaming platform that allows you and your friends to create 3D art and modify it.
The developers describe Atomontage as a "truly universal platform for making, sharing, and monetizing 3D content." Virtual Matter streams microvoxels instead of polygons and allows for simultaneous editing of detailed objects in real-time across different devices" after over two decades of research and development.
The platform lets you turn 2D images into 3D objects or use the integrated AI generator by Common Sense Machines and then modify them however you like, alone or together with your team.
Image credit: Atomontage
“It’s exciting for us because we’re a deep tech software startup. And getting to a product is a long journey,” Atomontage president Daniel Tabar told GamesBeat. “It’s been years as a company then. But even before then this is a lot of R&D that went into breakthroughs with what we call Virtual Matter. This is a new way to describe the streaming microvoxels that we’ve talked about before.”
Apart from these breakthroughs, the company has launched free mobile applications for Android, Windows, macOS, and Meta Quest, with the iOS version coming soon.
Image credit: Atomontage
The most notable distinction between Virtual Matter and many other platforms is the use of voxels for 3D creation as opposed to more common polygons. As GamesBeat puts it, "polygons are efficient at filling out 3D objects in an efficient and homogenous way, while voxels excel at representing spaces that are non-homogenously filled." In practice, objects in games that use polygons become pixelated if you zoom in, while with voxels it doesn't happen as easily.
“And what if those cubes in the voxels are so small that you don’t really see them anymore, and you have this kind of virtual clay, or what we call Virtual Matter,” Tabar said.
The president looks at Virtual Matter as "Photoshop for 3D" where you can fix any issues you have with AI-made images. And if you get bored or want another perspective, invite your friends to your little 3D world through a smartphone, VR headset, or web browser.
Image credit: Atomontage
“We have a fundamentally different approach to 3D graphics,” Tabar said. Usually, 3D artists use “these paper-thin polygons with troublesome texture maps that are mapped onto them. They have these hard limits. You can only fit so many of those millions of polygons, especially when targeting a smartphone image. And the texture maps can only be a certain resolution. Our approach is, again, different. And we don’t have hard limits. I’m not gonna say we have no limits, but we have much less.”
Image credit: Atomontage
This is just the beginning for Atomontage. In the future, the company will introduce advanced game development tools, such as physically-based rendering, scripting environments, physics engines, animation tools, audio streaming, and more.
Prices for Atomontage 2024 start at $29/month per virtual world. Find out more about the release here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.