You Won't Believe These Rocks Are Computer Generated

Jessica Miley

This video by Art by Rens shows 100 seconds of incredible computer generated rock formations. You have to see it to believe it. These rocks just look so damn real!

The artist behind the video is Rense de Boer, who is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of real-time rendering. De Boer spent five days photographing the landscape he wanted to render. Then several more weeks to rebuild the images in a video game making tool called Unreal Engine, using a process called photogrammetry.  

Photogrammetry compiles images taken from various angles and uses them to create an image with realistic 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 said.

Not surprisingly, you need some pretty heavy hardware to use this process and for the creation of this video, de Boer was gifted by graphic card maker Nvidia with the GPUs necessary to render these glorious rocks. In this case, he used two Geforce 1080 Tis.

This computer generated rock experiment was just one step towards a playable Scandinavian forest environment that de Boer is creating. The game is expected to hit Steam at the end of the year. De Boer explains this video is part of a larger experiment. He states in his channel description, “I am now creating a playable tech demo, which is a first step in establishing a workflow, creating content and developing a foundation that can become a full game.”