Given my last links post referenced “The Fast and the Furious”, I might as well call this post by the 4th movie in that series. Which is bizarrely titled by simply removing two “the”s from the original title. So the 5th movie will just be “Fast Furious”? I can imagine this subtract-a-the for other movies: “Fellowship of Ring”, “Silence of Lambs”, “Singin’ in Rain”, “Back to Future”. Anyway, the goal of this post is to whip through the rest of my links backlog.

I’m still catching up with reading the post-GDC flurry of resources and blog posts and whatnot – you’re on your own. Well, mostly. One or two things: watch the last half of the Unreal 3 new features demo – some nice-looking stuff. Also, the GDC tutorials are available for download; the first set of 7 are what you want. Lots of DirectX 10 and 11 material, from my quick skim. The third talk, by the DICE guys, looked to have some interesting things to say about cascaded shadow maps. Here’s another older presentation, about the Frostbite rendering engine, parallelism, software occlusion culling, ray tracing, and other nice tidbits. What’s also interesting about this one is that it uses a slide hosting site, SlideShare, to hold the presentation. Speaking of slidesets, there are also these from the parallel graphics computing course at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. 

But, you found you’re required to attend a conference between GDC and SIGGRAPH (If so, I want your job). In that case, EGSR 2009 is coming up at the end of June, in Girona, Spain. This is the conference for rendering research in general. There’s still a week before abstracts are due, so get cracking.

In my last links post I asked for open source that loaded and exported a variety of model types and allowed mesh manipulation. Two people answered back: MeshLab. The blog about this package is also worth skimming through.

Also in the previous links article I mentioned the server-side graphics computation model presented by OnLive.  I should also mention AMD’s Fusion Render Cloud project, in the same space. Hmmm, maybe this really could work, with compression, and if you don’t mind some lag.

In Gamasutra is a “sponsored” article, but a good one, on Intel’s Threading Building Blocks. I can attest that this component truly does help you take advantage of multiple cores. Knowing at least a bit about TBB is worth your while. Also on Gamasutra is part two of the data alignment article.

There’s a nice rundown of Killzone 2’s graphical features on Brian Karis’ blog.

The sIBL site has some HDR environment maps and manipulation software for download.

Paul Merrell has made plugins available for Max and Blender for his city synthesis procedural modeling research at UNC Chapel Hill.

This diagram of Windows’ graphics makes me think, “it’s just that easy.”

NVScale is an OpenGL-based SDK that lets you use up to four GPUs to store and render extremely large models. It’s nice to see NVIDIA supporting this (non-gaming) area of rendering.

Well-produced tutorial on volume rendering, along with demo code, by Kyle Hayward: part 1, part 2.

There are lots of articles about XNA graphics programming getting put at Ziggyware.

Nothing to do with computer graphics, but this seems like the best computer science class ever.

When nerds and lace-making meet: fractal doilies.