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Last changed: December 16, 2024
This page is devoted
to sites and tools we use on a continuing basis. They're personal picks, and reflect our own
biases.
- Ke-Sen Huang's conference pages has links for papers from all the major computer graphics conferences and workshops. The pages by Tim Rowley are not available directly, but this archive contains them.
- Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games, Introduction to Real-Time Ray Tracing, Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering, An Overview of Next-Generation Graphics APIs, and Stylized Rendering in Games SIGGRAPH course materials are hosted on our site.
- SIGGRAPH 2023 links, compiled by Stephen Hill. Also see link pages for
SIGGRAPH 2023 links
SIGGRAPH 2022 links
SIGGRAPH 2021 links
SIGGRAPH 2020 links
SIGGRAPH 2019 links (and SIGGRAPH 2019 ray tracing links), SIGGRAPH 2018, SIGGRAPH 2017, SIGGRAPH 2016, SIGGRAPH 2015, SIGGRAPH 2014, SIGGRAPH 2013, SIGGRAPH 2012 and SIGGRAPH 2011.
- YouTube research conference resources: SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, I3D, HPG, and EGSR 2024.
- Game Developers Conference: see the GDC Vault, and the YouTube channel of talks from 2022 to the present. 2019 links, also 2018, 2017, 2016. There's none we can find for 2015, but before then Javier "Jare" Arevalo collected GDC 2014, 2013, and 2012 presentations.
- Graphics Programming weekly - Jendrik Illner summarizes graphics blog articles. Think of it as your one-stop blog. He also has a nice searchable collection.
- NVIDIA and AMD (plus GPUOpen)
graphics developer sites - demos, code samples, white papers, etc. Other worthwhile code samples at Humus-3D.
- Min Chen's list of Computer Graphics Forum State-of-the-Art (STAR), survey, and review papers since 2010.
- The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques - open access (free to all) and many articles include code samples.
- Journal of Graphics Tools (JGT) code repository.
- Graphics Gems Repository
- contains the source code for many graphics algorithms. Search the contents
by category,
by author,
or by book.
- Developer sites and mailing lists:
GameDev.net is active,
as is OpenGL.org,
Ogre Forums,
GD Algorithms archives dying out but searchable (subscribe),
and
FlipCode (old, closed, but some good things in the archives).
- Game company publication pages: alphabetically, and a few quite dated, but here goes.
Frostbite,
Guerrilla Games,
Unreal Engine,
Unity,
Ready At Dawn,
Tri-Ace,
and
Activision (and dated Activision).
- Commercial research lab pages:
NVIDIA Research,
Microsoft Research U.S.,
and
Cesium (GIS).
- Film company publication pages:
Disney (Hyperion renderer specific)
and
Pixar.
- Catlike Coding has tutorials for programming in Unity and Godot.
- Acerola gives a bunch of tutorials, specializing in post-process effects. His What is a Graphics Programmer? video is an interesting journey.
- Level 80 has a constant stream of information for game artists and content creators.
- Game Developer programming page - the successor to Gamasutra's programming page.
- Free (and good) books online
- Models: McGuire CG Archive, Stanford 3D Scanning, Large Geometric Models (Georgia Tech), Utah 3D Animation, ORCA, Khronos Group glTF, Smithsonian, Disney, Intel, Apple AR Quick Look, Bitterli, pbrt, Mitsuba, TurboSquid, Hair from Cem Yuksel, Free3D, Poly Haven, CGTrader, Sketchfab, Three D Scans, PoliigonBEEPLE (C4D project files), Standard Procedural Databases.
USD: Moana, Caldera, ALab, Scan the World, and ALab 2, Sponza, DPEL from ASWF,and another list.
- APIs:
- OpenGL: SDK, specifications, tutorials, Raster Tek tutorials, extensions and more, GLEW, Mesa, NVIDIA's site.
- Vulkan: Official site, tutorial, NVIDIA's site.
- DirectX: SDK, tutorials, Raster Tek tutorials, debugging, version stats, NVIDIA's site.
- WebGL: 2.0 Specification, browser support, device/browser test, current browser details, debugging/profiling, x3dom, and WebGL Resources page.
- Metal: developer site.
- Paper Search:
- Education:
- Interactive 3D Graphics is an interactive course (MOOC) by Eric using videos (with transcripts) alongside exercises and demos (using three.js) that run in your browser. Focus is on general principles, though specifics, such as shader programming, are also covered.
- The Rendering Course from TU Wien is a free master's level video course on rendering. More information here.
- Shader School is highly recommended for learning GLSL; it has a nice way of teaching you step by step. Answers here, as (on the Mac, at least) the one flaw is that compiler errors are not shown.
- three.js is a scene graph layer and much more atop WebGL. It makes adding 3D web content pretty easy - enjoy the demos on that page, or sample the examples (and even better, commented examples here).
- Scratchapixel has a series of articles on the basics of computer graphics theory.
- Shadertoy is unlikely to help you write shaders - I just wanted to sneak it in. Rather, enjoy the extreme shaders (using procedural geometry, ray casting, etc.) that others have written, right in your browser. New shaders every day.
- The Level Up Report by Mark DeLoura. Stopped publishing in 2018, but was a free weekly that provided pointers to all sorts of developments and resources for learning through games, coding, and making.
- Game Developer Magazine - stopped printing in 2013 (which sounds ancient, but there are some good articles on the basics). All issues are available free for download.
- Graphics and Game Gems Database is dated (2016), but lets you search the various popular interactive graphics series, browse each book's article titles, and get bibtex entries. AI Wisdom is a simila sites. They leave out a few newer (and older) books, but have the advantage of being able to browse by category.
- ACM TOG's Software Tools and Resources page is ancient (2015), but has much about both graphics software and where to get BRDF data and other resources.
- Gameconfs - game-related conferences.
- Geometric Tools - there
are many different code snippets and tutorials here to do all sorts of graphics
operations, with a focus on computational geometry and intersection methods.
- 3D Object Intersection Page - where to find articles and code on this topic.
- Virtual Terrain Project - an old (2013) repository of algorithms about and models of terrain, vegetation, natural phenomena, etc.
- comp.graphics.algorithms FAQ - truly ancient (last updated 2003), but still full of computational goodness.
- Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics is an incredible (though often dense) resource for mathematical definitions.
- Steam's hardware survey tracks what is currently used by their subscribers.
- Dead End Thrills makes some excellent renders of current games.
- Tech Power Up has an up-to-date summary of the clock speed, memory size, and other characteristics for every major consumer PC GPU. Tech ARP has similar GPU charts for workstations, PCs, and mobile devices.
- GPU Review Sites - these sites often have in-depth analysis of GPU features:
- Game Related - Metacritic for meta-ratings, VG Chartz for console and handheld sales figures, gamedevmap for developer locations.
- Github and SourceForge are popular places to browse for free, open-source software applications.
- Blogmania: Your first (and possibly only) stop could be Jendrik Illner's, which summarizes all sorts of graphics-related posts. Also, most bloggers (and non-bloggers) also have a Twitter feed - find and follow them. You can also follow individual blogs with one of these:
Our own,
Interplay of Light,
Lost in the Triangles,
C0DE517E,
Bart Wronski,
the ryg blog,
Ignacio Castaño,
Ben Golus,
Nathan Reed,
Ray Tracey's blog (Sam Lapere),
Self Shadow (SIGGRAPH links),
NVIDIA Blog (graphics),
DirectX Developer Blog,
Intel Gaming,
AMD Radeon Pro and
AMD Gaming,
Pete Shirley's Graphics Blog,
Code & Visuals,
Clean Rinse,
Game Developer,
and
GameDev.net, which links to developer blogs and devlogs.
Not active in the past two years, but still with some worthwhile posts:
Humus,
Diary of a Graphics Programmer,
Graphics Rants,
Sébastien Lagarde,
Roar11.com,
Meshlab,
Casual Effects,
TomF's Tech Blog,
Stingray,
Mikkelsen and 3D Graphics,
Industrial Arithmetic,
I Get Your Fail (brilliant),
The Little Grasshopper,
Legalize Adulthood!,
realtimecollisiondetection.net,
Beyond3D,
G Blog,
Pandemonium,
OpenGL Superbible,
and
Pixel, Too Many....
You'll often find yet more blogs linked from these pages.
- Real Artifacts - a collection of real-world rendering bugs, hosted here.
Special bonus site: you need to visit it only once, but Maxima
is worth listing here. It is a free version of Macsyma (which is similar to Mathematica
and Maple). If you work with equations and do not have $1500 to spare, you need
this.
If you know a site that you're simply shocked we don't list here, please let me know.
Resources Hosted Onsite
Beyond the books list and object/object intersections page, the major resources hosted here are:
Computer Programs and Services
Here are some computer programs and services we like, in rough order of awesomeness.
- Dropbox - you should know this already, but just in case: creates a special folder that is shared among three of your machines for free. You can also share with others privately or publicly. There are competitors, such as OneDrive.
- Agent Ransack is pretty good at searching sets of files for various strings.
- Everything finds files and folders instantly.
- Ninite - installing stuff on a new PC? Save yourself an hour or two by just checking off the things you want and getting one program to install them all, without prompts (you can also rerun the .exe at any time to update everything you installed). Also a nice site for finding programs to try out.
- WizTree and WinDirStat (Disk Inventory X on the Mac) - shows where all your disk space has gone in an excellent visual fashion. WizTree is new and much faster than WinDirStat. Try clicking on everything you see in the display to get more info, delete, etc. Free.
- Beyond Compare - an excellent file comparison program. It even compares images, also showing their alpha layer. Shareware, but the trial gives 30 days of use. Our review here.
- LICEcap - icky name, nice utility for creating animated GIFs of what's happening on the screen. Use this for capturing program behavior, to show what problem a bug is causing.
- cppcheck - easy to use and free, it will probably find some coding errors that your compiler didn't notice. More about it here.
- Visual Studio Code - the most confusing name for a product ever, it has nothing to do with the Visual Studio IDE. A nice, free text editor, good for JavaScript development in particular.
- Assimp is an open source library that reads a wide variety of 3D model file formats and writes out a few. It also can perform some mesh clean-up functions.
- Simple 3D model reader code: tiny OBJ loader and tiny glTF loader.
- MeshLab is a free package that's good for mesh manipulation and translation. It's got rough edges all over - expect crashes and lockups on advanced functionality - but it's got a huge range of functions.
- 3D Viewers: there are lots. Meshlab, mentioned above, does not handle transparency well. We particularly like G3D Viewer (full website) and FBX Review.
- Screen capture: we've looked far and wide. FastStone Capture is shareware that costs $20, but does a lot, including annotation. Greenshot is a favorite free one.
- Image viewers: it's a matter of taste and needs. IrfanView, XnView, and FastStone Image Viewer are popular generic viewers. ddsview lets you look at mipmap levels (for DDS) and examine colors and alpha easily (plus source code is available).
- Video editing: OBS Studio is reasonable; you can even use it to run conferences. The free version of DaVinci Resolve is supposed to be quite good. LosslessCut is wonderful for simple edits, such as trimming out bits from a video, and saves the results instantly and losslessly without changing the data format.
- Glary Utilities, free for home use, has worthwhile cleanup tools and other utilities.
- Debugging: start with RenderDoc if you need a graphics debugger.
- Shader-related: NShader adds syntax highlighting for shaders developed in Visual Studio, or you can get most of the way there in MSVC by "Options | Text Editor | File Extension" and setting extension .fx (.fxh, etc.), choosing Microsoft Visual C++, then clicking "Add". I suspect there are more options out there. Other shader-related tools are described here.
- iPad: our only recommendation is GoodReader - lets you stuff and view documents onto your iPad, syncs nicely with Dropbox.
- Performance: there are many tools in this area, here's an (old) start.
- For newer performance tools and much, much else, see Angelo Pesce's massive tools post.
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