Well, it’s not printed in silver or steel or somesuch, but it’s still fun to see. This is from Alexander Enzmann, who did a lot of work on the SPD model software, outputting a wide variety of formats. Since the spheres in the sphereflake normally touch each other at only one point, he modified the program a bit to push the spheres only 80% of the way along their axis translation, so giving more overlap between each pair. He printed this on his Solidoodle printer. 
Monthly Archives: January 2014
512 and counting
I noticed I reached a milestone number of postings today, 512 answers posted to the online Intro to 3D Graphics course. Admittedly, some are replies to questions such as “how is your voice so dull?” However, most of the questions are ones that I can chew into. For example, I enjoyed answering this one today, about how diffuse surfaces work. I then start to ramble on about area light sources and how they work, which I think is a really worthwhile way to think about radiance and what’s happening at a pixel. I also like this recent one, about z-fighting, as I talk about the giant headache (and a common solution) that occurs in ray tracing when two transparent materials touch each other.
So the takeaway is that if you ever want to ask me a question and I’m not replying to email, act like you’re a student, find a relevant lesson, and post a question there. Honestly, I’m thoroughly enjoying answering questions on these forums; I get to help people, and for the most part the questions are ones I can actually answer, which is always a nice feeling. Sometimes others will give even better answers and I get to learn something. So go ahead, find some dumb answer of mine and give a better one.
By the way, I finally annotated the syllabus for the class. Now it’s possible to cherry-pick lessons; in particularly, I mark all lessons that are specifically about three.js syntax and methodology if you already know graphics.
HPG CFP 2014
Really, you just need this link. I think HPG is the most useful conference I keep tabs on, from a “papers that can help me out” standpoint. SIGGRAPH’s better for a “see what’s happening in the field as a whole” view, and often there’s useful stuff in the courses and sketches, but in the area of papers HPG far outstrips SIGGRAPH in the number of papers directly useful to me. I can’t justify going as often as I like (especially when it’s in Europe), but HPG’s a great conference.
Anyway, here’s the CFP boilerplate, to save your precious fingers from having to click on that link (it’s actually amazing to me how much links are not clicked on; in my own life I tend to consider clicking on a link something of a commitment).
High-Performance Graphics 2014 is the leading international forum for performance-oriented graphics and imaging systems research including innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, languages, parallelism, compilers, hardware and architectures for high-performance graphics. High-Performance Graphics was founded in 2009, synthesizing multiple conferences to bring together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of parallel hardware, novel programming models, and efficient algorithms in the design of systems for current and future graphics and visual computing applications.
The conference is co-sponsored by Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH. The 2014 program features three days of paper and industry presentations, with ample time for discussions during breaks, lunches, and the conference banquet. It will be co-located with EGSR 2014 in Lyon, France, and will take place on June 23—25, 2014.
Topics include:
- Hardware and systems for high-performance graphics and visual computing
- Graphics hardware simulation, optimization, and performance measurement
- Shading architectures
- Novel fixed-function hardware design
- Hardware for accelerating computer
- Hardware design for mobile, embedded, integrated, and low-power devices
- Cloud-accelerated graphics systems
- Novel display technologies
- Virtual and augmented reality systems
- High-performance computer vision and image processing techniques
- High-performance algorithms for computational photography, video, and computer vision
- Hardware architectures for image and signal processors (ISPs)
- Performance analysis of computational photography and computer vision applications on parallel architectures, GPUs, and specialized hardware
- Programming abstractions for graphics
- Interactive rendering pipelines (hardware or software)
- Programming models and APIs for graphics, vision, and image processing
- Shading language design and implementation
- Compilation techniques for parallel graphics architectures
- Rendering algorithms
- Spatial acceleration data structures
- Surface representations and tessellation algorithms
- Texturing and compression/decompression algorithms
- Interactive rendering algorithms (hardware or software)
- Visibility algorithms (ray tracing, rasterization, transparency, anti-aliasing, …)
- Illumination algorithms (shadows, global illumination, …)
- Image sampling strategies and filtering techniques
- Scalable algorithms for parallel rendering and large data visualization
- Parallel computing for graphics and visual computing applications
- Physics and animation
- Novel applications of GPU computing
Important Dates:
- Paper submission deadline: April 4, 2014
- Notification of acceptance: May 12, 2014
- Camera-ready papers due: May 22, 2014
- Conference: June 23—25, 2014
More information: www.HighPerformanceGraphics.org
Long Plane Rides and JCGT
I’m about to embark on a 20-hour (or so) plane trip to Shanghai. With most of that time being in the plane, I’m loading up on stuff to read on my iPad. (Tip: GoodReader is great for copying files from your DropBox to your iPad.) JCGT does a great job of helping me fill up. Just go to the “Read” area and there’s a long list of articles, select the ones that sound interesting, and download away (well, having all the papers be called “paper.pdf” is not ideal, but that will eventually get fixed). No messing around with logging in, no digging to find things, just “here’s a nicely-illustrated list, have at it”. It’s amazing to me how much the little illustrations help me quickly trim the search.
In contrast, I had to do a few minutes of clever searching to find the SIGGRAPH 2013 Proceedings. Shame on you, ACM DL, for not responding properly to the searches “SIGGRAPH 2013” or “SIGGRAPH 2013 papers”. The first search shows everything but the papers, since the papers are part of TOG; the second search gives practically random results.
