Monthly Archives: June 2014

Books page updated

I spent an inordinate amount of time just updating the books page at this site. It hadn’t been done for about two years – I can finally check this task off the list. It took awhile tracking down related websites for each book, especially Google Books samples, which can be quite large and worthwhile for some books. I also cleaned out older volumes from the listing and updated the recommendations list.

From what I can tell – and please do tell me if I’ve missed anything – beyond API books (OpenGL and DirectX) and the GPU Pro series, there have been very few new graphics books since 2013. The major release has been a new edition of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. There was also The CUDA Handbook, which is somewhat graphics related but not strictly so. I also included The HDRI Handbook; even though it’s more a user’s guide, it does have some good bits about the theory of tone mapping and much else, in an area that can use more coverage. I don’t bother listing the many books about Unity 3D, the Unreal Engine, etc., since those truly fall in the area of guides.

Anyway, that’s all until SIGGRAPH, when I can take a look at what else is out there.

GPU Pro 5 is out

Really, the title says it all, the book GPU Pro 5 is shipping. Sadly, there’s no “Look Inside” for the book on Amazon; I’ll hope they at least put the Table of Contents there. You can find a rough Table of Contents on the CRC site; rough in that you can’t see the number of pages for each article. A few articles are quite lengthy: Physically Base Area Lights is 34 pages long, Hi-Z Screen-Space Cone-Traced Reflections is an incredible 44. The rest are in the 10-20 page range.

You can get a taste of the book at the GPU Pro blog, it has previews of a large number of the articles. At $70 this is not a casual purchase, but if you’re a practitioner and just one article saves you 2 hours, the book’s more than paid for itself.

Me, I was amused to see the following, a model from Morgan McGuire’s high-quality model repository – hey, that’s from our world! (And you thought I was done with Minecraft references here.)

VoxeliaMC

Free Golden Paint Spectra Spreadsheet

The short version is go see this page here.

I’m collaborating on a little hobby project with Andrew Glassner. It involves paint spectra, so we were hunting down a spectrometer. We’d heard good things about ColorMunki, though it’s pricey for a hobby project. There’s now even a $40 spectrometer from Public Labs; they’re located a few miles from where I live.

Andrew decided to ask Golden Artist Colors, Inc., if they had spectra available for their paints. Happily, they did and agreed to release these for free, noting that “spectra are spectra”. This saves us a lot of grunt work and expense, which is great. I felt so good about them that I decided to make a page about their dataset so that researchers and developers could also benefit from it.

Golden Artists sample data

Chartreuse and Puce

Yes, I should weight in about Apple’s Metal announcement, or Google’s Tango smartphone, or talk about Oculus Rift, or Word Lens (which really is cool and free for a short time, so get it now), or something. But, others have said enough on them, so let’s talk about two colors, chartreuse and puce.

I’ve blogged about chartreuse before (and answers here). The gist: it’s a color that a lot of people think they know, but don’t (including myself, once upon a time). Get it fixed in your mind before reading further. I decided to actually make it a tiny part of the Udacity MOOC, asking students about it for fun. 10,450 students responded, and here are the results:

  • 41% said yellow-green
  • 22% said red-orange
  • 19% didn’t know
  • 18% said deep purple

Please use this knowledge for good, or evil. So what about puce? Well, last night I was trying to think about other colors I wasn’t sure about. I know what drab is – that’s the color of commerce, accountancy, and business (hey, I don’t make this stuff up). One I though of was puce (aka, peuce, puse, peuse). I again got it wrong. Also, it turns out this has to be about the most disgusting color name ever – you’ve been warned. It sounds nicer in French, though.

This is a mostly content-free post (you really should see Word Lens, though – it’s like magic), but I should have an interesting color-related announcement next week, if all goes well.