Two free webinar courses from SIGGRAPH 2021, run by Rajesh Sharma at Disney Animation, starting next week:

Introduction to Ray Tracing starts Tuesday, May 25th, running for seven sessions. It’s based on Pete Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend book (which is also free). Each class starts with a live conversation with a ray tracing luminary (or me). See here for the full description, syllabus, and YouTube links. You don’t need to register – just show up. But, when? Here’s a Google calendar for integrating into your own, and here’s a link for the ICS file for Outlook, etc. Course materials and prerequisites are here.

Machine Learning and Neural Networks starts Monday, May 24th, also seven sessions. Similar thing: see here for the description, syllabus, and YouTube links. Registration not required. Here’s the Google Calendar link and here’s the ICS link. Course materials and prerequisites (not many!) here.

Me, I hope to at least watch the first 10 minutes of every session to get a glimpse of what the experts are thinking about.

From Rajesh’s Linked-In posting:

So much good stuff is going on:

• The Graphics Codex is now free on the web. This thing’s both a good source of tutorials on all sorts of areas of 3D graphics, as well as a reference of handy code bits. It’s basically “stuff Morgan McGuire got interested in and decided to write up.” It’s best integrated source for learning about ray marching algorithms that I know. The book’s main site is here.
• For ray marching, also see Inigo Quilez’s site (you know, the Shadertoy guy). This should be old news, but just in case… He writes on a bunch of topics and rarely publishes in journals or presents at conferences, so there’s a mess of useful bits on his site.
• Speaking of Shadertoy: English Lane. Quite incredible (with maybe a few too many lanes, but that’s a niggle).
• “A Survey on Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Ray Tracing” is indeed a monster survey. Someone still needs to prove forming an optimal BVH is NP-hard. If you’re a professor, give it as a homework assignment “by accident” – someone will probably prove it and you’ll get to be on Snopes.
• Running a virtual conference and want to know how to use OBS (Open Broadcaster Software)? Zdravko Velinov wrote a detailed article (two, actually) all about doing this for I3D 2020 and 2021.
• Speaking of which, the I3D 2021 awards are here, with paper links here. Also, I3D 2022 is looking for more help, especially with publicity and website redesign – consider it! You can write them here.
• I want this manga book, GPU Optimization: Getting Started, in English, now. I particularly appreciate the character with GPU cards for ears and a GPU chip as a third eye or whatever. Here’s a page after applying Google Translate: