Seven Things for June 2, 2022 | Real-Time Rendering

Now that Aaron Hertzmann’s pointed it out, I’m noticing all the time that my perception of a scene doesn’t much match what a camera captures. Starts out lightweight; by the end he delves into some current research.
For good or ill, reading the ancient Wavefront OBJ model format (now 32 years old) is still a thing. Aras Pranckevičius compares the speeds of various popular OBJ readers (and an earlier one on optimizing such code). The readers vary considerably: a range of 70x in speed! He admits it’s a fair bit apples vs. oranges – each reader has different goals and two are multithreaded – but it’s worth a look if you read in such models. He also put all the test code in a repo for testing. Fun for me to see that the Minecraft Rungholt model created with my Mineways software gets used as a benchmark.
Large models? Try the coronavirus. The article’s just some visualizations presented in the NY Times, in the billion atoms range (sorry, not interactive, and your browser may appear to lock up – be patient).
Make meshes smaller and faster? I need to find some time someday to poke at meshoptimizer, an open-source project I’ve heard good things about and that has a lot of features.
AI-generated imagery has been rapidly evolving. If you missed DALL-E 2, here’s a pleasant, long video about it (or see their short marketing video) – worth the time. Midjourney is a related effort from another group with an emphasis on styles; you can sign up for the beta (but your GPU time is limited, so spend it wisely, perhaps building on others’ work). Video about both, with a bit more explanation. But wait, there’s more! So very much more. Among those many links I found this midjourney artist’s style dump is worth a skim.
I’m thinking I should always make the sixth element in these lists something goofy. This time it’s Coca-Cola Byte (two cans for just $14.77, plus $6.95 min. shipping).
This new illusion is fantastic – I did a screen cap of it (below) just to make sure they weren’t cheating with a GIF. That said, you might not see it – 14% of people don’t. And, for me, it’s much stronger on my PC than my phone. The authors note that the larger the better; here’s their big one.