So, please submit something to SIGGRAPH Mobile so that I can further justify attending this year. Deadline is May 1st.
One key research direction: making the phone no longer fit in your pocket. These are some designs to beat (click on the image for more info).
From the Solid Angle (Arnold renderer) guys, an ad in this month’s Cinefex:
Go get your hotel reservation for SIGGRAPH 2012 now. Reservations can be cancelled with no cost up to July 19th, so if you think there’s the slightest chance you’ll go, grab a room now.
The HQ hotel and the Figueroa are already gone. The Ritz Milner is certainly cheap and pretty close, but some TripAdvisor reviews eventually scared me off. I then switched to the Luxe City Center (used to be a Holiday Inn), as I prefer being close to the convention center. But I recall complaints about things like the WIFI stinking at the old Holiday Inn, and the place is even pricier now. So I rebooked yet again into The Sheraton, as a pretty good compromise among the factors of cost, quality, and location – being more downtown can be good, as you’re closer to restaurants and other nighttime activities.
If you’re a member of ACM, you have access to about 1200 books online through Safari and Books24x7. Safari’s catalog is here, Books24x7 is here. Just login using your ACM ID & password. I can’t say the book selection is that exciting, some are half a decade old or older (bad for books about APIs), though there are few that might be of interest. If nothing else, there are some guides to popular packages and languages that might help you out.
Worth a reminder: if you’re an ACM SIGGRAPH member, you also get access to essentially all computer graphics papers in the ACM’s Digital Library. I took a peek today to see if the I3D 2012 papers were up yet (the conference runs this weekend) – no joy there, though 2011’s are available. At least, I’m pretty sure 2012’s are not up. Personally, I find their searcher kind of poor if you want to search through proceedings, but is otherwise serviceable for individual articles. As usual, Ke Sen Huang’s page is the place to go to get most of the latest articles (with no membership needed).
Oh, just to reel off some other free books that might be of interest: Autodesk’s “Imagine Design Create” book, a free PDF. More for designers but full of pretty pictures and there’s stuff on game graphic design, along with films and much else. If you’d rather have the coffee-table version, get it on Amazon.
Me, I just finished the crowd-sourced sci-fi “Machine of Death” compilation, which has nothing to do with computer graphics but was an interesting bedtime read. Free as an ebook or audiobook, or again in physical form from Amazon.
In the past few week I’ve learned of a number of ways to access our book’s content. Some are just plain new, others I simply didn’t know about. Here’s a summary of sources I know, listed from lowest to highest price.
I’ve heard we’ll eventually have a “rent for six months” option for the Kindle version, which makes sense for students. Frankly, the Kindle and Google prices hit me as high: you don’t actually own anything, in the sense that you can’t sell it later. Our publisher says Amazon controls their Kindle price – beats me how that works. On the other hand, electronic versions have the advantages of weight (none extra) and searchability. Me, I love having my own internal PDF version of the book that I can search and copy & paste from. It’s unfortunate that PDFs are too easy to pass on to others.
Personally, I like the Google eBook and Books24x7 concept the best, where you can access the book from any web browser by simply logging in (no installation needed, no need to authorize the device, etc.). This method of access seems to be at a good balance point between reader usability and author/publisher protection.
The Graphics Codex is a little $3.99 Apple app developed by Morgan McGuire, a noted researcher and practitioner in graphics, especially interactive graphics. He’s written numerous research papers and a number of books on videogame development, consults for NVIDIA, teaches at Williams College, and has worked on games such as Titan Quest (recently named #65 in PC Gamer’s top 100 games of all time). From talking with him, the Graphics Codex is basically his reference notebook. It holds the compact nuggets of knowledge he wants to have instantly available at his fingertips (literally, since it’s an iPad/iPhone app; it also runs on iPods running iOS 5.x).
This Graphics Codex been available for a few weeks, but this new version, 1.2, has faster scrolling and display, among other features. Morgan felt this was an important improvement so I’ve been holding off blogging about the app. Upgrades are free and simple, as with most apps. Morgan says he’s working on version 1.3, which will focus on iOS 5.1 support, color theory, and diagrams useful for explaining computer graphics topics.
So, what is it? Well, let’s start with pictures:
We all have our own favorite pieces of information we like to see included. This codex fits me pretty well: I see the reflection and refraction formulas, and various matrix types described (perspective, rotation, scale, translation, skew, determinants, etc.). I see handy things like the formatting for printf, and the latex and HTML codes for Greek letters and for math symbols. I see pseudocode for object/object intersection and distance formulas, as well as various common sorting algorithms. I see raster and 3D file formats (nicely linking to original documents on the web, when available). That’s just for starters.
There are a lot of topics included, and you can see the whole list before purchasing. In the app topics are listed alphabetically, index-style, but that’s fine, as the normal way to access this work is to search the index. Some topics I don’t know a thing about, which is great – knowing what you don’t know is important. Seeing some of these concepts inspires me to learn about them (elsewhere – like I say, this app is a reference, not a textbook). Some topics I may rarely or never look at, such as the examples shown in the images above, but I like knowing they’re there. Given that the author is a professor and consultant, I understand why they exist: these are teaching aids, information you can easily pull up and show a student, client, or other developer to help explain a concept or algorithm.
That said, there are some minor gaps. Things that came to mind for me to test but that I didn’t find: compositing (“over”, etc.), sampling and filtering (e.g. sinc and Gaussian curves), dithering (but when did I last use that?), and regular expressions (which admittedly sometimes have variations between computer languages). There’s other stuff I wouldn’t mind having: all HTML letter codes, a decimal/hexadecimal table, etc., but these are trivial to find & bookmark from sites on the web. Some domain-specific things like the various architectural projections (e.g., the various axonometric projections) would be nice, but that’s very specific to me and Wikipedia mostly fills the gap. Someday I imagine there could be a framework for such codex apps to allow you to add your own index entries, similar to how you can make your own reference work on Wikipedia (update: Morgan notes that this feature exists for his app, it’s called “email him and ask for a topic to be added”). The difference is that this app gives you the core, relevant ideas and algorithms of computer graphics in a usable form, with a consistent style, and cross-referenced to only directly relevant articles. A single author and editor, focused on a single area, adds considerable value.
This is not the first time someone has collected such reference entries. The most direct “competitor” that comes to mind is Phil Dutre’s great Global Illumination Compendium. This is a free PDF, go get it. Its focus is indeed global illumination, and it’s quite an extensive reference in this area. I would say there’s about a 25% overlap with the Graphics Codex. Another resource that comes to mind is Steve Hollasch’s collection of USENET articles, free on the web. This collection is a bit ancient, but math and physical formulas don’t change quickly. It’s a pretty shotgun-scattered set of articles, more like Graphics Gemlets, but an interesting place to wander through and try for information.
Back to the Graphics Codex. Each index entry is nicely formatted and readable, and every page (except the Bibliography, which I have reported as a bug) can be made larger or smaller. This larger/smaller functionality works well, reformatting the entry to be fully visible side-to-side, vs. typical PDF zoom, where the page can become wider than the display.
All the entries are aimed to be for reference, such as hard information that you basically understand but want to get the precise formula or code. This is information you could eventually find on your bookshelf or on the web, but instead is quickly available for you by simply searching the index. You can’t actually search the entries themselves, and the bibliography doesn’t have back links, i.e., “which Codex entries reference this article?” These are minor niggles: entries use cross-references to other entries, and most entries have a reference to related books or papers, sometimes links directly to the reference, if online. Reference back-links are more useful in a textbook; for this reference, they’d probably mostly be clutter.
Summary
Negatives:
Positives:
All in all, worth $3.99 to me.
The above are my own impressions, before reading the email Morgan sent me about the app. Here’s what Morgan said:
HPG is a great little conference squarely aimed at interactive rendering techniques, including areas such as hardware and ray tracing. It will be June 25-27 in Paris (France, not Texas), colocated with another excellent gathering of researchers, the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering. See the HPG call for participation and EGSR CFP for more information.
Entirely gratuitous image follows, a voxelized and 3d printed you-know-what (from here):
Like the title says, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications has a call for papers on the topic of scattering: acquisition, modeling, and rendering. Deadline is August 25th, for inclusion in their May/June 2013 issue. See the complete CFP here.
I’ve updated our books page a bit, adding the new books I know of at this point, adding links to authors sites and Google Books samples, etc. Please let me know what we’re missing.
A book I know nothing about, but from updating the books page I think I’ll get, is the OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook. A reviewer on Gamasutra gives it strong praise, as do all the Amazon customer reviews.
One I’ve left off for now is Programming GPUs, which I expect is focused on computing with the GPU (no rendering), judging from the author’s background as a quant (his bio’s cute). I also left off a heckuva lot of books on using the Unity engine, to keep the list focused on direct programming vs. using higher-level SDKs.
Along the way I noticed a nice little blog called Video Game Math, by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry, who recently released a second edition of their 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development. Which is pretty good, by the way. My mini-review/endorsement: “With solid theory and references, along with practical advice borne from decades of experience, all presented in an informal and demystifying style, Dunn & Parberry provide an accessible and useful approach to the key mathematical operations needed in 3D computer graphics.” There’s an extensive Google Books sample of much of the first few chapters.
In the “old but awesome and free” category this time is Light And Color – A Golden Guide. Check it out before there’s some takedown notice sent out. Yes, it’s small, it’s colorful, and some bits are dated, but there are some pretty good analogies and explanations in there. No kidding. Lots more Golden Guides here (including, incredibly, this one).
I did find that there’s a new edition of “Real Time Rendering“ out, which was a surprise. The subtitle is the best: “Aalib, Aces of ANSI Art”. It’s even sold by Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Happily, I couldn’t find it on Amazon, so maybe they’re scaling back on carrying these so-called books. This particular book is a paperback, and more expensive than the real thing (I like to think our’s is real – it’s the dash between “Real” and “Time” that keeps it real for me). Or I should say it’s more expensive unless you buy ours from these “double your intelligence or no money back” sellers. I believe this phenomenon is from computers tracking competitors’ prices and each one jacking up prices in response.
In case you missed my posts on Betascript Publishing, go here – short version is that they use a computer program to find related articles on Wikipedia, put on a cover (usually the most creative part of the process), and sell it. I’d be interested to know which book is better, their computer-generated one or my own Wikipedia-derived followup, GGGG:RTRtR (Game GPU Graphics Gems: Real-Time Rendering the Redux), reviewed by me here. I really should read my own book some day, there look to be some interesting Wikipedia articles in there.
Finally, I like the concept of book autopsies:
In honor of SOPA-blackout day, here’s my sideways contribution to the confusion.
Is this blog post in potential violation of copyrights or trademarks? I don’t honestly know. The (great!) image below was made by Lee Griggs and Tomás Fernández Serrano at SolidAngle, the company that develops the Arnold renderer, used by (among others) Sony Imageworks for CG effects in their films.
So, let’s see, some issues with this post and image are:
He used Mineways to export the model from a Minecraft world. A texture pack terrain image is applied to the model. So, if you use a texture pack from some copyrighted source (which all of them are, by default; sadly, few declare themselves Creative Commons in any form), are you violating their copyright? What if, like in the image below, you can’t actually make out any details of the textures?
This Minecraft world was built by a lot of people – are their models somehow protected? In what ways? Over on the left there I see Mario and Luigi. These are trademarked figures (or copyrighted?). Are these illegal to build in your own Minecraft world? What about public, shared worlds where others see them? Or is it fine under good faith, since it’s non-commercial? Would selling the print then be illegal? How big does Mario have to be to infringe? Is it the building of them or the photographing of these models that’s illegal? Or is this a “public virtual space” where taking photos is fine? I can make some guesses, but don’t know.
Similarly, if one of the builders used a voxelizer like binvox to build a model from a commercially-sold mesh, would that be OK? At what resolution of voxels does the original mesh and the voxelized version become close enough for a violation to occur? Luckily, the model itself is just a bunch of cubes, and cubes themselves are not something protected by any laws, right? (well, Marchings Cubes were, but that’s a different story.) If I could download their mesh, could I legally use it? Probably not commercially, since it’s the arrangement of the cubes that’s important.
You’re saying to yourself that this is “tempest in a teapot” stuff, with no real likelihood anyone would demand a takedown of fan art. I remember the early years of the commercial internet, where Lucasfilm did just that, endlessly ordering takedowns of unauthorized Star Wars images, models, etc. (I guess they still do?). I even understand it: I’ve heard trademark must be actively defended to retain it. Most interesting of all, there was a United Kingdom Supreme Court ruling last summer involving Lucasfilm: the court ruled that 3D models are covered by “design rights” by default, giving them 3 to 10 year protection, or 25 years if registered. Stormtrooper helmets were judged “utilitarian”, not sculptures, and so are not covered by these rights. Fascinating! But that’s the UK – what if I order a stormtrooper helmet from the UK for delivery to the US? I assume it’s an illegal import.
Finally, am I breaking some law by including this image in my post, using the URL of the original post‘s image? I attribute the authors, but the image is copyright, explicitly shown in the Flickr version. I think I’d invoke Fair Use, since I’m making a point (oh, and that Fair Use link won’t work for a few more hours, with Wikipedia blacked out). Confusing.
With images, textures, and models referencing each other and all sloshing around the web, what copyright, trademark, and all the rest means gets pretty hazy, pretty quick. I’m guessing most of the questions I pose have definitive answers (or maybe not!), but I know I’m part of the vast majority that aren’t sure of those answers. Which is probably mostly fine (except when corporations overstep their bounds), since our culture is much richer for all the reuse that most of us do without any financial gain and without worrying about it.
Update: I just noticed this article on Gamasutra on similar issues (the difference being that the author actually knows what he’s talking about).
Another update: looking at this article during 2016, I noticed the original image is no longer on the page. However, the Wayback Machine has a copy here. I’ve grabbed a copy and so am including the image directly, to avoid having it slip away again (items on The Wayback Machine sometimes get taken down, too). I also wanted to add that, unlike a trademark, you don’t lose your copyright if you don’t defend it against every infringement – you can be selective.
