Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Moving Targets, and Why They’re Bad

Executive summary: if you write anything or show off any images, you should make a real website, both for yourself and for others. The followup post gives some resources for doing so.

We’ve been updating the Real-Time Rendering site (take a peek – you might at least enjoy the 4th edition cover). Today I’ve been grinding through updating URLs for the references in the book. Even though the book’s not yet out, you can see what articles we reference and jump to the article from this page.

Most of the articles can be found through using Google or Google Scholar. A few articles are trickier to find, or have a few URLs that are relevant – that’s the value I feel I’m adding by doing this laborious task. The other reason is for helping avoid link rot – I’ll explain that in a minute. Another is virus protection. For example, one blog URL, for the article “Render Color Spaces” by Anders Langlands, has had its domain anderslanglands.com (DON’T GO THERE (REALLY)) taken over by some evil entity in May 2018 and now leads to a page full of nastiness.

In going through our reference page today and adding links, doing so reminds me how tenuous our storage of knowledge is for some resources on the internet. Printed journals at least have a bunch of copies around the world, vs. one point of failure. I’ve noted this before. My point today is this: if you publish anything, go buy yourself a domain and host it somewhere (I like bluehost, as do Morgan McGuire and Andrew Glassner, but there are no doubt cheaper ways). All totaled, this will cost you maybe around $110 a year. Do it, if you care about sharing your work or are at all serious about your career (e.g., lose your job or want another? You now have a website holding your CV or work, ready to show). URLs have a permanence to them, vs. company-specific semi-hosting schemes such as Github or Dropbox, where the rules can and do change. For example, I just found a Github-based blog entry from Feb. 2017 that’s now gone (luckily still on archive.org). With some poking around, I found that the blog entry is in fact still on Github, but appeared to be gone because Github had changed its URL scheme and did not redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Once you have a hosted URL, look at how others arrange their resources, e.g., Morgan McGuire recently moved all his content from the Williams College website to his own personal site. Grab a free template, say from W3 Schools or copy a site you like. Put any articles or presentations or images or whatever that you want people to find on that site. Me, I’m old school; I use basic HTML with a text editor and FileZilla for transfers, end of story. Start a WordPress or other blog, which is then hosted on your site and so won’t die off so easily. Once you have a modest site up, you are now done, your contributions to civilization are available to everyone until you forget to renew your domain or pay for web hosting. Assuming you remember, your content is available until you’re both dead and no one else keeps up with the payments (another good reason to renew for the longest duration). Setting up your own website isn’t some ego-stroking thing on your part – some of the rest of us want continued access to the content you’ve provided, so please do keep it available. If your goal in writing is to help the graphics community, then allow your work to live as long as possible. “But my blog posts and whatnot have a short freshness ‘read by’ date,” you complain. Let us decide that; as someone who maintains the Graphics Gems repository, a collection of articles from 1990-1995, I know people are still using this code and the related articles, as they report bugs and errata to me. “I have tenure, and my school’s been around for 200 years.” So when you retire, they’re going to keep your site going?

Most of us don’t grab a URL and host it, which is a pity for all concerned. Most of the links I fixed today rotted for one of three reasons: the site itself died (e.g., the company disappeared; I now can’t find this talk from 2012 anywhere, and at least 14 other sites link to it), the subdirectory on the site was deleted (e.g., for a student or faculty member no longer at the institution), or the URLs were reorganized and no redirection was put in place (and if you’re a webmaster, please don’t do this – take the time to put in some redirection, no matter how untidy it may feel to you). Some resources that still work are hanging on by a thread, e.g., three articles on our page are served up by FTP only. FTP! Update: see my follow-up post for where to find that 2012 talk now.

BTW, people have worked on how to have their sites outlive them, but so far I don’t know of a convincing system, one where the service itself is likely to outlast its participants. Some blog and presentation content does outlive its creator, or at least its original URL, as much of the internet gets archived by The Wayback Machine. So, for the virus-ridden anderslanglands.com site, the article I wanted to link to is available on archive.org. Jendrik Illner does something for his (wonderful) summary posts that I hadn’t seen before: each link also has a “wayback-archive” link for convenience, in case the link no longer works. You can also easily try such links yourself on any dead site by using this Chrome extension. With this extension active, by default a dead page will cause the extension to offer you to look on archive.org. Links have an average life of 9.3 years before they rot, and that’s just the average. You’re likely to live longer, so do your future older self a favor by saving them some time and distress: make a nice home for your resources now so you don’t have to later.

If you’re too busy or poor to host your own content, at least paste your important URLs into archive.org’s site (you can also use the “Save Page Now” option in the Chrome extension, if you have a lot of pages) and your content will get archived (though if it’s a large PDF, maybe not). However, content on archive.org is not included in Google searches, so articles there effectively disappear unless the searcher happens to have the original URL and thinks to use the Wayback Machine. Also, people may stop looking when they try your original URL and find, for example, a porn site (e.g., this archive.org graphics site’s original URL goes to one now). This won’t happen if you have your own URL and maintain it.

For longer-term storage of your best ideas, don’t just blog about a topic, submit it to a journal (for example, JCGT takes practical articles) or article collection book (e.g., GPU Zen series, Ray Tracing Gems) and so have it become accessible for a good long while. It is possible and reasonable to take good blog content and rework it into an article. Going through peer review and copy editing will polish your idea all that much more.

These ramblings reflect my (limited) view of the world. If you know other approaches or resources to combat any aspect of link rot, please do let me know and I’ll fold them in here and credit you. Me, I hate seeing information get lost. Fight entropy now. Oh, and please put a date on any page you put up, so the rest of us can know if the page is recent or ancient history. Blog entries all have dates; everything else should, too.

Update: see my next post for some followups and a bunch of inexpensive options for making your own site.

 

One day left for the (optional) “Ray Tracings Gems” promotion

One more day for (optionally) submitting a proposal for Ray Tracing Gems for a shot at also winning a Titan V GPU. You can find the details and an update on what (the heck) a proposal is and what we’re looking for is on this page. A proposal is optional, the article is the main thing, but we hope this promotion gets you thinking about it. We’re happy to hear from you after tomorrow, of course, so please feel free to bounce ideas off of us.

Being the last one in the world to contribute to this meme, maybe our cat Ezra will inspire you:

 

Propose a great RT article and win a Titan V graphics card

I’m passing on this tweet from Tomas:

Titan V competition w/ Ray Tracing Gems.

Submit a one-page abstract to raytracinggems@nvidia.com
The five best article proposals will receive a Titan V graphics card. Submit before the end of June 21st.
More info: https://nvda.ws/2spqrUK

I also wanted to note that the Ray Tracing Gems CFP has been updated with some significant new bits of information:

The book will be published by Apress, which is a subsidiary of Springer Nature and the e-book will be available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobi (Kindle). We are working on getting open access for the e-book, which means that it will be free for all, and that authors may post a draft version to other sites; however, we ask that they include a link to the final version once published. The printed book will cost approximately $60.

 

Not April Fool’s

I mentioned in a post last week that I expected interest in ray-tracing to increase. So, there actually does appear to have been an uptick in Google searches on the term “ray-tracing,” looking at Google Trends. The last time there was as much interest was March 2010 (though other months in between have come close).

It’s a funny area to explore: South Korea seems the most interested, by far. Under “Related topics” is “NVIDIA – Company,” which is not surprising. What’s funny is that if you click that topic, you find that NVIDIA is of strongest interest in Romania, followed by Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, then Russia. I assumed the explanation is “Bitcoin,” but that’s not quite right. According to NVIDIA’s CEO, it’s actually Ethereum mining, as Bitcoins are most profitably mined by custom ASICs at this point. Such a world.

“Ray Tracing Gems” Book Call for Participation

Given the recent DXR announcements, Tomas Akenine-Möller and I are coediting a book called Ray Tracing Gems, to come out at GDC 2019. See the Call for Participation, which pretty much says it all. The book is in the spirit of the Graphics Gems series and journals such as JCGT. Articles certainly do not have to be about DXR itself, as the focus is techniques that can be applied to interactive ray tracing. The key date is October 15th, 2018, when submissions are due.

To self-criticize a tiny bit, the first sentence of the CFP:

Real-time ray tracing – the holy grail of graphics, considered unattainable for decades – is now possible for video games.

would probably be more factual as “Real-time ray tracing for video games – … – is now possible.” But, the book is not meant to be focused on just video game techniques (though video games are certainly likely to be the major user). I can see ray tracing become more a standard part of all sorts of graphics programs, e.g., much faster previewing for Blender, Maya, and the rest.

As far as “considered unattainable for decades” goes, interactive ray tracing has been attained long ago, just not for (non-trivial) video games or other interactive applications. My first encounter with an interactive ray tracer was AT&T’s Pixel Machine back in 1987. I had put out the Standard Procedural Databases on Usenet the week before SIGGRAPH, and was amazed to see that they had grabbed them and were rendering some in just a few seconds. But the real excitement was a little postage-stamp (well, maybe 6 stamps) sized rendering, where you could interactively use a mouse to control a shiny sphere’s position atop a Mandrill plane texture.

The demoscene has had real-time ray tracers since 1995, including my favorite, a 252 byte program (well, 256, but the last four bytes are a signature, “BA2E”) from 2001 called Tube by 3SC/Baze. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was rendered using ray tracing on a 20-machine system by Daniel Pohl at Intel a decade ago. OptiX for NVIDIA GPUs has been around a long time. Shadertoy programs usually perform ray marching. Imagination Technologies developed ray tracing support for mobile some years back. There are tons more examples, but this time it feels different – DXR looks here to stay, with lots of momentum.

Ray tracing is, in my opinion, more easily adopted by computer-aided design and modeling programs, as users are willing to put up with slower frame rates and able to wait a few seconds every now and then for a better result. Systems such as KeyShot have for some years used only ray tracing, performing progressive rendering to update the screen on mouse up. Modelers such as Fusion 360 allow easy switching to progressive ray tracing locally, or for finished results can render at higher speeds on the cloud. I think DXR will make these few seconds into a handful of milliseconds, and near-interactive into real-time.

In a sense, this history misses the point: for interactive rendering we use whatever gives us the best quality in an allotted amount of time. We usually don’t, and probably shouldn’t, trace rays everywhere, just for the purity of it. Rasterization works rapidly because of coherence exploited by the GPU. Ray tracing via DXR is a new piece of functionality, one that looks general enough and with support enough that it has the potential to improve quality, simplify engine design, and reduce the time spent by artists in creating and revising content (often the largest expense in a video game).

Long and short, DXR is the start of an exciting new chapter in interactive rendering, and we look forward to your submissions!

GPU Zen Two CFP, and LAA

The article collection GPU Zen was a ridiculously good deal at $10 for the electronic version of the book. A call for participation for GPU Zen 2 is now out. First important date: March 30th for submitting proposals (i.e., not the first draft, which is due August 3rd).

Just because I wanted to have a title with a series of 3 letter bits, I wrote out the Two. I recently read some little tidbit about some old book passage with the longest-known (at least, to him) string of 3 letter words in a row, that someone found from analyzing a huge pile of Project Gutenberg texts or similar. Can’t find the article now, thought it was at the Futility Closet site, but maybe not. Which is my roundabout way of saying that site is sometimes entertaining, it has an odd historical oddities & mathematical recreations bent to it.

To continue to ramble, in memory of the first anniversary of his death (and LAA), I’ll end with this quote from the wonderful Raymond Smullyan: “I understand that a computer has been invented that is so remarkably intelligent that if you put it into communication with either a computer or a human, it can’t tell the difference!”

HPG 2018; oh, and a hyphen for “Physically-Based” (don’t!)

I mostly wanted to pass on the word that High-Performance Graphics 2018 has their call for participation up. Due date for papers is April 12th. HPG 2018 is co-located with SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver in August.

Also, let’s talk about hyphens. See Rule 1: Generally, hyphenate two or more words when they come before a noun they modify and act as a single idea. This is called a compound adjective.

Update: John Owens wrote and said “Go read Rule 3,” which is: An often overlooked rule for hyphens: The adverb very and adverbs ending in ly are not hyphenated.

So, he’s right! The hyphen is indeed NOT needed, my mistake! I didn’t do all the work, reading through all eleven rules and noting that “physically” is indeed an adverb.

Here’s the rest of my incorrect post, for the record. I guess I’m in good company – about a quarter of authors get this wrong, judging from the list of publications below.

The phrase “High-Performance Graphics” is good to go; “Real-Time Rendering” is also fine. Writing “Physically Based Rendering,” as seen on Wikipedia and elsewhere, not quite [I’m wrong]. The world doesn’t end if the hyphen’s not there, especially in a title of just the phrase itself. Adding the hyphen just helps the reader know what to expect: Is the word “based” going to be a noun or part of a compound adjective? If you read the rest of Rule 1, note you don’t normally add the hyphen if the adjective is after the noun. So:

“Physically-based [that’s wrong] rendering is better than rendering that is spiritually based.”

is correct, “spiritually based” should not be hyphenated. Google came up with no direct hits for “spiritually-based rendering” that I could find – it’s an untapped field.

Not a big deal by any stretch, but we definitely noticed that “no hyphen” was the norm for a lot of authors for this particular phrase [and rightfully so], to the point where when the hyphen actually exists, as in a presentation by Burley, the course description leaves it out.

In no particular scientific sample, here are some titles found without the hyphen:

  • SIGGRAPH Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course
  • Graceful Degradation of Collision Handling in Physically Based Animation
  • Physically Based Area Lights
  • Antialiasing Physically Based Shading with LEADR Mapping
  • Distance Fields for Rapid Collision Detection in Physically Based Modeling
  • Beyond a Simple Physically Based Blinn-Phong Model in Real-Time
  • SIGGRAPH Real-time Rendering of Physically Based Optical Effect in Theory and Practice course
  • Physically Based Lens Flare
  • Implementation Notes: Physically Based Lens Flares
  • Physically Based Sky, Atmosphere and Cloud Rendering in Frostbite
  • Approximate Models for Physically Based Rendering
  • Physically Based Hair Shading in Unreal
  • Revisiting Physically Based Shading at Imageworks
  • Moving Frostbite to Physically Based Rendering
  • An Inexpensive BRDF Model for Physically based Rendering
  • Physically Based Lighting Calculations for Computer Graphics
  • Physically Based Deferred Shading on Mobile
  • SIGGRAPH Practical Physically Based Shading in Film and Game Production course
  • SIGGRAPH Physically Based Modeling course
  • Physically Based Shading at DreamWorks Animation

Titles found with:

  • Physically-Based Shading at Disney
  • Physically-based and Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite
  • Fast, Flexible, Physically-Based Volumetric Light Scattering
  • Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering
  • Physically-based lighting in Call of Duty: Black Ops
  • Theory and Algorithms for Efficient Physically-Based Illumination
  • Faster Photorealism in Wonderland: Physically-Based Shading and Lighting at Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Physically-Based Glare Effects for Digital Images

I suspect some authors just picked what earlier authors did. The hyphen’s better, go with it [no, don’t].

Now, don’t get me started on capitalization… Well, it’s easy, the word after the hyphen should be capitalized. There’s an online tool for testing titles, in fact, if you have any doubts – I use Chicago style.

But I digress. Submit to HPG 2018.

Links for the holidays

In my self-inflicted weekly reports for Autodesk I always included a “link for the week,” some graphics-related or -unrelated tidbit I found of interest. Did you pick up on the “d” in “included”? Out of the blue I was laid off from Autodesk three weeks ago (along with ~1149 others, 13% of the workforce), and it’s fine, no worries.

But, it meant that I had collected a bunch of links I was never going to use. So, here’s the curated dump, something to click on during the holidays. Not a sterling collection of the best of the internet, just things that caught my eye. Enjoy! Or not!

Seven Things for October 25, 2017

Seven links for today:

  • Prof. Min Chen has assembled a page of all the STAR (State of the Art), review, and survey papers in Computer Graphics Forum. Such articles are great for getting up to speed on a topic.
  • Jendrik Illner has been writing a weekly roundup of recent blog posts and other online resources for computer graphics. Some good stuff in there, articles I missed, and I’m happy to see someone filtering through and summing up what’s out there. I hope he doesn’t burn out anytime soon.
  • ACM TOG is now encouraging submitting code with articles, so as to be able to reproduce results and build off previous work. I’m happy to see it.
  • There is now a Monument to an Anonymous Peer Reviewer at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (more pics here, and Kickstarter page). I liked, “Researchers from across the world will visit to touch the “Accept” side in the hope that the gods of peer review will smile down upon them.”
  • Some ARKit apps in development look like wonderful magic. Which is often how demos look, vs. reality, but let me have my dreams for now.
  • One more AI post: the jobs of people who name colors are not yet at risk. Though I do like the computer’s new color name “Snowbonk” and some of the others. Certainly “Stanky Bean” is descriptive, no worse than puce.
  • I should have reposted months ago, but many others already have. Just in case you missed it, Stephen Hill’s SIGGRAPH 2017 link collection is wonderfully useful, as usual.

Seven Things for October 24, 2017

Machine learning, and especially deep learning, is all the rage, so here are some (vaguely) graphics-related tie ins: