I just made a page of all the ray, path, and sampling papers/talks/courses/demos/events happening at SIGGRAPH 2019. See it here: http://bit.ly/rtrt2019 (and RT, if you wish).

Please let me know of any additions (including schedules for courses) and corrections.

Enjoy!

I was happy two weeks ago when Apress put Ray Tracing Gems on Kindle for free. I’m happier still today as they now have also put it on Google Play for free. My tweet – if you RT it will then be an RTRTRT.

What’s a blog entry without an image? A non-waste of bandwidth. So, here’s one from Chapter 26, “Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing,” by Thomas Willberger, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann.

I plunked my $10 down to try out Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS), PTGI E6, for Minecraft. These shaders include ray-tracing, path-tracing, and other effects. They’re not the easiest thing to install: you need Forge, then need OptiFine, then SEUS (but not the old SEUS), and adding something like the Realistico resource pack with high-res normal and specular maps makes it all that much better.

I toured around our ancient (circa 2010-2014) world and made a short video of the results. Here’s an album showing some of the effects (and some of the limitations).

Overall I love the look – it adds a solidity and realism to the world. That said, it’s a bit difficult to see while underground vs. vanilla Minecraft. OptiFine has a “have the torch in hand illuminate the area” which SEUS doesn’t support, so dark areas are, by default, quite dark indeed. So, great for touring around, more challenging if building underground.

Here’s a shot with bump and specular maps, some reflection of the environment, and ripples from rain. If you just can’t get enough, here’s a way-too-large album I made mostly for our players.

Chris Wyman pointed out this entertaining Amazon world-view:

Wow, cool, we’re #1 for DirectX books, and the book’s not actually shipping yet (the second printing should come out in May, with little fixes). Click on that “DirectX Software Programming” link and you can see the competition we beat out:

Yes! We displaced that best-selling book on DirectX programming, the classic Air Fryer Cookbook.

Update: sadly, the next day we fell to #2. That cookbook is an unstoppable computer programming guide, as it’s also #1 in many other programming book categories, such as for OpenGL, Java server pages, Cold Fusion, and XSL, not to forget CAD software control. That said, sous vide cooking controls PHP programming, classic authors top Ruby programming books, and, appropriately, the Harry Potter Coloring Math Book controls Flash programming, beating out books on machine trading, Excel, Javascript, Adobe Animate CC – aha, at #15 there is actually a book about Flash.

Clearing through a Google Doc, I found a number of links stored away for a rainy day. It’s raining, so here goes:

• I have fond memories of the wooden mirror at SIGGRAPH ’99. Daniel Rozin has kept the idea going.
• Facebook has some well-hidden tricks: you can embed Sketchfab models, lots of modelers can export to glTf for display, and their 3D Photos capability is eerie and cool. Related: cute iPhone app illusion, in case you missed it.
• Dinosaur Comics had a nod to ray tracing (and ray casting got a mention two years earlier).
• I still follow some Tumblr feeds of repeating GIFs. Here’s a hypnotic one, Bees & Bombs continues with some lovely stuff, and funny/strange bits at kiszkiloszki and Un gif dans ta gueule… Inactive but worthwhile if you haven’t seen them: bigblueboo sometimes hits the spot and dusum has some great flow examples.
• If you’re in the area (or even if not), MIT continues to entertain: a few weeks ago BAHfest was great (“bagpipes caused the Black Death” won; no YouTube video yet, so you could enjoy last year’s winner instead), the cozy & little-known New England Symposium on Graphics yesterday was pleasant, and I assume the Disobedience Award for 2019 is being determined in the weeks ahead.
• I’m impressed by groups that push out elaborate renderers. Here’s yet another: Godot (free on Steam).
• His and hers. The only difference in the two images are contrast settings.

I saw this work at the New Orleans Museum of Art – tres ray tracing. See if you can figure out why it looks how it does, from these images and film clip. Last image in album is the reveal.

The influx of registration spam (fake accounts registering) is just too much for me to keep up with.

Sorry.

Time to clear the link collection before GDC/GTC – download some web pages for the plane ride.

• Berkeley UC is the first university system in the U.S. to break with Elsevier over Open Access. Talking with an academic, I learned one reason predatory journals flourish is that his university refuses to pay open access for articles they are publishing in established journals, since the university itself already pays the yearly subscription fee for these journals. So, if there’s funding for publishing open access available, it can only go to journals for which there’s no paywall, which are less-established and predatory ones.
• This is peculiar, a mix of Tarot and shader code. I can’t say I understand, but the WebGL’s nice, and the little shaders are on Github.
• Stolen Images in Games is a bit too comprehensive, but it’s a fun skim to see how various games were “inspired by” (i.e., ripped off) all sorts of sources, from Schwarzenegger to Escher. Note that there are six pages in total, it just keeps going…
• This is a cool, interactive way to show a virtual reality artist at work.
• An older article, but interesting that Netflix considers Fortnite a bigger rival than HBO.
• Not graphics, but I found this article on foreign hacking informative & gripping.
• This is Colossal has so much stuff… over the past few months I particularly liked the tentacle building and this forced-perspective piece (I wonder if anyone’s been injured by it, though), and this press conference is kawaii.