Clearing the Queue

I’ve have a goal this week (it should be clear by now) of clearing my queue of stored-up RTR links by my birthday, today! (Hint: I want a pony.) So excuse the excessively-long list o’ links. Next task on my list, update the main RTR page itself.

StructureSynth. This looks pretty cool, and I love procedural models (my ancient SPD package was all about this, back in the days when downloading models was oppressively slow). I do wish they just provided an executable – building looks like a pain.
That previous link was on Meshula.net, which also blogs about Pixel Bender Fractals. Great stuff, sort of steampunk computer graphics: you must click this link, if no other on this page, and look on in awe.
Shapeways has a blog, and it’s not just dull company announcements. I’m glad they find people as pixels as interesting as I do. They also cover exporting Spore characters to Collada files (which is a great addition to Spore) and creating physical models from these.
In related news, The Economist has a reasonable summary of some trends in 3D printing. Their Technology Quarterly also has articles on Augmented Reality, 3D displays, and CAPTCHAs, among other topics.
This is one more reason the Internet is great: an in-depth article on normal compression techniques, weighing the pros and cons of each. This sort of article would probably not see the light of day in traditional publications, even Game Developer – too long for them, but all the info presented here is worthwhile for a developer making this decision. Aras’ blog has other nice bits such as packing a float into RGBA and SSAO blurring.
I need to add a link to the article itself to the object intersection page, but Morgan McGuire recently verified that he found this ray/box algorithm super-fast in SIMD. Code’s downloadable from that page, free version of article is downloadable here. Morgan uses this test in the ray tracer for his cool photon mapping paper at HPG 2009; if nothing else, you should at least see the video.
In related news, I am happy to see that AK Peters is beginning to put past journal of graphics tools articles online. At $15 each, the price of an article is quite high for individuals (or at least this individual), but current journal of graphics (gpu, & game) tools subscribers have full access to this archive for free. The mechanism to get access is a little clunky right now: if you’re a subscriber, you need to register with Metapress, then tell AK Peters your userid and they’ll provide you access.
Related to this, I hope Google Books conquers the world (or anyone else doing similar work, as long as it isn’t Apple or Amazon or other overcharging closed-box “we’re just protecting the authors, who get 10% or less for a purely digital sale with nil physical cost to us per unit” retailers – rant over, and I do understand there are fixed start-up costs for the retailer/publisher/etc., but really…). Google Books is so darn handy to look for short articles in books at Google’s repository, such as this one giving a clean way to build an orthonormal basis given a vector, from Graphics Tools: The JGT Editors’ Choice.
Humus provides a whole slew of new cubemaps he captured, if you’re getting tired of Grace Cathedral.
CUDA itself (vs. others) may or may not be a critical technology, but what it shows about the underlying GPU architecture is fascinating.
It should be mentioned: August 2009 DirectX SDK is available. Includes the first official release of DirectX 11.
This is hilarious, and possibly even useful!
I love seeing things like this: build your own multitouch display. Not that I’ll ever do it, but I hope others will.
You might be sick of Larrabee news (ship one, already!), but I found Phil Taylor’s article pleasantly hype-free and informative.
ATI’s Eyefinity (cute marketing name, I must admit – now I want to use the word everywhere) seems to me to solve a problem that rarely occurs: too much GPU for too few screens. Still, it’s nice to have the option. Eyefinity allows up to six monitors to be driven by a single GPU. I guess Eyefinity is useful when running older flight simulator programs on newer GPUs; otherwise, Eyefinity is pretty irrelevant. Eyefinity, eyefinity, eyefinity. At work I find two displays is plenty, one to run, one to debug. Anyway, the sweet spot for the monitor:GPU ratio is 13:1, as can be seen here:
There’s an article on instancing animated grass using DX10 on Gamasutra.
Humus’ summary of z interpolation is a good summary of the topic. He gives some of the key tricks, e.g., if you’re using floating point, use a near=1.0 and far=0.0 to help preserve precision.
Here’s a basic tutorial on different projection methods used in videogames, with lots of visual examples (add “Zaxxon” and it’s complete, for me). The one new tidbit I learnt from it was about reverse perspective, an effect I’ve made myself once every now and then when I screw up a projection matrix.
While I’ve been on break (one of the reasons I’ve been posting so much – Autodesk gives wonderful 6 week “sabbaticals”, aka “long vacations”, to U.S. employees every four years you’re there; it’s like being French or Swedish every fourth year), the rest of the company’s been busy: this new sketch application for the iPhone looks pretty cool, at the usual $2.99 “cup of coffee” type price.
Caustics can be dangerous. I can attest to this myself; a goofy award Andrew Glassner gave me long ago sat on my windowsill for years (I moved once, as you should discern from the picture), until I noticed what was happening to the base:
I usually don’t have time to keep up with Slashdot, but SeenOnSlash, the funny bits of SlashDot, is sometimes entertaining. Graphics-related example: AMD’s latest chip.

Seven Programs for September 16th, 2009

LLVM compiler. A number of people at the High Performance Graphics 2009 symposium were impressed, or even using, this new compiler. It’s new, based on recent research on compilers and optimization, and is supposed to be darn good. More here, with page 3 talking about Apple’s use of it for GLSL code optimization.
Very Sleepy CPU Profiler. Free, of course, and works directly on any Windows app with PDBs. Sounds pretty convenient if you don’t have access to a reasonable profiler, or just want to try a different one (I’ve found profilers sometimes have blind spots or peculiar biases). Bonus link at the same site: summaries and links to classic graphics papers. The first sentence on this page made me laugh.
Vista Gadgets. I use the NVIDIA temperature gadget, the memory monitor’s also handy. An alternate temperature gadget is here.
NVIDIA NEXUS. Debugging GPU code with PIX is flakey at best; I have high hopes that this product from NVIDIA will be much better. It’s something NVIDIA will charge for (a first for NVIDIA, I think), and that’s fine by me if it does a noticeably better job.
NVPP. A CUDA library of functions from NVIDIA. I haven’t tried CUDA, but this library looks worthwhile. To be honest, in the long-term OpenCL or compute shaders look like the popular future for commercial products vs. research, since those two are multi-platform. CUDA is much more developed at this point, however, and I’ve heard that whatever techniques you learn using CUDA can almost always be applied to the other two. So, I’m on the fence waiting for a winner, since I have no personal reason to use any of them at this point.
VMMap. A little free application that shows where all the memory went.
OverClock Checking Tool. I kinda forgot people still overclock. This utility is interesting even if you don’t, if nothing else than to check if things are working. It’s a bit exciting to hear my GPU’s fan kick into overdrive as the temperature climbs to 87 degrees Celsius (188.6 Fahrenheit). I also learnt a little more about my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU: it “idles” at 2.0 GHz, but jumps up to 2.66 GHz when running something serious. I wimped out on going ahead with the Power Supply test, as their warning kept me away.

Seven Things for September 15, 2009

RapidMind is now a part of Intel. Which I think is a good fit; RapidMind does some interesting multicore techniques. Anything that makes multicore programming easier for a larger group of people is all to the good.
I3D 2010 Call for Participation. October 23rd for papers, December 18th for posters – submit! I3D will be in Washington, DC, February 19-21.
Dirty Coding Tricks in Gamasutra. A reprint of a Game Developer article, I’m glad to see it online – it’s pretty amusing in places. The hack at the top of page 2 is my favorite.
Carmack on the iPhone 3GS. Now the iPhone begins to face the same problem PC developers have to deal with: different levels of GPU support. At least there will be only one line of Apple phones, vs. multiple IHVs with a wide range of offerings at different price points, etc.
Mendeley Bibliographic Database. Manny Ko mentioned this one to me, and it looks interesting: a number of tools to pull in PDFs, get their references, let you annotate them, etc.
O’Reilly’s author guide. A surprisingly open and honest guide to how you as an author deal with publishers, specifically O’Reilly. Many publishers consider their contracts and royalty terms to be trade secrets, so it’s refreshing to see this information given in a straightforward manner.
aM Laboratory ToneMatrix. Pretty fun, and it reminds me of an experimental device seen at SIGGRAPH a few years ago. To see the most elaborate (and beautiful) web app ever, click on the AudioTool link, Start AudioTool, then pick DrumNBass. Scroll around. Click the menu in the lower left corner. Amazing.

Visual Stuff

After all the heavy lifting Naty’s been doing in covering conferences, I thought I’d make a light posting of fun visual stuff.

The first one’s not particularly visual, I include it just because the cover and book description was put on the web just a few days ago:

In short, the ShaderX series has moved publishers, from Charles River Media to A.K. Peters. Unfortunately for everyone else in the world, CRM retains the rights to the ShaderX name, hence the confusing rename. This book is ShaderX⁸, under a new title.

This resource is possibly handy: a map of game studios and educational institutions, searchable by state, city, etc. That said, it’s a bit funky: search by “Massachusetts” and you get a few reasonable hits, plus the Bermuda Triangle. Search on “MA” for State and you get lots of additional hits, mostly mall stores. But, major developers like Harmonix (in Cambridge) don’t show up. So, take it with a grain of salt, but it might be handy in turning up a place or two you might not have found otherwise.

A few weeks back I passed on a link from Morgan McGuire’s worthwhile Twitter blog (the only good use I’ve seen for Twitter so far) for a business-card sized ray tracer created by Andrew Kensler. In case you were too busy to actually compile and run this tiny piece of code, here’s the answer, computed in about a minute, sent on to me by Mauricio Vives. Note the depth of field and soft shadows:

Speaking of ray tracing, I noticed some GPU-side ray tracers are available for iPhone 3GS from Angisoft:

Julia Set ray traced

With the recent posting on Morphological Antialiasing, Matt Pharr pointed me at this cool Wikipedia page on scaling up pixel art. To whet your appetite, here’s an example from that page, the left side being the original image used to generate the right:

In a similar vein, I was highly impressed by the examples created by Potrace, a free, GPL’ed package for deriving Bézier curves from raster images. Here’s an example:

Original, raster head Smoothed head with Potrace

See more examples on Peter Selinger’s Potrace examples page. Doubly impressive is that Peter also carefully describes the algorithms used in the process.

I enjoy collecting images of reality that look like they have rendering artifacts. Here’s one from photos by Morgan McGuire, from the Seattle public library. The ground shadow look undersampled and banded, like someone was trying to get soft shadows by just adding a bunch of point light sources. What’s great is that reality is allowed to get away with artifacts – if this effect was seen in a synthetic image it would come across as unconvincing.

Seattle Public Library by Morgan McGuire

The best thing about reality is that it’s real, not photoshopped. I also enjoy photos where reality looks like computer graphics. Here’s a fine example by Benedict Radcliffe from this entertaining collection:

Wireframe Toyota by Benedict Radcliffe

My one non-visual link for this posting is to Jos Stam’s essay on how photography and photorealism is not necessarily the best way to portray reality.

There are tons of visual toys on the web, a few in true 3D. Some (sent on by John McCormack) I played with for up to a whole minute or more: ECO ZOO – click on everything and know it’s all 3D, don’t forget to rotate around; the author’s bio and info is at ROXIK – needs more polygons, but click and drag on the face. In the end, give your eyes a rest with this instant screen saver (actually, it’s also a bit interactive). This last was done using Papervision3D, an open source library which controls 3D in Flash. More demos here. Maybe there’s actually something to this idea of 3D on the web after all… nah, crazy dream.

OK, I’m done with things that are in some way vaguely, almost educational. Here’s a video, 8 Bit Trip, that’s been making the rounds; a little more info here. Not fantastically entertaining, but I admire the amazing dedication to stop motion animation. 1500 hours?!

Art: Xia Xiaowan makes sculptures by a method reminiscent of volume rendering techniques:

Xia Xiaowan sculpture

More at Google Images.

The Mighty Optical Illusions blog is a great place to get a feed of new illusions. Here are two posts I particularly liked: spinning man (sorry, you’ll actually have to click that link to see it) and more from Kitaoka, e.g.

Kitaoka's rotating snake planets

I love that new illusions are being developed all the time nowadays. I found this next one here; unfortunately, to quote Tom Parmenter, “digital technology is the universal solvent of intellectual property rights” (Copyright 1995). No credit is given at that site, so I don’t know who actually made this one, but it’s lovely:

4 perfectly round circles

One last illusion, from here (again, author unknown), included since it’s such a retina-burner:

Flying City

If you hanker for something real and physical after all these, you might consider making a pseudoscope (instructions here). To be honest, I tried, and I’ll tell you that mirrors from the local craft store are truly bad for this project. So, I can’t say I’ve seen the effect desired yet. Next step for me is finding a good, cheap store for front surface mirrors (the link in the article is broken) – if anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Pacific Graphics 2009 Papers

The incomparable Ke-Sen Huang has put up yet another graphics conference papers page, this time for Pacific Graphics 2009. The full papers list is up and there is a good number of preprints linked. Pacific Graphics has had a good number of interesting papers over the years; this year continues the tradition. HPCCD: Hybrid Parallel Continuous Collision Detection proposes an interesting combined CPU-GPU collision detection algorithm. Procedural Generation of Rock Piles using Aperiodic Tiling uses an aperiodic tiling method (similar to a 3D version of Wang Tiles) to enable the quick placement of large numbers of random-seeming rocks. The technique described in Fast, Sub-pixel Antialiased Shadow Maps is quite expensive (it improves quality and adds cost to the already-costly irregular z-buffer technique), but it is worth looking at for applications running on advanced hardware (in other words, not for current-gen games platforms). Finally, Interactive Rendering of Interior Scenes with Dynamic Environmental Illumination presents a PRT-like approach to render complex interiors lit by arbitrary environmental lighting coming in through windows.

Three more papers lack online preprints or abstracts (at the moment) but have promising titles: Procedural Synthesis using Vortex Particle Method for Fluid Simulation, Linkless Octree Using Multi-Level Perfect Hashing, and The Dual-microfacet Model for Capturing Thin Transparent Slabs.

SIGGRAPH 2009 Encore

SOMA Media has been providing (for a fee) video of SIGGRAPH presentations for the last few years; this service (SIGGRAPH Encore) is invaluable for people who could not attend the conference. Even if you did attend, it is great to be able to see presentations you had to miss (SIGGRAPH has a lot of overlap), or even to revisit presentations you were able to see. The videos include the speaker’s voice synchronized with their screen feed, including slides as well as any demos they were showing – it is almost as good as being in the room.

Encore has part of SIGGRAPH 2003, as well as most of 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008 (I’m not sure what happened to 2006). As of yesterday, SIGGRAPH 2009 is available as well. This includes Courses, Talks, and Computer Animation Festival presentations, as well as Technical, Game and Art Paper presentations. However, not all sessions are available; as in previous years, some needed to be removed for copyright or other reasons. Unfortunately, some of the omissions include key content like the Beyond Programmable Shading course and the second half of the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games course. I will list the available presentations; if you see stuff you like, it might be worth purchasing the relevant presentation videos. Individual videos cost between $10 and $20; the entire 2009 set is $300. Presentations which I think are most relevant to readers of this site will be marked in bold.

The available courses are: “The Whys, How Tos, and Pitfalls of User Studies“, Introduction to Computer Graphics, Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games I, Point Based Graphics – State of the Art and Recent Advances, Color Imaging, Real-Time Global Illumination for Dynamic Scenes, Acquisition of Optically Complex Objects and Phenomena, Creating New Interfaces for Musical Expression, An Introduction to Shader-Based OpenGL Programming, Next Billion Cameras, Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting, Scattering, Visual Algorithms in Post-Production, Interaction: Interfaces, Algorithms, and Applications, Shape Grammars, and The Making of ‘Shade Recovered’: Networked Senses at Play.

The missing courses are: Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games II, Build Your Own 3D Scanner: 3D Photography for Beginners, Interactive Sound Rendering, Efficient Substitutes for Subdivision Surfaces, Beyond Programmable Shading (I and II), Visual Perception of 3D Shape, The Digital Emily Project: Photoreal Facial Modeling and Animation, Realistic Human Body Movement for Emotional Expressiveness, Computation & Cultural Heritage: Fundamentals and Applications, and Advanced Material Appearance Modeling.

The available talks are: Tablescape Animation: A Support System for Making Animations Using Tabletop Physical Objects, Teaching Animation in Second Life, Collaborative Animation Productions Using Original Music in an Unique Teaching Environment, MyWorld4D: Introduction to Computer Graphics with a Modeling and Simulation Twist, GPSFilm: Location-Based Mobile Cinema, Applying Color Theory to Creating Scientific Visualizations, BiDi Screen, Karma Chameleon: Jacquard-woven photonic fiber display, Generalizing Multi-Touch Direct Manipulation, Non-Linear Aperture for Stylized Depth of Field, PhotoSketch: A Sketch Based Image Query and Compositing System, Automatic colorization of grayscale images using multiple images on the Web, 2D and 3D Facial Correspondences via Photometric Alignment, Estimating Specular Roughness from Polarized Second Order Spherical Gradient Illumination, Motion Capture for Natural Tree Animation, Connecting the dots: Discovering what’s important for creature motion, Surface Motion Graphs for Character Animation from 3D Video, Methods for Fast Skeleton Sketching, Animation and Simulation of Octopus Arms in ‘The Night at the Museum 2’, Wildfire forecasting using an open source 3D multilayer geographical framework, Innovation in Animation: Exiting the Comfort Zone, “Building Bridges, Not Falling Through Cracks: what we have learned during ten years of Australian Digital Visual Effects Traineeships”, Genetic Stair, Computational Thinking through Programming and Algorithmic Art, Visual Zen Art: Aesthetic Cognitive Dissonance in Japanese Dry Stone Garden Measured in Visual PageRank, Spore API: Accessing a Unique Database of Player Creativity, Results from the Global Game Jam, Houdini in a Games Pipeline, well-formed.eigenfactor: considerations in design and data analysis, Multi-Touch Everywhere!, The Immersive Computer-controlled Audio Sound Theater: History and current trends in multi-modal sound diffusion, Radially-Symmetric Reflection Maps, Smoother Subsurface Scattering, Painting with Polygons, Volumetric Shadow Mapping, Bucket Depth Peeling, BVH for efficient raytracing of dynamic metaballs on GPU, Normal Mapping with Low-Frequency Precomputed Visibility, RACBVHs: Random-Accessible Compressed Bounding Volume Hierarchies, Rendering Volumes With Microvoxels, Multi-Layer Dual-Resolution Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion, Beyond Triangles: Gigavoxels Effects In Video Games, Single Pass Depth Peeling via CUDA Rasterizer, Design and self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes, Computer-Mediated Performance and Extended Instrument Design, InTune: A Musician’s Intonation Visualization System, Adaptive Coded Aperture Projection, Projected Light Microscopy, High-Tech Chocolate: Exploring mobile and 3D applications for factories, Non-Reflective Boundary Condition For Incompressible Free Surface Fluids, See What You Feel – A Study in the Real-time Visual Extension in Music, Designing Instruments for Abstract Visual Improvisation, 2009 Japan Media Arts Festival Review, “Model-Based Community Planning, Decision Support, and Collaboration”, and “Universal Panoramas: Narrative, Interactive Panoramic Universes on the Internet“.

The missing talks are: “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, Reproduced”, GreenLite Dartmouth: Unplug or the Polar Bear Gets It, Shooting ‘UP’: A Trip Through the Camera Structure of ‘UP’, From Pythagoras to Pixels: The Ongoing Trajectory of Visual Music, Modulated Feedback: The Audio-Visual Composition ‘Mercurius’, Visual Music and the True Collaboration of Art Forms and Artists, What Sound Does Color Make?, Exploring Shifting Ground: Creative Intersections Between Experimental Animation and Audio, An Efficient Level Set Toolkit for Visual Effects, Water-Surface Animation for ‘Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa’, Underground Cave Sequence for ‘Land of the Lost’, Creativity in Videogame Design as Pedagogy, Geometric Fracture Modeling in ‘Bolt’, Simulating the Balloon Canopy in ‘Up’, Fight Night 4: Physics-Driven Animation and Visuals, B.O.B.: Breaking Ordinary Boundaries of Animation in ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’, Empowering Audiences Through User-Directed Entertainment, Educate the Educator: Lessons Learned From the Faculty Education Programs at Rhythm & Hues Studios Worldwide, Bringing the Studio to Campus: A Case Study in Successful Collaboration Between Academia and Industry, The Evolution of Revolution of Design: From Paper Models and Beyond, Green From the Ground Up: Infrastructure Rehabilitation and Sustainable Design, Model Rebuilding for New Orleans Transportation, Making Pixar’s ‘Partly Cloudy’: A Director’s Vision, Hatching an Imaginary Bird, Rhino-Palooza: Procedural Animation and Mesh Smoothing, It’s Good to be Alpha, Venomous Cattle for ‘Australia’, Applying Painterly Concepts in a CG Film, From Pitchvis to Postvis: Integrating Visualization Into the Production Pipeline, The Light Kit: HDRI-Based Area Light System for ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, Interactive Lighting of Effects Using Point Clouds In ‘Bolt’, Composite-Based Refraction for Fur and Other Complex Objects on ‘Bolt’, Dense Stereo Event Capture for the James Bond Film ‘Quantum of Solace’, ILM’s Multitrack: A New Visual Tracking Framework for High-End VFX Production, Immersive and Impressive: The Impressionistic Look of Flower on the PS3, “Universal Panoramas: Narrative, Interactive Panoramic Universes on the Internet“, The Blues Machine, Real Time Live, Clouds With Character: ‘Partly Cloudy’, The Hair-Motion Compositor: Compositing Dynamic Hair Animations in a Production Environment, iBind: Smooth Indirect Binding Using Segmented Thin-Layers, Concurrent Monoscopic and Stereoscopic Animated Film Production, Pushing Tailoring Techniques To Reinforce ‘Up’ Character Design, The Net Effect: Simulated Bird-Catching in ‘Up’, Destroying the Eiffel Tower: A Modular FX Pipeline, Building Story in Games: No Cut Scenes Required, Real-Time Design Review and Collaboration for Global Infrastructure Projects, Sound Scope Headphones, Medial Axis Techniques for Stereoscopic Extraction, Realistic Eye Motion Using Procedural Geometric Methods, Practical Uses of a Ray Tracer for ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’, Making a Feature-Length Animated Movie With a Game Engine, and Practical Character Physics For Animators.

Almost all the Technical Papers presentations are available. The following are missing: Light Warping for Enhanced Surface Depiction, How Well Do Line Drawings Depict Shape?, Detail-Preserving Continuum Simulation of Straight Hair, and Generating Photo Manipulation Tutorials by Demonstration. Also, two of the ToG papers (2D Piecewise Algebraic Splines for Implicit Modeling and A BSP-Based Algorithm for Dimensionally Nonhomogeneous Planar Implicit Curves With Topological Guarantees) were not presented at SIGGRAPH due to last-minute visa or illness issues.

All seven of the Art Paper presentations are available, as well as most of the Game Paper presentations. The following are missing: Inferred Lighting: Fast Dynamic Lighting and Shadows for Opaque and Translucent Objects, Experimental Evaluation of Teaching Recursion in a Video Game, and Cardboard Semiotics: Reconfigurable Symbols as a Means for Narrative Prototyping in Game Design.

Finally, Encore has video for a single panel: “The Future of Teaching Computer Graphics for Students in Engineering, Science, and Mathematics”.

ShaderX^2 Code Available for Download

With Wolfgang Engel’s blessing, I’ve added the ShaderX² books’ (both of them) CD-ROM code samples as zip files and put links in the ShaderX guide. The code is hardly bleeding edge at this point, of course, but code doesn’t rot – there are many bits that are still useful. I’ve also folded in most of the code addenda into the distributions themselves. The only exception at this point is Thomas Rued’s stereographic rendering shaders; in reality, more up-to-date information (and SDK) is available from the company he works with, ColorCode 3-D.

Our book’s figures now downloadable for fair use

A professor contacted us about whether we had digital copies of our figures available for use on her course web pages for students. Well, we certainly should (and our publisher agrees), and would have done this awhile ago if we had thought of it. So, after a few hours of copying and saving with MWSnap, I’ve made an archive of most of the figures in Real-Time Rendering, 3rd edition. It’s a 34 Mb download:

http://www.realtimerendering.com/downloads/RTR3figures.zip

Update: preview and download individual figures on Flickr

Update: figures for the Fourth Edition are here.

This archive should make preparation a lot more pleasant and less time-consuming for instructors, vs. scanning in pages of our book or redrawing figures from scratch. Here’s the top of the README.html file in this archive:

These figures and tables from the book are copyright A.K. Peters Ltd. We have provided these images for use under United States Fair Use doctrine (or similar laws of other countries), e.g., by professors for use in their classes. All figures in the book are not included; only those created by the authors (directly, or by use of free demonstration programs, as listed below) or from public sources (e.g., NASA) are available here. Other images in the book may be reused under Fair Use, but are not part of this collection. It is good practice to acknowledge the sources of any images reused – a link to http://www.realtimerendering.com we suspect would be useful to students, and we have listed relevant primary sources below for citation. If you have questions about reuse, please contact A.K. Peters at service@akpeters.com.

I’ve added a link to this archive at the top of our main page. I should also mention that Tomas’ Powerpoint slidesets for a course he taught based on the second edition of our book are still available for download. The slides are a bit dated in spots, but are a good place to start. If you have made a relevant teaching aid available, please do comment and let others know.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Papers – Micro-Rendering, RenderAnts, and More

A partial papers list has been up on Ke-Sen Huang’s SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 page for a while now, but I was waiting until either the full list was up or an interesting preprint appeared before mentioning it. Well, the latter has happened – A preprint and video are now available for the paper Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering. It shares many authors (including the first) with one of the most interesting papers from last year’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference, Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient Computation of Indirect Illumination. Last year’s paper proposed a way to efficiently compute indirect shadowing by rendering a very large number of very low-quality shadowmaps, using a coarse point-based scene representation and some clever hole-filling. This year’s paper extends this occlusion technique to support full global illumination. Some of the same authors were recently responsible for another notable extension of an occlusion method (SSAO in this case) to global illumination.

RenderAnts: Interactive REYES Rendering on GPUs is another notable paper at SIGGRAPH Asia this year; no preprint yet, but a technical report is available. A technical report is also available for another interesting paper, Debugging GPU Stream Programs Through Automatic Dataflow Recording and Visualization.

No preprint or technical report, but promising paper titles: Approximating Subdivision Surfaces with Gregory Patches for Hardware Tessellation and Real-Time Parallel Hashing on the GPU.

Looking at this list and last year’s accepted papers, SIGGRAPH Asia seems to be more accepting of real-time rendering papers than the main SIGGRAPH conference. Combined with the strong courses program, it’s shaping up to be a very good conference this year.

Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 3rd Edition

One bit of deja vu for me at SIGGRAPH this year was another book signing at the A K Peters booth. Last year’s SIGGRAPH had the signing for Real-Time Rendering; this year I was at the book signing for the third edition of Fundamentals of Computer Graphics. My presence at the signing was due to the fact that I wrote a chapter on graphics for games (this edition also has new chapters on implicit modeling, color, and visualization, as well as updates to the existing chapters). As in the case of Real-Time Rendering, I was interested in contributing to this book as a fan of the previous editions. Fundamentals is targeted as a “first graphics book” so it has a slightly different audience than Real-Time Rendering, which is meant to be the reader’s second book on the subject.

At the A K Peters booth I also got to try out the Kindle edition of Fundamentals (the illustrations in Real-Time Rendering rely on color to convey information, so a Kindle edition will have to wait for color devices). I haven’t jumped on the Kindle bandwagon personally (the DRM bothers me; when I buy something I like to own it), but I know people who are quite pleased with their Kindle (or iPhone Kindle application).