Seven things:

• Cem Yuksel is posting video lectures for his Intro to Computer Graphics course at the University of Utah. Here’s the playlist (with more coming). You can also catch his latest lecture live. I (multi-task) watched the one on texturing yesterday and appreciated how he noted that we use (s,t) texture coordinates but usually call them (u,v). Practical advice for how the field actually works.
• My go-to format for quickly writing out an image from some throwaway program is PPM. It’s easy enough to write from scratch each time, but here’s a page of code in just about every language under the sun for doing that. This will save me the five minutes of “oh, I forgot to put a carriage return” next time around. Plus, they give versions that write to the binary form of PPM, and some have fancier and nicer interfaces than I would have hacked. (If you need to output to a more serious image file format, I like LodePNG, C++ for PNG).
• Speaking of languages, what is today’s top computer language, by popularity? No, not that one, nor that one. Answer here, by one estimate. Nice to know the Graphics Gem Repository code base is still relevant, despite it being 30 years old. Code doesn’t rust (though you may have to futz with the headers).
• A surprisingly chewy set of slides with copious notes about ray tracing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Bits of it are over my head without further reading, but it has great information about various bottlenecks encountered and solutions explored.
• If you’re looking for a rabbit hole of articles to wade through (mixing my metaphors), consider Fabien Sanglard’s collection. Lots there, with a recent trend towards explaining the technical characteristics of a wide range of video game and GPU architectures. One example: a history of NVIDIA’s streaming multiprocessor.
• “A Taxonomy of Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function Lobes for Rendering Engineers,” a workshop proposal for establishing a few terms as the ones to use. The title and subject probably don’t get your heart racing. What makes it entertaining are the xkcd-like cartoons explaining various book authors’ views. The recent Sci & Tech Oscars reminded me of it, as winners this year include some computer graphics people.
• The sheer dedication of some artists is incredible. Simon Beck makes Andy Goldsworthy (who you should google if you don’t know) look a bit indolent.

From GPU Zen 2 (which you should get), published back in June 2019, which now seems like simpler times:

(thanks to Adam Marrs for noting this Preface)

The first two are what motivated this post, but the rest are hopefully worth your time:

• Hash Functions for GPU Rendering – I’ve been waiting a long time for this to come out. RT here. Now there’s no reason now to use a bad one. Oh, and bonus: Shadertoy version.
• On Windows, Control+Shift+V pastes text into Gmail and other apps without the formatting (I never knew until now…) – or try Control+Alt+V – it varies among applications. Oh, and it’s the somewhat insane combo Option + Command + Shift + V on the Mac. Then I found this list for more on Windows. But the second-best one is missing from both: Windows+Shift+S brings up four different screen clip tools (thanks, Mark DeLoura!).
• Ray Tracing Denoising article by Alain Galvan.
• arXiv now allows researchers to submit code with their manuscripts – title says it all. I’m for it.
• Real-Time Stochastic Light Cuts won a best paper award at I3D 2020; it includes source code. And, here’s a nice blog from the first author.
• SIGGRAPH paper trends in twelve seconds.
• What might cheer you up: free and legal Studio Ghibli screen background images.

Two virtual conferences start this coming week of October 5th:

• SCA 2020, about computer animation, starts Tuesday October 6th
• NVIDIA’s Fall GTC 2020, about, well, NVIDIA stuff, starts with a keynote at the end of Monday, October 5th with sessions in earnest the next day

I’ll “attend” both, since they’re both free to me. I’ve never been to SCA – animation is not something I know all that much about (hand-wave about skinning, morph targets, IK, simulation – you now know all I know), but the virtual format gives me an excuse to dip in, especially for the keynotes. The NVIDIA GTC conference has lots of ray-tracing related talks, so I’ll tune in for them. GTC is free to those with .edu and .gov email addresses (and NVIDIA employees).

SCA is also using Discord, like I3D did, and they kindly provide a short introductory video on how to use it. Even without registering, you can download and watch most of the full paper presentations right now, if you like. During the conference itself, 3-minute summary videos will be played for the papers in a session and then discussion will commence. I’ll be interested to see how this format feels. My attention span is short, as is everyone’s (20 minutes is about the absolute maximum), but 3 minutes I can do.

I admit I’ll likely be multitasking, listening and watching only when something catches my attention, so probably will absorb only a small bit of what I’d get if I attended in person. I’m also unlikely to do my homework, reading the papers and watching the presentations, as I’ll mostly be lurking. That’s one advantage of physical conferences: You’re there, and so are “forced” to pay attention. Yes, you can fiddle with your phone or laptop in a “real” talk, but it’s a bit rude and unseemly – why are you even attending? (Well, the answer is, for single-track conferences, that you went to the conference for three sessions in particular, but have time to blow during the other five sessions. I don’t have a great answer for that problem, and admit to the same – it’s hard to pay attention for 6+ hours each day.)

Anyway, take advantage of these *** times and try things out! Figuring out what makes a virtual conference work well and gets people engaged is going to be important for about the next year, sadly enough. But it’s also a chance to find what works well, uses people’s time most effectively and efficiently, and how people who can’t afford the time or money to attend a physical conference can still stay informed.

Maybe make it these three? They’re the “best paper” award winners for this year’s I3D, which (finally) was held, virtually, two weeks ago. I’ve almost recovered. Almost.

In addition to being available on the ACM Digital Library for subscribers, all three of these papers (along with many of the others) are available on the authors’ websites.

I3D 2020 (“ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games” for short) starts this Monday. Here are some pro tips.

• If you want to integrate I3D 2020’s calendar with your own, see the instructions here.
• The daily YouTube livestreaming links are in place.
• Crowd-pleasing academic keynotes are from Ming Lin (University of Maryland) and Julien Pettré (Inria), and industry keynotes from Rachel Rose (ILM), Naty Hoffman (Lucasfilm), and David Morin (Epic Games). Expect Mandalorians. Late-breaking news: the ILM/Lucasfilm talk on Tuesday morning will be a live presentation only, not permanently recorded. Similarly, the Epic Games talk will be a live presentation only, as this will allow David to show some new content.
• Paper presentations are queued up, and registered attendees will have access to the slides from these. If you don’t have an ACM Digital Library subscription, come Monday the papers themselves will be free to all to download for the week.
• The VR posters space has opened up to also be the breaks and after-hours social room – works fine in your browser. You can visit any time (now, in fact), if you’re registered. Pick a nice avatar (I dibs the blocky fox).
• Plan on the rest of Friday off: after the conference is officially over, we will coordinate Overwatch and Fall Guys gaming groups, or you can just invite other attendees yourself through Discord. Most attendee interaction this week will be through Discord (hey, “Games” is in the title of our conference), but you’ll need to register.

And, here’s the registration link (it’s free): https://bit.ly/i3d2020reg – make sure to copy (at least) the Discord information once you’ve registered

I3D 2020 VR poster space

• I3D 2020 registration is open. It’s free, and registration lets you interact: ask questions, enter the virtual posters session space, speak up at the town hall, etc. Find the trailer here, whole schedule here, and keynotes here.
• Like clockwork, Stephen Hill’s SIGGRAPH 2020 Links page is up. SIGGRAPH itself provides an Open Access page to some sessions from this and past years.
• Speaking of open, if you’re not providing pre-prints of your work, you’re limiting your audience. The ACM has officially allowed pre-prints to also be posted to ArXiv now. Here’s the how-to guide.
• Here is a wonderful interactive article on photogrammetry, with 3D scenes contained within it. Just keep scrolling to see it all, or break off at various points to explore the environments along the way.
• Dave Eberly has a new book out, “Robust and Error-Free Geometric Computing.” My copy’s on order.
• This article discusses the history and goals of USD, the open source Universal Scene Description format that Pixar has developed and that is gaining traction in the film industry. Bonus: learn of the liver-peas rubric.
• This:

Well, I have about 59 things, but here are the LIFO bits:

• Reverse Engineering the Rendering of Witcher 3, part 20 – Light Shafts: an incredibly detailed article about the beams of light glare effect. And it truly is part 20, see the index for the first 19. These will keep you busy for many hours.
• You’re back? OK, since it’s three weeks later, check out the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course page, which I assume will have links to presentations once this SIGGRAPH course has been presented.
• This article on C++ compiler optimizations is incredible, I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. There are some truly miraculous code substitutions that can take place under the hood. The article also provides ways to code to ensure the optimizer can do its magic.
• Need to make a video presentation? The grapevine notes that the free version of DaVinci Resolve is currently The One for video editing.
• WebGL not good enough for you? Want more control? WebGPU is for you.
• Shading languages too easy for you now? How about encoding shading instructions into textures? Bonus: no capitalization and poor punctuation.
• You can now boot a Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom on it (and, yes, you can also play Minecraft on it). Though if you want to go old school, there’s a 64-bit redstone computer with a display that includes graphics acceleration, such as Bresenham’s line drawing and flood fill.