Seven Ray Tracing Things for August 16, 2019

I have a huge backlog of cool URLs. Here are a bunch having to do with ray tracing:

SIGGRAPH 2019 so far

There’s lots to see and lots to like. Here are a few things you can enjoy in the comfort of your own home, if you’re not here baking in the sun or shivering in the AC (well, it’s not so bad, but I someday imagine a SIGGRAPH where I don’t feel the need to carry a sweater, just in case).

First, the “Are We Done with Ray Tracing?” course – spoiler: no. The talks were great, and I particularly enjoyed Morgan McGuire’s, since I love to see people predict the future. Little did he realize back then that we’d all have embedded holographic displays in the backs of our necks by 2035… Anyway, the course notes are all here: https://sites.google.com/view/arewedonewithraytracing – something of a record for getting them online, surpassed only by the Path Tracing in Production folks, who have their course notes for this year available before their courses on Wednesday: https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in-production/2019/index.html – and note that Stephen Hill has already begun gathering SIGGRAPH 2019 links.

Next, I happened upon this lovely, not at all disturbing work by Weta Workshop, Poster #72, just outside the exhibition floor past the ping-pong table. They’ll be back with these 3D printed eyes on Wednesday, from 12:15 to 1:15 pm, unless some unspeakable horror consumes them first. Honestly, these look amazing. I hadn’t realized such a thing was possible, modeling volume-like structures and printing them.

One more: Eric Lengyel and the second volume of his series on game engine development, on Rendering (Amazon link). From my quick skim, it looks good, a textbook covering a lot of the basics of color science, the camera, culling, shading, lighting, and more, with code snippets throughout, and API agnostic. See his website, and if you’re at SIGGRAPH, visit him at booth 620. Cool part: he turned in the final manuscript to Amazon’s print on demand last Thursday, had printed books in hand by Monday!

SIGGRAPH 2019 – my plan

This is my guaranteed-biased view of what I think is likely to be exciting at SIGGRAPH 2019, i.e., what I’ll be attending.

First, there are way too many ray tracing events, around 50 I’ve found so far (and that’s counting each of the eight SIGGRAPH courses having to do with ray tracing each as a single event). List at http://bit.ly/rtrt2019, which took me way longer to collate than I expected. Additions appreciated.

Of these, here are ones I won’t miss:

There are a bunch of other courses and talks at other times I’ll be at, but these are the ones I’m particularly interested in and can attend.

Here is the “hmmm, many things are going on at once, which do I choose?” part of the conference:

or

or

or

Here are the ones I can’t miss, since I’m involved:

  • Emerging Technologies, Matching Visual Acuity and Prescription: Towards AR for Humans – Some next steps in lightweight AR. I didn’t work on this, but I’m helping out in the booth Sunday 1-5:30, so stop on by.
  • Tuesday 10am – 10:25am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: A Fast Forward through Ray Tracing Gems – 32 papers in 25 minutes, so if I speak at 400 WPM I’ll be fine.
  • Tuesday 11am – 12 noon, Room 507, Los Angeles Convention Center, Birds of a Feather: Ray Tracing Roundtable – I’m the “organizer.” This will be in a 60-person room with whoever shows up first and wants to talk informally about ray tracing R&D. No presentations or other planned activities – I give an intro, we quickly introduce ourselves, then real-time parallel processing happens. That is, it’s a cocktail party without the cocktails, or the party – just the talk, with whoever shows up.
  • Wednesday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Ray Tracing Gems 1.1 – I’m chairing, and am looking forward to hearing these talks, which will include progress since the book was published (e.g., the new work presented at HPG).
  • Wednesday 5:30pm – 6pm, SIGGRAPH bookseller, outside Room 403, Book Signing: Ray Tracing Gems – meet some of the contributors; you will be a sad panda if you miss it.

As far as evening activities go, as usual SIGGRAPH needs to have twice as many nights as it provides. For everyone, Sunday’s Fast Forward; Monday’s the sake party, Electronic Theater, SIGGRAPH Reception, and Chapters Party; Tuesday’s Real-Time Live; Wednesday’s the Khronos reception (and I don’t want to think of all the good Khronos presentations I’m missing that day). Plus all the parties I’m not invited to.

So, what cool things do I not know about and shouldn’t miss?

Bookarama

I’ve never seen this before, a Humble Bundle of all sorts of computer graphics books. $8 for Ray Tracing from the Ground Up, OpenGL Insights, and Real-Time Shadows (and nine other books also of interest) is quite the deal. Kick it up to $15 and you get 19 books. I just did and it was painless: it’s a few minutes later and I now have 18 PDFs of these books. (Thanks to Patrick Cozzi for the tip-off.)

Get Your Book, Make It Free

Hey, authors: free up your book and put the PDF up for download. Your book does not need to be out of print. The short version of this post is “go read this website on rights reversion and do it.”

If you’re an author of a book, you should consider asking for the rights for it and releasing it for free. A number of prominent graphics books authors have already done so: Physically-Based Rendering (from 2016!), An Introduction to Ray Tracing, the first three ShaderX books, and both volumes of Principles of Digital Image Synthesis. The free release of the book WebGL Insights (from 2015) was simpler yet: the book’s editor just asked the publisher if he could put a free PDF online, and they signed a tiny contract confirming it.

The process is pretty simple, though sometimes drawn out:

  • Check your contract: There’s a slight chance you already have the rights, e.g., if it’s out of print.
  • If not, find the person at the publisher who is in charge of book rights.
  • Ask for a “reversion of rights.” There are any number of reasons your publisher will want to do so.
  • Get them to send you a form, sign it, done.

Publishers often agree (more often than you might think), but that final step can take awhile, since passing rights back to you is usually the last task on the publisher’s TODO list. Persist. Once you have the rights, you can put the book up as a PDF, web pages, etc. The book can still be sold by the publisher (if you work this out with them) and you’ll still earn royalties.

Advantages of getting the rights and making your book free include: increased availability increases citations, nice for academics; possibly increased sales, as people find the book and want the paper version; and, helping the public interest. You could also make your book Open Access or licensed under Creative Commons, allowing its contents to be redistributed and reused more freely still.

Like I said at the start, visit this website and read their guide through if you’re interested – it’s pretty good.

One thing I’ll add is about PDFs. Say you get the rights but don’t have a PDF of the book. This problem is often solved by googling around. Sadly, many books are illegally available as PDFs (common knowledge among college students, so I don’t feel this is all that much of a revelation). Taking an illegal PDF and calling it your own is entirely fine in my book.

Nicer still, you can use Acrobat Pro DC to edit the PDF, fixing errata and putting whatever you want at the start to explain the legal status of the PDF. That software has a seven-day free trial. Me, I’m happy to host most any computer graphics book at our website; we already host about eight. There are other ways to make your book available, too. I wrote a post about how to put your book on Google Books.

Please contact me if you have any questions or anything I might help you with, such as contacts at publishers. And, please do it – it’s a nice thing for everyone.

Two More New Books: GPU Zen 2 and The Ray Tracer Challenge

The short version: see all the links for these two books and their related resources on our books page, at the top.

I haven’t seen these books yet – I look forward to doing so. GPU Zen 2 is the next in the series of ShaderX/GPU Pro/GPU Zen books edited by Wolfgang Engel. Sixteen (or seventeen, depending how you count ShaderX2) books since 2002 – amazing. BTW, I maintain a links page for just this series of books.

The Ray Tracer Challenge I don’t know anything about, I just happened upon it – I’ve just ordered one. Two things I like seeing: First, the YouTube advertisement reminds me a bit of “Welcome to Night Vale.” Second, if you buy the physical and (DRM-free) eBook together, the bundle is cheaper. This should be the norm. Unfortunately, Amazon’s price is $10 less than the publisher’s, so, much of that savings gets wiped out (though Amazon has just the DRM’ed Kindle version, of course).

Both books are selling well, but neither can outdo the popularity of Plant Based Cookbook for Beginners, #1 in Best Sellers in Rendering & Ray Tracing. (More meaningful is the new releases listing, but that’s not as entertaining.)

  

“Ray Tracing Gems” now free on Google Play

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.

Messing about with SEUS for Minecraft

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.

Bragging Rights

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.