An entertaining rant in the Communications of the ACM (of all things) about why you shouldn’t ever look at patents.
If you want to use paint brushes on your iPad, make a Light Strokes system. If you don’t, the demo reels are fun to watch.
This article surprised me, about ten image formats the world allegedly forgot. Checking my own system right now (using the wonderful, free Everything finder on Windows), I see hundreds of BMPs loaded this year used in various applications, including UE4, Visual Studio, Maya, and 3DS MAX; TGA gets extensive use in Minecraft PBR resource packs; VRML is mostly dead but is still commonly used in the 3D print field. Some I agree with: TIFF is happily almost gone, good riddance (some traces in Houdini, Maya, and others – still seen for some terrain files on the USGS site, though (update: Angelo Pesce says it’s used in Photoshop still and sometimes is preferred over PSD. The horror, the horror.)); PCX is essentially defunct (the wonderful G3D uses it extensively and that’s it); AFAIK Maya and no one else uses IFF (and Irfanview can’t open them anyway).
Orano’s site is quite impressive graphically, running in the browser. I don’t particularly care about or even know what this company does (nuclear mumble something?), but I like that they splashed out for cool interlinked graphical tidbits. Try the “Live the Experiences” menu in the upper right, and scroll down to the bottom of each page for an interactive demo.
Townscaper is lovely, and a basic version is now free in the browser. Two minutes of semi-random clicking gave me this:
4 thoughts on “Seven Things for December 13, 2021”
isonno
I’m pretty sure I recall the total-internal-reflection painting trick from a 1980s SIGGRAPH paper. Alas, google fails me.
Far from being “almost gone” and merely “traces found”, TIFF is the primary image format for a number of professional fields, and also happens to be the most common format used for storing tiled, MIP-mapped textures by high-end renderers used in film production. (Though some hot-off-the-presses additions to OpenEXR may finally supplant it in the coming years, fixing some issues that made exr have very poor performance in comparison up until now.)
Inexplicably — because these truly should be long since forgotten — I still get a shocking number of user issues related to BMP and Targa (including from within your company!), so I regret to say that these aren’t nearly as close to finished as I would like them to be.
One more side note: There are two different “iff” formats, and the one that is from Maya is not the same as the one that was used on the Amiga.
Thanks! Interesting that TIFF lives on. I’d be happy to see it go because it’s so open-ended, but I guess it makes sense that it is still used, since I can’t think of an alternative for some operations and types of data. Ah well.
And, oh, there are two different IFF formats? Ugh. Which reminds me of the NFF format I created long ago, and then some poor company – aha, Sense8 and WorldToolKit – that also called their files NFF.
I’m pretty sure I recall the total-internal-reflection painting trick from a 1980s SIGGRAPH paper. Alas, google fails me.
Good memory, isonno! The tech is based on this paper, by the same person, Richard Greene: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/325334.325202
Far from being “almost gone” and merely “traces found”, TIFF is the primary image format for a number of professional fields, and also happens to be the most common format used for storing tiled, MIP-mapped textures by high-end renderers used in film production. (Though some hot-off-the-presses additions to OpenEXR may finally supplant it in the coming years, fixing some issues that made exr have very poor performance in comparison up until now.)
Inexplicably — because these truly should be long since forgotten — I still get a shocking number of user issues related to BMP and Targa (including from within your company!), so I regret to say that these aren’t nearly as close to finished as I would like them to be.
One more side note: There are two different “iff” formats, and the one that is from Maya is not the same as the one that was used on the Amiga.
Larry,
Thanks! Interesting that TIFF lives on. I’d be happy to see it go because it’s so open-ended, but I guess it makes sense that it is still used, since I can’t think of an alternative for some operations and types of data. Ah well.
And, oh, there are two different IFF formats? Ugh. Which reminds me of the NFF format I created long ago, and then some poor company – aha, Sense8 and WorldToolKit – that also called their files NFF.