Halo | Real-Time Rendering

7 things, with images for each as some quick eye candy – is it worth my adding these images?

Here’s a nice rundown of much of the graphical goodness (and badness, e.g. temporal antialiasing) of the Halo: Reach beta. It’s worth a skim just to get a sense of the state of the art in a wide range of areas. The motion blur video appears to not be available currently. (thanks, Mauricio)
Unlimited Detail Technology is a voxel-based renderer with an interesting history: it was developed by a self-taught hobbyist who once ran a supermarket chain. There’s been interest in voxels for awhile, e.g. Jon Olick’s SIGGRAPH presentation in 2008 (slides here). Voxel rendering reminds me of the CPU-side heightfield renderer used in Novalogic’s Comanche and Delta Force game series from 1992 on. Novalogic’s was a 2.5 D system using contour following, while the Unlimited Detail system is full 3D voxels. Looking at UD’s presentations, it seems like a form of 3D clipmapping, where the level of detail of the voxels needed are determined by distance. The look reminds me of dribble sand castles. The coolest part: no GPU needed, it’s all CPU. I can imagine 18 limitations to this system: animation/deformation, sharp-edges not possible, shading models have limitations, transparency doesn’t work, textures are difficult to apply, fuzzy objects can’t be rendered, etc. Still, fun to see and a fascinating option. (another thanks, Mauricio)
The Ruin Island demo was created by some students in France. Parallax occlusion mapping, depth of field, NPR toon rendering, motion blur, glow and bloom, and more – it’s a grab-bag of effects in OpenGL. What’s nice is that the source code is provided. (Geeks3D)
Norbert Nopper has a small set of standalone OpenGL 3.2 and GLSL 1.5 tutorial programs with code for various effects. (Morgan McGuire)
The demoscene demo agenda circling forth uses particle clouds for a beautiful look. Note that the links for the video and demo are just under the image at the top of the page.
The photorealistic Octane Renderer uses CUDA for acceleration. To try it out you’ll need a fairly up-to-date NVIDIA driver, the demosuite, and the executable. It’s actually pretty cool to see the frameless rendering in action, it’s quite interactive for their simple scenes. There’s golden thread rendering: the longer you sit, the better the image gets. (Geeks3D)
3D printing with ice. (BoingBoing)