Some news, and some olds.

• HPG has a CFP. In slow motion,  this means the High Performance Graphics conference, June 25-27 in Saarbrucken, Germany, has a call for participation. Naty talked about this conference in his post two months ago; now the HPG website and CFP are up. In case you don’t recognize the conference’s name, this is the combination of the Graphics Hardware and Interactive Ray Tracing symposia. HPG was fantastic last year, with more useful (to me) papers than SIGGRAPH (where it was co-located). Potential submitters please note: because HPG 2010 is co-located with EGSR this year, the deadlines are very tight after SIGGRAPH notification and quite rigid. In other words, if your SIGGRAPH submission is rejected, you will have a very short time to revise and submit to HPG (i.e., by April 2nd).
• NVIDIA has put up a list of talks at GDC in which it is participating, which will undoubtedly appear soon after on the web. In other NVIDIA news, there’s an interesting press release about NVIDIA and Avatar and how GPUs were used in precomputation of occlusion using ray tracing, for scenes with billions of polygons.
• A handy tool for showing frame rate and capturing screenshots and video that is worth a mention again (it’s buried on the Resources page): FRAPS. It’s been around forever, continues to improve, and the basic version is free.
• Crytek made an updated version of the famous Sponza model (used in many global illumination papers) available in OBJ and 3DS Max formats, along with textures. If you have the time, in theory 99 lines of code will make a picture for you.
• Stefan Gustavson has a nice little demo of using distance fields for “perfect” text rendering. This type of technique has been used for a number of years in various games, such as Valve’s Team Fortress 2. The demo unfortunately falls apart when you rotate the scene off-axis, but otherwise is lovely.
• SUBSTANCE is an application for making 3D evolutionary art. I really need more time on my hands to check this sort of tool out…
• Theory for the day: we don’t have fur because our skin can show our emotions, which we pick up with our improved color perception.