Monthly Archives: February 2018

GPU Zen Two CFP, and LAA

The article collection GPU Zen was a ridiculously good deal at $10 for the electronic version of the book. A call for participation for GPU Zen 2 is now out. First important date: March 30th for submitting proposals (i.e., not the first draft, which is due August 3rd).

Just because I wanted to have a title with a series of 3 letter bits, I wrote out the Two. I recently read some little tidbit about some old book passage with the longest-known (at least, to him) string of 3 letter words in a row, that someone found from analyzing a huge pile of Project Gutenberg texts or similar. Can’t find the article now, thought it was at the Futility Closet site, but maybe not. Which is my roundabout way of saying that site is sometimes entertaining, it has an odd historical oddities & mathematical recreations bent to it.

To continue to ramble, in memory of the first anniversary of his death (and LAA), I’ll end with this quote from the wonderful Raymond Smullyan: “I understand that a computer has been invented that is so remarkably intelligent that if you put it into communication with either a computer or a human, it can’t tell the difference!”

HPG 2018; oh, and a hyphen for “Physically-Based” (don’t!)

I mostly wanted to pass on the word that High-Performance Graphics 2018 has their call for participation up. Due date for papers is April 12th. HPG 2018 is co-located with SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver in August.

Also, let’s talk about hyphens. See Rule 1: Generally, hyphenate two or more words when they come before a noun they modify and act as a single idea. This is called a compound adjective.

Update: John Owens wrote and said “Go read Rule 3,” which is: An often overlooked rule for hyphens: The adverb very and adverbs ending in ly are not hyphenated.

So, he’s right! The hyphen is indeed NOT needed, my mistake! I didn’t do all the work, reading through all eleven rules and noting that “physically” is indeed an adverb.

Here’s the rest of my incorrect post, for the record. I guess I’m in good company – about a quarter of authors get this wrong, judging from the list of publications below.

The phrase “High-Performance Graphics” is good to go; “Real-Time Rendering” is also fine. Writing “Physically Based Rendering,” as seen on Wikipedia and elsewhere, not quite [I’m wrong]. The world doesn’t end if the hyphen’s not there, especially in a title of just the phrase itself. Adding the hyphen just helps the reader know what to expect: Is the word “based” going to be a noun or part of a compound adjective? If you read the rest of Rule 1, note you don’t normally add the hyphen if the adjective is after the noun. So:

“Physically-based [that’s wrong] rendering is better than rendering that is spiritually based.”

is correct, “spiritually based” should not be hyphenated. Google came up with no direct hits for “spiritually-based rendering” that I could find – it’s an untapped field.

Not a big deal by any stretch, but we definitely noticed that “no hyphen” was the norm for a lot of authors for this particular phrase [and rightfully so], to the point where when the hyphen actually exists, as in a presentation by Burley, the course description leaves it out.

In no particular scientific sample, here are some titles found without the hyphen:

  • SIGGRAPH Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course
  • Graceful Degradation of Collision Handling in Physically Based Animation
  • Physically Based Area Lights
  • Antialiasing Physically Based Shading with LEADR Mapping
  • Distance Fields for Rapid Collision Detection in Physically Based Modeling
  • Beyond a Simple Physically Based Blinn-Phong Model in Real-Time
  • SIGGRAPH Real-time Rendering of Physically Based Optical Effect in Theory and Practice course
  • Physically Based Lens Flare
  • Implementation Notes: Physically Based Lens Flares
  • Physically Based Sky, Atmosphere and Cloud Rendering in Frostbite
  • Approximate Models for Physically Based Rendering
  • Physically Based Hair Shading in Unreal
  • Revisiting Physically Based Shading at Imageworks
  • Moving Frostbite to Physically Based Rendering
  • An Inexpensive BRDF Model for Physically based Rendering
  • Physically Based Lighting Calculations for Computer Graphics
  • Physically Based Deferred Shading on Mobile
  • SIGGRAPH Practical Physically Based Shading in Film and Game Production course
  • SIGGRAPH Physically Based Modeling course
  • Physically Based Shading at DreamWorks Animation

Titles found with:

  • Physically-Based Shading at Disney
  • Physically-based and Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite
  • Fast, Flexible, Physically-Based Volumetric Light Scattering
  • Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering
  • Physically-based lighting in Call of Duty: Black Ops
  • Theory and Algorithms for Efficient Physically-Based Illumination
  • Faster Photorealism in Wonderland: Physically-Based Shading and Lighting at Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Physically-Based Glare Effects for Digital Images

I suspect some authors just picked what earlier authors did. The hyphen’s better, go with it [no, don’t].

Now, don’t get me started on capitalization… Well, it’s easy, the word after the hyphen should be capitalized. There’s an online tool for testing titles, in fact, if you have any doubts – I use Chicago style.

But I digress. Submit to HPG 2018.