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A few new books

January 26, 2012 in Resources by Eric | No comments

I’ve updated our books page a bit, adding the new books I know of at this point, adding links to authors sites and Google Books samples, etc. Please let me know what we’re missing.

A book I know nothing about, but from updating the books page I think I’ll get, is the OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook. A reviewer on Gamasutra gives it strong praise, as do all the Amazon customer reviews.

One I’ve left off for now is Programming GPUs, which I expect is focused on computing with the GPU (no rendering), judging from the author’s background as a quant (his bio’s cute). I also left off a heckuva lot of books on using the Unity engine, to keep the list focused on direct programming vs. using higher-level SDKs.

Along the way I noticed a nice little blog called Video Game Math, by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry, who recently released a second edition of their 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development. Which is pretty good, by the way. My mini-review/endorsement: “With solid theory and references, along with practical advice borne from decades of experience, all presented in an informal and demystifying style, Dunn & Parberry provide an accessible and useful approach to the key mathematical operations needed in 3D computer graphics.” There’s an extensive Google Books sample of much of the first few chapters.

In the “old but awesome and free” category this time is Light And Color – A Golden Guide. Check it out before there’s some takedown notice sent out. Yes, it’s small, it’s colorful, and some bits are dated, but there are some pretty good analogies and explanations in there. No kidding. Lots more Golden Guides here (including, incredibly, this one).

I did find that there’s a new edition of “Real Time Rendering“ out, which was a surprise. The subtitle is the best: “Aalib, Aces of ANSI Art”. It’s even sold by Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Happily, I couldn’t find it on Amazon, so maybe they’re scaling back on carrying these so-called books. This particular book is a paperback, and more expensive than the real thing (I like to think our’s is real – it’s the dash between “Real” and “Time” that keeps it real for me). Or I should say it’s more expensive unless you buy ours from these “double your intelligence or no money back” sellers. I believe this phenomenon is from computers tracking competitors’ prices and each one jacking up prices in response.

In case you missed my posts on Betascript Publishing, go here – short version is that they use a computer program to find related articles on Wikipedia, put on a cover (usually the most creative part of the process), and sell it. I’d be interested to know which book is better, their computer-generated one or my own Wikipedia-derived followup, GGGG:RTRtR (Game GPU Graphics Gems: Real-Time Rendering the Redux), reviewed by me here. I really should read my own book some day, there look to be some interesting Wikipedia articles in there.

Finally, I like the concept of book autopsies:

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GPU Pro^3 is available for order

January 12, 2012 in Resources by Eric | No comments

Like the title says, GPU Pro3, the next installment of the GPU Pro series, is now available for order. The publication date is realsoonnow (January 17th). The extended table of contents is a great way to get a sense of what it contains.

The GPU Pro series is essentially a continuation of the ShaderX series, just with a different publisher. I was given a look at the draft of this latest volume, and it appears in line with the others: some eminently practical and battle-tested approaches mixed with some pie-in-the-sky out-of-the-box done-with-the-metaphors ideas – having a mix keeps things lively. Articles such as the one covering the CryENGINE 3 is a fine combination of both, with solid algorithms alongside “this doesn’t always work but looks great when it does” concepts. Some of the material (including a fair bit of the CryENGINE 3 article) can be gleaned from presentations online from GDC and SIGGRAPH, but here it’s all polished and put in one place. Other articles are entirely fresh and new. Priced reasonably for a full-color book, it’s a volume that most graphics developers will find of interest.

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High Performance Graphics 2012 CFP

January 8, 2012 in Resources by Eric | No comments

The High Performance Graphics 2012 Call for Participation is up, go get it. HPG 2012 is in Paris (France, not Texas) June 25-27, co-located with EGSR, another excellent symposium.

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Bloxing Day

December 26, 2011 in Resources by Eric | No comments

My crazy-person project for the month is done. It’s a little program called Mineways, which is a bridge between Minecraft and Shapeways, the 3D printing service. You can grab a chunk of a Minecraft world for rendering or 3D printing. See the Mineways Flickr group for some results.

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Seven Things for 10/13/2011

October 13, 2011 in Resources by Eric | 2 comments

  • Fairly new book: Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11, by Jason Zink, Matt Pettineo, and Jack Hoxley, A.K.Peters/CRC Press, July 2011 (more info). It’s meant for people who already know DirectX 10 and want to learn just the new stuff. I found the first half pretty abstract; the second half was more useful, as it gives in-depth explanation of practical examples that show how the new functionality can be used.
  • Two nice little Moore’s Law-related articles appeared recently in The Economist. This one is about how the law looks to have legs for a number of more years, and presents a graph showing how various breakthroughs have kept the law going over the past decades. Moore himself thought the law might hold for ten years. This one talks about how computational energy efficiency is doubling every 18 months, which is great news for mobile devices.
  • I used to use MWSnap for screen captures, but it doesn’t work well with two monitors and it hangs at times. I finally found a replacement that does all the things I want, with a mostly-good UI: FastStone Capture. The downside is that it actually costs money ($19.95), but I’m happy to have purchased it.
  • Ray tracing vs. rasterization, part XIV: Gavan Woolery thinks RT is the future, DEADC0DE argues both will always have a place, and gives a deeper analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each (though the PITA that transparency causes rasterization is not called out) – I mostly agree with his stance. Both posts have lots of followup comments.
  • This shows exactly how far behind we are in blogging about SIGGRAPH: find the Beyond Programmable Shading course notes here – that’s just a mere two months overdue.
  • Tantalizing SIGGRAPH Talk demo: KinectFusion from Microsoft Research and many others. Watch around 3:11 on for the great reconstruction, and the last minute for fun stuff. Newer demo here.
  • OnLive – you should check it out, it’ll take ten minutes. Sign up for a free account and visit the Arena, if nothing else: it’s like being in a sci-fi movie, with a bunch of games being played by others before your eyes that you can scroll through and click on to watch the player. I admit to being skeptical of the whole cloud-gaming idea originally, but in trying it out, it’s surprisingly fast and the video quality is not bad. Not good enough to satisfy hardcore FPS players – I’ve seen my teenage boys pick out targets that cover like two pixels, which would be invisible with OnLive – but otherwise quite usable. The “no download, no GPU upgrade, just play immediately” aspect is brilliant and lends itself extremely well to game trials.

OnLive Arena

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Seven things for 10/10/11

October 10, 2011 in Resources by Eric | No comments

  • If you can get WebGL running properly on your browser, check out Shader Toy. Coolest thing is that you can edit any shader and immediately try it out.
  • Another odd little WebGL application is a random spaceship maker, with a direct tie-in to Shapeways to buy a 3D version of any model you make.
  • Speaking of Shapeways, I liked their “one coffee cup a day project“. The low-resolution cup is particularly good for computer graphics people, though I’m told that in real life it’s a fair bit more rounded off, due to the way the ceramic sets. Ironic. Also, note that these cups are actually quite small in real life (smaller than even espresso cups), which is too bad. Still, clever.
  • Source code for iOS versions of Castle Wolfenstein and the original DOOM is now available.
  • Patrick Cozzi has a nice rundown of his days at SIGGRAPH this August, with a particular emphasis on OpenGL and mobile. The links for each day are at the bottom of the entry.
  • Nice fractal video generated in near-real time (300 ms/frame) running a GLSL shader using this code. Reddit thread here, about an earlier video now pulled back online.
  • This site gives a darn long list of educational institutions offering videogame design degrees. It’s at least a place to start, if you’re looking for such things. That said, I’ve heard counterarguments from game company professionals to such specialized degrees, “just learn to program well and we’ll teach you the videogames business”.

Bonus thing: Draw a curve of your data for a number of years and see what it most closely correlates. Peculiar.

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AMD CubeMapGen is now Open Source

August 31, 2011 in Resources by Naty | 2 comments

UPDATE 9/1/2011: ignotion has put the source up on Google Code.

For a long time, I’ve found ATI’s (now AMD’s) CubeMapGen library to be an indispensable tool for creating prefiltered environment maps (important for physically based shading). Many older GPUs (all the ones in current consoles) do not filter across cube faces. CubeMapGen solves this problem and others – details can be found in a GDC presentation and a SIGGRAPH sketch, both from 2005.

Support for CubeMapGen has been spotty for the last few years, and a while ago AMD officially declared its end of life. Since then I’ve been wondering when AMD would open-source this important tool – there is a good precedent in NVIDIA texture tools, which has been open source for several years now.

Speaking of NVIDIA texture tools, a comment on its Google Code website just let me know that AMD has released source to CubeMapGen. A link to the source for version 1.4 can be found on the bottom of the CubeMapGen page. Note that this does not include the DXT compression part of the edge fixup (which was a pretty nifty feature – hopefully someone will reimplement it now that the library is open source).

Looking at the license doc in the zip file, the license appears to be a modified BSD license. This is excellent news – tools like this are far more useful when source is available. Perhaps someone should host the code on Google Code or github, to make it easier to add future improvements – or maybe it could be folded into the nvidia_texture_tools code base (if the license allows).

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Advances in RTR Course Notes up

August 25, 2011 in Resources by Eric | 2 comments

I’m finally back from a nice post-SIGGRAPH vacation in the Vancouver area. Both our computers broke early on in the trip, so it was a true vacation.

I hope to post on a bunch of stuff soon, but wanted to first mention something now available: the slides and videos presented in the popular SIGGRAPH course “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics”. Find them here, and the page for previous years (well, currently just 2010) here. Hats off to Natalya Tatarchuk and all the speakers for quickly making this year’s presentations available.

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A.K. Peters books at SIGGRAPH and beyond

August 3, 2011 in Resources by Eric | 1 comment

OK, so I like the publisher A.K. Peters, for obvious reasons. They’re also kind/smart enough to send me review copies of upcoming graphics-related books. I’ve received two recently, with one of particular interest:

Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11, by Jason Zink, Matt Pettineo, and Jack Hoxley

This one’s very nicely produced (especially for the price): hardcover, color throughout, with paper a bit better than the GPU Gems volumes; basically, that level of quality. More important, it covers a topic that is not very well covered at all (from what I’ve seen), neither by Microsoft’s scattershot documentation nor other sources. Well, in fairness there’s Beginning DirectX 11 Game Programming, but that’s indeed for beginners. I don’t see anything about compute shaders, tessellation, or even stream output in the table of contents. These topics and many more are covered in the new book.

Skimming through it, it looks quite good, a book that I want to spend some serious time reading. You might recognize Zink and Hoxley’s names from the free book that never quite made it to publication, Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel Shaders, coauthored by Wolfgang Engel (of ShaderX and GPU Pro fame), Ralf Kommann, and Niko Suni.

The other book I received was:

Visual Perception from a Computer Graphics Perspective, by William Thompson, Roland Fleming, Sarah Creem-Regehr, and Jeanine Kelly Stefanucci

This book is a survey of visual perception research and how it relates to computer graphics. If you’re a researcher and expect to delve into the field of visual perception, this looks like the place to start. With 68 pages of references, it clearly attempts to give you relevant research in a huge variety of areas. To be honest, I’m not all that interested in reading a whole book on the topic. I picked one topic, motion blur, as a quick test of the book’s usefulness to me. There’s just a brief mention of motion blur on one page, and the computer graphics papers referenced are from the 1980′s (fine papers, but ancient). I tried another: Fresnel – no index entry, half a page, no references. Depth of field: a page and a half, a fair number of references (newest being 2005), none about interactive graphics. So, it’s an extensive survey of the visual perception literature, but don’t expect much depth nor any serious coverage of the area of interactive computer graphics.

Two other books I expect to see at SIGGRAPH are Real-Time Shadows and 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, 2nd Edition. I got a peek at the latter and it looks to be quite in-depth (and still approachable and informal) – I’m not sure how it differs from the first edition at this point. A micro-review on this blog of the first edition is here, at the end.

There are a lot of other upcoming computer graphics books from A.K. Peters that sound intriguing, e.g. Shadow Algorithms Data Miner – two great tastes now together. Check out the list here or ask at the booth at SIGGRAPH.

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… and free to veterans and unemployed professionals

August 2, 2011 in Resources by Eric | No comments

Mauricio Vives pointed out that the Autodesk program I mentioned yesterday, where students and educators can get Autodesk products and training for free, also applies to veterans and “displaced professionals.” See this page for the logic. The fine print on the registration page is:

An Autodesk Assistance Program participant is either a veteran or unemployed individual who has (a) previously worked in the architecture, engineering, design or manufacturing industries, has completed the online registration for the Autodesk Assistance Program, and upon request by Autodesk is able to provide proof of eligibility for that program.

This is a nice thing.

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