Free Intro to RT and ML & NN Courses

Two free webinar courses from SIGGRAPH 2021, run by Rajesh Sharma at Disney Animation, starting next week:

Introduction to Ray Tracing starts Tuesday, May 25th, running for seven sessions. It’s based on Pete Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend book (which is also free). Each class starts with a live conversation with a ray tracing luminary (or me). See here for the full description, syllabus, and YouTube links. You don’t need to register – just show up. But, when? Here’s a Google calendar for integrating into your own, and here’s a link for the ICS file for Outlook, etc. Course materials and prerequisites are here.

Machine Learning and Neural Networks starts Monday, May 24th, also seven sessions. Similar thing: see here for the description, syllabus, and YouTube links. Registration not required. Here’s the Google Calendar link and here’s the ICS link. Course materials and prerequisites (not many!) here.

Me, I hope to at least watch the first 10 minutes of every session to get a glimpse of what the experts are thinking about.

From Rajesh’s Linked-In posting:

Seven Things for May 13th, 2021

So much good stuff is going on:

  • The Graphics Codex is now free on the web. This thing’s both a good source of tutorials on all sorts of areas of 3D graphics, as well as a reference of handy code bits. It’s basically “stuff Morgan McGuire got interested in and decided to write up.” It’s best integrated source for learning about ray marching algorithms that I know. The book’s main site is here.
  • For ray marching, also see Inigo Quilez’s site (you know, the Shadertoy guy). This should be old news, but just in case… He writes on a bunch of topics and rarely publishes in journals or presents at conferences, so there’s a mess of useful bits on his site.
  • Speaking of Shadertoy: English Lane. Quite incredible (with maybe a few too many lanes, but that’s a niggle).
  • A Survey on Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Ray Tracing” is indeed a monster survey. Someone still needs to prove forming an optimal BVH is NP-hard. If you’re a professor, give it as a homework assignment “by accident” – someone will probably prove it and you’ll get to be on Snopes.
  • Running a virtual conference and want to know how to use OBS (Open Broadcaster Software)? Zdravko Velinov wrote a detailed article (two, actually) all about doing this for I3D 2020 and 2021.
  • Speaking of which, the I3D 2021 awards are here, with paper links here. Also, I3D 2022 is looking for more help, especially with publicity and website redesign – consider it! You can write them here.
  • I want this manga book, GPU Optimization: Getting Started, in English, now. I particularly appreciate the character with GPU cards for ears and a GPU chip as a third eye or whatever. Here’s a page after applying Google Translate:

Skribbl.io + computer graphics terms

One activity we did during Tuesday and Wednesday evenings after I3D sessions ended was to play skribbl.io (essentially, Pictionary) together. Quite fun! It’s maybe not ideal for an international audience, since it involves typing English words, but given that the winners were generally people from non-English-speaking countries, maybe that’s not so limiting. The good bits are that the game’s easy to learn and people can join or quit at any time. It also gets everyone talking and is free. Plus, it’s like 15 minutes or so for a full game, depending on the number of players.

Since I3D is about graphics and interaction, I made a custom list of graphics terms for people to draw. These can be pasted into the program when starting a match. Christoph Peters had this clever idea, but his phrase list on Tuesday was a bit ambitious: all the terms in the index of the PBR book. Turns out there’s a thirty-character limit… The next day I made a list from looking at a 3D graphics glossary and some other sources, culling out ones that seemed way too tough. Using this worked well for the one game we played with it (after a single game you’ll start to get repeats).

Here’s my list to paste in as custom words, most from last night and a few I added just now:

antialiasing, aliasing, alpha channel, ambient light, ambient occlusion, augmented reality, backface culling, baking, billboard, blending, bounding box, bounding volume, bump mapping, BRDF, cache, camera, clipping, collision detection, color bleeding, convolution, Cornell box, cube mapping, decal, deep learning, depth buffer, diffuse, fill rate, filter, fractal, global illumination, graphics processing unit, height field, interpolation, intersection, keyframe, level of detail, lighting, Manhattan distance, marching cubes, mipmap, multiprocessing, noise, particle, path tracing, penumbra, pipeline, point cloud, polygon mesh, post processing, refraction, shader, shadow, skinning, specular highlight, spline, sprite, Stanford bunny, stereo rendering, tangent, texture mapping, transform, transparency, umbra, Utah teapot, view frustum, virtual reality, voxel grid, wavelength, wireframe

Have fun! And good luck drawing “convolution,” that’s there mostly for “are you crazy?” value – you should edit the list as you wish.

A screenshot from last night’s game. My score’s low since I was aiming to give hints (and, yes, it should have been “multum” – didn’t help anyone anyway). If you host the game and provide the list, I recommend you take on this clue-giver role, too. But, type something each drawing, whatever the case. If you don’t make any guesses for a few turns you’ll get autokicked.

 

Seven Things for April 19, 2021

Seven things:

Seven Things for March 25, 2021

Seven things:

Seven Things for February 19, 2021

Seven things:

  • Cem Yuksel is posting video lectures for his Intro to Computer Graphics course at the University of Utah. Here’s the playlist (with more coming). You can also catch his latest lecture live. I (multi-task) watched the one on texturing yesterday and appreciated how he noted that we use (s,t) texture coordinates but usually call them (u,v). Practical advice for how the field actually works.
  • My go-to format for quickly writing out an image from some throwaway program is PPM. It’s easy enough to write from scratch each time, but here’s a page of code in just about every language under the sun for doing that. This will save me the five minutes of “oh, I forgot to put a carriage return” next time around. Plus, they give versions that write to the binary form of PPM, and some have fancier and nicer interfaces than I would have hacked. (If you need to output to a more serious image file format, I like LodePNG, C++ for PNG).
  • Speaking of languages, what is today’s top computer language, by popularity? No, not that one, nor that one. Answer here, by one estimate. Nice to know the Graphics Gem Repository code base is still relevant, despite it being 30 years old. Code doesn’t rust (though you may have to futz with the headers).
  • A surprisingly chewy set of slides with copious notes about ray tracing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Bits of it are over my head without further reading, but it has great information about various bottlenecks encountered and solutions explored.
  • If you’re looking for a rabbit hole of articles to wade through (mixing my metaphors), consider Fabien Sanglard’s collection. Lots there, with a recent trend towards explaining the technical characteristics of a wide range of video game and GPU architectures. One example: a history of NVIDIA’s streaming multiprocessor.
  • A Taxonomy of Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function Lobes for Rendering Engineers,” a workshop proposal for establishing a few terms as the ones to use. The title and subject probably don’t get your heart racing. What makes it entertaining are the xkcd-like cartoons explaining various book authors’ views. The recent Sci & Tech Oscars reminded me of it, as winners this year include some computer graphics people.
  • The sheer dedication of some artists is incredible. Simon Beck makes Andy Goldsworthy (who you should google if you don’t know) look a bit indolent.

I3D 2021 Posters Submission open

I3D Posters submission is open. The submission deadline is March 16th. Submitting a poster is a fairly easy way for researchers and developers in the field to get involved and receive feedback from their peers. We hope you can take advantage of it. One silver lining of our mutual circumstances: this year has the advantage of needing no travel budget.

Last year’s poster session was a highlight of I3D 2020 for me, as they were presented in a 3D VR space. I was particularly impressed by one presenter who brought up a screen and did live coding during their Q&A. We expect to have a similar space this year. My photo album of last year’s event is here.

The other I3D 2021 news is that we have just finished the first, major part of the paper review process. Keynote speakers are also lined up. We should soon be able to form a schedule and open registration, likely in early March. Like last year, registration will be free. Mark your calendar: I3D 2021 is April 20-22.

One photo below, to lure you into looking at the album 🙂 – there’s also a short video (no sound).

Happy Public Domain Day 2021

It’s one of the best days of the year, most every year. Happy Public Domain Day, all! “The Great Gatsby” and many more now enters the realm of works we can all (finally) legally build upon, without permission or fee.

It’ll be interesting what happens come 2024, when the first Mickey Mouse movie is to be freed up. In the meantime, imagine what could have been (the Mary Poppins movie!).

Artistic works should not remain locked away for nearly ever (imagine if Shakespeare’s works or the Bible were still under copyright). Copyright is meant to help motivate creative people. Extending copyright after the fact does not increase that motivation – it’s just rent seeking.

Seven Things for October 19, 2020

The first two are what motivated this post, but the rest are hopefully worth your time: