Seven Things for August 19, 2015

More stuff:

  • New interactive 3D graphics books at SIGGRAPH 2015: WebGL Insights, GPU Pro 6 (Kindle right now, hardcover in September). Let me know if I missed anything (see full list here, which also includes links to Google Books previews for these new books).
  • Updated book: 7th edition of the OpenGL SuperBible. I would guess that, with Vulkan coming down the pike, and Apple going with Metal and no longer developing OpenGL (it’s back in 2010 at 4.1 in Mavericks), this will be the final edition. Future students having to learn Vulkan or DirectX 12, well, that won’t be much fun at all…
  • I mentioned yesterday how you can download the SIGGRAPH 2015 Proceedings for free this week. There’s more, in theory. Some of the links there have nothing as of right now. The Posters are worth a skim, especially since I didn’t see them at SIGGRAPH. I also liked the Studio PDF. It starts with a bunch of single-page talks that are fun to snack on, followed by a few random slidesets. Emerging Tech also has longer descriptions than on the ETech page (which has more pics and videos, however). If you gotta catch ’em all, there’s also a PDF for Panels.
  • There have been many news articles recently about not viewing screens at bedtime. Right, sure. Michael Herf (former CTO at Picasa) is the president at f.lux, one company that makes screens vary in overall spectra during the day to ameliorate the problem. He pointed me at a useful-to-researchers bit: their fluxometer site, with spectra for many different displays, all downloadable.
  • Oh, and related, a tip from Michael: Pantone stickers with differing colors (using metameric failure) under different temperature lights, so you can ensure you’re showing work under consistent lighting conditions.
  • I was impressed by HALIDE, an MIT licensed open source project for writing high performance image processing code (including GPU versions) from scratch. Most impressive is their case study for local Laplacian filters (p. 28), showing great performance with considerably less code and time coding vs. Adobe Photoshop’s efforts. Google and others use it extensively (p. 32).
  • Path tracing is all the rage for the film industry; the Arnold renderer started it (AFAIK) and others have followed suit. Here’s an entertaining path trace of interior lighting for a Minecraft scene using the free Chunky path tracer. SPP is samples per pixel:

Chunk progressive render