shadows

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Shadow Survey from SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 course

February 21, 2010 in Resources by Eric | No comments

I asked Daniel Scherzer about my post about his book. He said it’s about right (and the long subtitle is indeed a Verlag decision).

The cool thing that turned up: their upcoming STAR survey on hard shadows will be more theoretical and detailed than his thesis’ survey. It will be similar to the hard shadow section in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 course Casting Shadows in Real Time (which has a solid 90 pages on direct illumination shadow algorithms, plus more on related methods).

I’ve updated the original post with this information, but wanted to make a separate post so that people wouldn’t miss this valuable overview on shadows and ambient occlusion (just a tiny bit on the latter).

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Another new book, with an incredibly long subtitle

February 21, 2010 in Resources by Eric | 1 comment

Amazon sent an auto-recommended of this book to me. Unlike last time, which was humorous but unrelated, I actually appreciate this one: “Temporal Coherence in Real-Time Rendering: Practical Approaches for Capitalizing on Temporal Coherence in the Domain of Real-Time Rendering,” by Daniel Scherzer.

At $81 for a 132 page book, I suspected it was a thesis reprint. Indeed it is: you can download the thesis from here. The thesis is 130 pages long, so my guess is the book form adds nothing (and subtracts $81).

So, you can download it for free now, but should you read it? Well, it is a thesis, which means it collects various papers and presents each in turn. This thesis focuses on using temporal coherence, i.e. use previous frames’ computations in various ways. It includes Daniel’s hard shadow (history buffer), soft shadow, and discrete LOD blending work, as listed here. Since it’s a thesis, the author can stretch out a bit more and cover various areas in depth. The focus is on improving image quality: hard shadows are higher resolution, soft shadows look smoother. There are limitations to his approaches, e.g., the lights are fixed in place, and objects generally should be static.

As with most theses, it also includes an extensive “previous work” section at the beginning. There is a 23 page overview of a number of shadow techniques and LOD work, explaining strengths and weaknesses. From my skim, this looks quite good; not quite all-encompassing (which is good: there are way too many shadow papers), but hitting most of the major areas of research. Let’s put it this way: if and when we write a fourth edition, I’ll certainly carefully read his categorization of various problems and think about how to integrate it into our section on shadows. His is the best recent overview of the subject that I’ve seen. He’s also the coauthor of an upcoming survey on hard shadows, not yet available for download but which I suspect is similar to his thesis’ overview.

Update: I asked Daniel about this post, he said it’s about right (and the long subtitle is indeed a Verlag decision). The book version contains an index, and different (non-copyright-protected) images. Also of interest, their upcoming STAR survey on hard shadows will be more theoretical and detailed, similar to the hard shadow section in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 course Casting Shadows in Real Time (which has a solid 90 pages on shadow algorithms).

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This and That

November 20, 2008 in Resources by Eric | No comments

I’ll someday run out of titles for these occasional summaries of new(ish) resources, but in the meantime, this one’s “This and That”.

Christer Ericson’s article on dealing with grouping and sorting objects for rendering is excellent. It mostly depends on input latency, but has concepts that can be applied in immediate mode.

An element that continues to renew the field of computer graphics is that the rules change. This article is about taking Quake 2 (from 1997) and moving it to a modern GPU.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Farbrausch’s demo “debris” is truly impressive. It’s only 183,462 bytes, and is absolutely packed with procedural content. Download here (last link works). Or be lazy and watch on YouTube.

NVIDIA’s pulled together its resources for shadow generation and ambient occlusion all onto one handy page (plus ray tracing – just one entry so far, but it’s a good one).

How to deal with various rendering paradigms on multiple platforms? GRAMPS looks intriguing.

Gamasutra put a useful Game Developer article online, all about commercial middleware game engines currently available.

OpenGL will always exist, since Macs and Linux need it. It’s easier to use in college courses because of its clarity and readability. But otherwise the pendulum’s swung far towards DirectX. Phil Taylor comments on and gives some historical context to the controversy around the latest release, OpenGL 3.0.

A nice trend for OpenGL is that people continue to write useful bits, such as GLee, which manages extensions.

New info on older effects: blur and glow, volumetric clouds, and particle systems.

The glorious teapot. I like “a wireframe view”. Yes, the real thing is taller than the synthetic model, as the model makers were compensating for non-square pixels.

“What’s the future hold?” is always a fun topic, one we’ve used each edition to end our book. I liked this presentation on SlideShare for its sheer “here are a hundred things that hurtle us towards the Singularity” feel, though I don’t buy it for a minute. SlideShare, where it is hosted, is a pleasant medium-attention-span kind of place, with all sorts of random and fun slidesets.

Finally, I am pleased to find that LittleBIGPlanet is just as gorgeous as it looked like it would be. I’ve played myself for only a bit, but walking by when my kids are playing I find I have to stop and stare.

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