Having seen way too much bloom on the Atacama Desert map for the Russian pilots in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (my current addiction, e.g. this and this), I can relate.

Edit: please do read the comments for why both pairs of images are wrong. I’m so used to HDR == tone mapping that I pretty much forgot the top pair is also technically incorrect (HDR is the range of the data, tone mapping can take such data and map it nicely to a displayable 8-bit image without banding) – thank you, Jaakko.

• I hadn’t noticed this set of notes before from Valve, “Post Processing in the Orange Box.” It’s about sRGB (think, gamma correction), tone mapping (think, rescaling using the histogram), and motion blur (think, types of blur). Interesting that a variable frame rate combined with blur made people sick. They’d also turn blur off if a single frame was taking too long. (from Morgan)
• Wolfgang Engel has posted DirectX 11 and DirectX 10 pipeline overview charts. In a similar vein, Mark Kilgard has a talk about the changes from OpenGL 1.0 to 3.2 with some worthwhile data flow diagrams and other material.
• openSourceVFX.org is a catalog of open source projects that are particularly suited for film visual effects and animation work. It is maintained by professionals in the field, so the resources listed are those known to actually be used and production-worthy. (thanks, Larry)
• Here’s another PhysX demo, of water—a little jelly-like (good spray is hard, since it’s so fine-grained), but pretty amazing to see happen at interactive rates.
• One resource I didn’t recall for my blog entry about tools for teaching about graphics and game creation: Kodu, from Microsoft. For grade schoolers, it uses a visual language. Surprisingly, it’s in 3D, with a funky chiclet terrain system. For still more tools, check the comments on the original blog entry—some great additions there. (pointed out by Mark DeLoura)
• Another interesting graphics programming tool is NodeBox 2, now in beta. It uses a node graph-based approached, see some examples here.
• The story of Duke Nukem in Wired is just fascinating. We all like to tell and listen to stories, so it’s hard to know how true any narrative is, but this one seems reasonably on the mark. A little balance is provided by Raphael van Lierop.