Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Real-time Mandelbulb visualization with GigaVoxels

See this post on Cyril Crassin’s blog (I just saw it linked on Tim Farrar’s blog and had to mention it here since it is wicked awesome and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it).

Cyril is the primary inventor of the Gigavoxels technique which has been the subject of several recent publications.  The Mandelbulb is similar to the Mandelbrot set, but in 3D.  Cyril evaluates the Mandelbulb on the fly to fill the brick cache used by the Gigavoxels.

Mandelbulb + Gigavoxels = real-time Mandelbulb visualization = pure win.

Almost all of Ke-Sen’s pages now up

Ke-Sen Huang has put up almost all the remaining pages that were taken down, after revising them according to ACM’s requirements:

The only pages not up yet are those for ACM’s Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM) for the years 2005-2008.

Ke-Sen Huang’s paper pages are down, will soon go back up

We have mentioned Ke-Sen Huang’s awesome paper preprint link pages in many previous posts – they’re the best graphics resource on the web by a long shot.

Early last week, many people (including myself) were shocked to see most of the pages replaced by the following:

REMOVED – This page has been removed at the request of the ACM Publications Board

This resulted in an outpouring of anger as well as support for Ke-Sen.  Many people in the community contacted the ACM Publications Board to try to convince them to change their position.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.  Today, Ke-Sen received the following email:

Dear Ke-Sen,

As you are aware, the computer graphics community has expressed dismay and concern about the removal of your web pages. ACM wants to make it possible for you to continue this service that the community clearly values very highly. By this message ACM grants permission for you to repost the pages, with the addition of links to the authoritative versions of the papers in the ACM Digital Library. The author’s home page links may also be included, but should not be links directly to the author’s version of the paper. Please post on the site that the information is being provided with the permission of the ACM. This is the solution you proposed earlier, and it is clear from the community’s comments that it is the right thing to do.

As you know, the concern about your pages was ACM copyright policy with regard to links. As a result of the community discussion, ACM will institute a formal review of this portion of its copyright policy.

Please contact us with any concerns or questions.

Sincerely,

Patricia Ryan
ACM Chief Operating Officer

ACM also offered to help with the work of adding the Digital Library links.  So nothing will be removed from Ke-Sen’s pages, and additional useful links will be added.

It will take a little while until the pages are back up, but they will be better than ever.  In the meantime, you can go to the Way Back Machine and find his pages from 2007 and earlier.

The graphics community has engaged with the ACM in a much more active manner than usual, which is a good thing.  We need to remember that it is our organization, and it is only as good as we make it.  So consider volunteering for conferences, paying more attention to ACM elections, etc. – I know I will.

Flocking on steroids

Flocking (running a large number of independent agents with simple proximity-based rules and letting interesting behavior emerge) has been a popular graphics technique since the 1987 SIGGRAPH paper by Craig Reynolds.  The idea is, of course, inspired by examples from the animal kingdom such as bird flocks and fish schools.  Today I saw an internet clip of 300,000 (!) starlings flocking. With such a large number of entities, the flock looks like some kind of bizarre physical fluid or smoke simulation.

Radeon HD 5800 Demos

AMD has posted executables and videos for two new demos for the Radeon HD 5800 series. Both demos require Windows 7 (I guess that means that Vista support for DirectX11 isn’t quite here yet).

One of the demos show order-independent transparency; from the description it sounds like an A-buffer-like approach, which is interesting. The other shows a high-quality depth of field effect.

NVIDIA Optix ray-tracing API available – kind of

We’ve written about the NVIDIA Optix ray-tracing API (which used to be called NVIRT) once or twice before.  Well, today it is finally available – for free.  While it’s very nice of NVIDIA to make this available, there are a few caveats.

We already knew Optix would only work on NVIDIA hardware (duh), but the system requirements reveal another unwelcome fact; it does not even run on GeForce cards, only Tesla and Quadro (which are significantly more expensive than GeForce despite being based on exactly the same chips).  They say GeForce will be supported on their new Fermi architecture – I call shenanigans.

Award-Winning Architectural Renderings

I don’t know much about architectural renderings; I guess I always thought of them as utilitarian.  This page of award-winners proved me very wrong – there is true artistry on display here.  The bottom of the page also has a real-time category; of the five nominees in that category three (including the winner – Shockwave required) are available to view online.