Category Archives: Miscellaneous

LinkedIn Invites

I’m posting because I gave a lecture on ray & path tracing last Monday, and at the end gave a little career advice, at the request of the people running the class. One thing I ranted about was getting LinkedIn invites without any explanation. I did say to the audience, students, that they could ask me for a connection, if they wanted. I guess I didn’t make it clear that they, too, should add an explanatory note – “loved your lecture, you’re the best person on the planet” or whatever – as I then received two invites without any notes that I tracked down as being students at the lecture (and so accepted). Next time I’ll be clearer…

I get a lot of LinkedIn invites – I suspect most people do. My rule is I accept if (a) I clearly know you or (b) you work for the same company as I do or have some other obvious direct connection or (c) you added a little note as to why we should connect.

I see varying advice on this. LinkedIn itself blogs on the topic, saying not to connect to random people. But most of the people who want to connect are semi-random – they usually are interested in computer graphics. Some site with an icky (to me) URL of linkedinriches.com (with “$” for that final “s” on the website itself) says I should accept everything except the utter randos, which does have a logic to it – who really cares who connects? But, if I get a note from the inviter, I’ll go with the assumption that I know them somehow. And if I see I have a connection with someone, I’ll assume I can contact them, as we somehow know each other – I don’t want to be the rando if I DM them.

My own feeling is that if someone doesn’t know me and doesn’t spend half a minute to write me a sentence for why we should connect (I always do, when connecting with someone else I don’t know), then I’ll ignore the request. As LinkedIn says, such requests are indistinguishable, disingenuous, lacking creativity, or lazy. Am I missing something here?

Reply on Twitter, if you’re interested (sadly, spammers have led to us mostly turning off comments on this blog itself).

And if you did make a no-explanation invite and would like to explain why we truly should connect, great: email me, erich@acm.org (once upon a time I would not post my email address, but Gmail’s spam filter is quite effective). I currently see 35 pending invites, and you all look to be fine people (except you, Fred), so let me know why you want to connect.

I3D 2020 Location and Dates

Date: conference is May 5-7th 2020 (the venue was already booked for May 4th – I’ll let you puzzle out why). Call For Papers coming soon – due date likely in December (judging from past conferences).

Location: Industrial Light and Magic at the Presidio, San Francisco. Naty Hoffman did a lot of work to make this happen, and I’m super-excited that it will be there – pleasant buildings in a lovely location with cool memorabilia in a great city. And that last link is definitely worth clicking – Google Earth’s fun.

This is the I3D you don’t want to miss (especially once you submit your best work!).

Seven Things for August 19, 2019

Here are some things that I found worthwhile:

The slides for Fresnel Equation Considered Harmful are worth a look. Two people at SIGGRAPH mentioned to me this was a good presentation, and they’re right. Among other things, it describes the surprising result that using “the right equation” but sampling it a simpler way (RGB instead of per wavelength, which almost no one rendering does) can give a worse result than various common approximations, such as Schlick’s.
PC Gamer’s “PC Graphics Options Explained” is surprisingly detailed, well illustrated, and quite readable. There are some bits I could pick at – e.g., the explanations for anisotropic filtering and for HDR – but overall it’s nicely done.
While I wasn’t looking, Microsoft added embedding of 3D models into Powerpoint, supporting six formats. I also just learned that the Minecraft Bedrock edition has binary glTF export built in, one of the six formats. And, worth repeating, Twitter allows Sketchfab models to be embedded, example here. That said, bummer: Facebook has pulled support for displaying 3D models in its system, I’m not sure why (3D photos, which are entirely fun, remain).
GauGAN won two awards at Real-Time Live! – video snippet. The fun part is that there’s a demo online. It’s a YMMV system, sometimes great, sometimes surprising. Note you need to scroll down and check the terms & conditions checkbox. Use the paint and fill tools, and control-Z is undo. Don’t miss out on picking styles below. When you’ve goofed off for an hour, see this comic. Update: this project is now called NVIDIA Canvas, still free for download.
This interactive web page is about JPEG encoding, giving you a sense of how this compression works. Occasionally the article’s a bit simplified, occasionally a bit arcane (changing various values at mystery locations), but the brilliant part is that it lets you poke at a JPEG file and see the effects immediately, with links in the article doing the same. It’s worth knowing about; YCoCg encoding can even be applied to real-time image display, saving memory and bandwidth.
Test your LCD monitor for blur effects. Read the sparse explanations (I could have used more technical background information), or just enjoy the illusions. Also, a strange thing: on one old Dell LCD monitor I use, scrolling this page up and down causes green to appear where it’s light gray. I have no idea why – explanations appreciated.
Math with Bad Drawings is a fun blog, and a great book, one of the best I’ve read this year. It references other good stuff, such as takeaways for teaching from the fascinating autobiography Mind and Matter, and this cartoon, which is relateable (working on Real-Time Rendering: “let’s use n for the normal; oh wait, we’re using that for the number of rows already, m for columns. And abcd and e and f and h and ijk and l and o and q and r and st and uvw and xyz already have meanings… that leaves us, ummm, g, and p. OK, what if we…”)

Please go with “DXR” or “DirectX Raytracing” (secret agenda: ray-traced Minecraft)

This is a post in which I sneak in an announcement at Gamescom from Microsoft and NVIDIA under the guise of an engaging post about terminology. I tell you now to avoid any anxiety or stress from surprise, to keep your heart healthy. The announcement is that official ray tracing support is coming to the Windows 10 Bedrock edition of Minecraft. Video here; it’s lovely:

Now the gripping terminology post:

I’ve seen “DirectX Raytracing” and “DXR” used for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API extension – perfect. My concern with today’s announcement is seeing “DirectX R” and “DirectX R raytracing” getting used as terms. Please don’t.

OK, I feel better now. Go enjoy the video! It’s nice stuff, and I say that as an entirely unbiased source, other than being employed by NVIDIA and loving ray tracing and Minecraft. I particularly enjoy the beams o’ light effects, having played with these long ago.

Minecraft fans: It will work on only the Windows 10 Bedrock Edition, not the Java Edition, so Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders project (which offers some ray tracing, but currently does not use RTX hardware) is unaffected. There are some technical details on Polygon, and at the other end of the spectrum, various musings on Reddit.

Seven Ray Tracing Things for August 16, 2019

I have a huge backlog of cool URLs. Here are a bunch having to do with ray tracing:

For SIGGRAPH presentations, see Stephen Hill’s page and my own. His is SIGGRAPH in general, mine is ray-tracing related only. Both have links to slidesets and videos, as released so far.
There are hardcore commercial physical ray tracers out there, for real-world optics, material analysis, etc. I’d heard of FRED last year because of this cool research (friendly version here). At SIGGRAPH I heard about ASAP.
Here’s a page of all publications related to Disney’s Hyperion renderer. Lots to chew on; today I read the short paper “The Challenges of Releasing the Moana Island Scene,” which brings up some tough questions (and their answers) for how to make a production model available to researchers.
I found this presentation about path tracing Quake II worthwhile, in part because it discusses denoising in not-so-handwaving terms. Latest game version here, older source code here, watch the presentation here (sign-in required).
This Unreal Engine tutorial on ray tracing has a lot of side-by-side comparisons. There’s also a video of pretty real-time architectural renderings using Unreal.
Super-cray: a pinhole camera working through global illumination by using ray tracing in a Minecraft mod.
And to finish on SIGGRAPH, here’s my album and Mauricio Vives’s album, which do have a few ray tracing related bits in them, including interesting predictions from a talk by Morgan McGuire. Let me know of more – there’s so much I missed.

SIGGRAPH 2019 – my plan

This is my guaranteed-biased view of what I think is likely to be exciting at SIGGRAPH 2019, i.e., what I’ll be attending.

First, there are way too many ray tracing events, around 50 I’ve found so far (and that’s counting each of the eight SIGGRAPH courses having to do with ray tracing each as a single event). List at http://bit.ly/rtrt2019, which took me way longer to collate than I expected. Additions appreciated.

Of these, here are ones I won’t miss:

Sunday 9am – 12:15pm, Room 152, SIGGRAPH Course: Are We Done with Ray Tracing? – answer’s clearly yes, so I’m attending for some career counseling.
Monday 9am – 12:15pm, Room 408AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part 1, moderator: Natalya Tatarchuk, who says she’ll talk about ray tracing a bit (she’s at Unity Technologies)
Tuesday 2pm – 3pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Optimizing and Deploying Ray-Traced Dynamic Global Illumination, Morgan McGuire. Rumor has it this should be a cool talk.
Tuesday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 403AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering – d’oh, it overlaps with Morgan’s talk, but I hope to catch the rest.
Tuesday 6pm – 7:45pm, West Hall B, Event: Real-Time Live! – I kinda debated this one (there’s also the Cornell Dinner), but it includes ray tracing on mobile GPUs – that tips the scale.

There are a bunch of other courses and talks at other times I’ll be at, but these are the ones I’m particularly interested in and can attend.

Here is the “hmmm, many things are going on at once, which do I choose?” part of the conference:

Monday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 408AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part 2, moderator: Natalya Tatarchuk – always some great talks here

Monday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: GPU Ray Tracing for Film and Design – stuff I should know about for my own work

Monday 3pm – 7:30pm, The Orpheum Theatre, 842 South Broadway, Unreal Engine SIGGRAPH 2019 User Group Meeting (register) – stuff I’d also like to know more about. Note you have to register in advance.

Monday 3:30pm – 4:30pm, Room 406B, Intel Exhibitor Session: Ray Tracing with Intel Embree and Intel OSPRay: Use Cases and Updates – what’s up with Intel?

Here are the ones I can’t miss, since I’m involved:

Emerging Technologies, Matching Visual Acuity and Prescription: Towards AR for Humans – Some next steps in lightweight AR. I didn’t work on this, but I’m helping out in the booth Sunday 1-5:30, so stop on by.
Tuesday 10am – 10:25am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: A Fast Forward through Ray Tracing Gems – 32 papers in 25 minutes, so if I speak at 400 WPM I’ll be fine.
Tuesday 11am – 12 noon, Room 507, Los Angeles Convention Center, Birds of a Feather: Ray Tracing Roundtable – I’m the “organizer.” This will be in a 60-person room with whoever shows up first and wants to talk informally about ray tracing R&D. No presentations or other planned activities – I give an intro, we quickly introduce ourselves, then real-time parallel processing happens. That is, it’s a cocktail party without the cocktails, or the party – just the talk, with whoever shows up.
Wednesday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Ray Tracing Gems 1.1 – I’m chairing, and am looking forward to hearing these talks, which will include progress since the book was published (e.g., the new work presented at HPG).
Wednesday 5:30pm – 6pm, SIGGRAPH bookseller, outside Room 403, Book Signing: Ray Tracing Gems – meet some of the contributors; you will be a sad panda if you miss it.

As far as evening activities go, as usual SIGGRAPH needs to have twice as many nights as it provides. For everyone, Sunday’s Fast Forward; Monday’s the sake party, Electronic Theater, SIGGRAPH Reception, and Chapters Party; Tuesday’s Real-Time Live; Wednesday’s the Khronos reception (and I don’t want to think of all the good Khronos presentations I’m missing that day). Plus all the parties I’m not invited to.

So, what cool things do I not know about and shouldn’t miss?

Way too much ray tracing at SIGGRAPH 2019

I just made a page of all the ray, path, and sampling papers/talks/courses/demos/events happening at SIGGRAPH 2019. See it here: http://bit.ly/rtrt2019 (and RT, if you wish).

Please let me know of any additions (including schedules for courses) and corrections.

Enjoy!

“Ray Tracing Gems” now free on Google Play

I was happy two weeks ago when Apress put Ray Tracing Gems on Kindle for free. I’m happier still today as they now have also put it on Google Play for free. My tweet – if you RT it will then be an RTRTRT.

What’s a blog entry without an image? A non-waste of bandwidth. So, here’s one from Chapter 26, “Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing,” by Thomas Willberger, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann.

Messing about with SEUS for Minecraft

I plunked my $10 down to try out Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS), PTGI E6, for Minecraft. These shaders include ray-tracing, path-tracing, and other effects. They’re not the easiest thing to install: you need Forge, then need OptiFine, then SEUS (but not the old SEUS), and adding something like the Realistico resource pack with high-res normal and specular maps makes it all that much better.

I toured around our ancient (circa 2010-2014) world and made a short video of the results. Here’s an album showing some of the effects (and some of the limitations).

Overall I love the look – it adds a solidity and realism to the world. That said, it’s a bit difficult to see while underground vs. vanilla Minecraft. OptiFine has a “have the torch in hand illuminate the area” which SEUS doesn’t support, so dark areas are, by default, quite dark indeed. So, great for touring around, more challenging if building underground.

Here’s a shot with bump and specular maps, some reflection of the environment, and ripples from rain. If you just can’t get enough, here’s a way-too-large album I made mostly for our players.

Bragging Rights

Chris Wyman pointed out this entertaining Amazon world-view:

Wow, cool, we’re #1 for DirectX books, and the book’s not actually shipping yet (the second printing should come out in May, with little fixes). Click on that “DirectX Software Programming” link and you can see the competition we beat out:

Yes! We displaced that best-selling book on DirectX programming, the classic Air Fryer Cookbook.

Update: sadly, the next day we fell to #2. That cookbook is an unstoppable computer programming guide, as it’s also #1 in many other programming book categories, such as for OpenGL, Java server pages, Cold Fusion, and XSL, not to forget CAD software control. That said, sous vide cooking controls PHP programming, classic authors top Ruby programming books, and, appropriately, the Harry Potter Coloring Math Book controls Flash programming, beating out books on machine trading, Excel, Javascript, Adobe Animate CC – aha, at #15 there is actually a book about Flash.