Some quick bits

We’ve updated our portal page a bit: added Black Rock Studio’s nice publications page, added some film and commercial research labs’ publication pages, and fixed some links. Also, with a bit of regret, I removed the links to the Google Group pages for comp.graphics.algorithms and comp.games.development.programming.algorithms (though the FAQ for c.g.algorithms is still handy). These groups (and I assume most groups in general) have turned into spam repositories. The first group in particular has a special meaning for me, as comp.graphics.* is where I met a lot of graphics programmers back in the 80’s and 90’s and learned a bunch of techniques.

Happily, there are packrats on the internet; Steve Hollasch has a nice collection of the best of comp.graphics and other internet graphics sources. Some web-rot there with the external links, but the comp.graphics postings are solid. A few are dated, but there’s much that is still relevant today. I noticed a page I hadn’t seen before, a SIGGRAPH ’92 satire – some funny bits there (e.g. The Freehand Generation of Fractal Curves using only a Lightpen and Caffeine).

Which reminds me of a classic page that everyone should at least skim: “WARNING: Beware of VIDEA“. It’s about a bogus conference, now long-gone (though the so-called institute that ran it back then still held 23 conferences this year). Werner Purgathofer and colleagues submitted silly abstracts to this conference and all were accepted without review. Check out the abstracts on his page. Werner’s overview page also gives links to a number of related publications scandals: nonexistent peer review, plagiarism, automatic paper writing, etc. If nothing else, check out SCIgen if you haven’t seen it before.

Rendering Equation in Wired

I’ve been on vacation this week. Kayaked this morning, biked this afternoon (I sound so studly. but it’s all been fairly easy stuff, though sweaty). Catching up on my Wired magazines while waiting for the shower, I ran into this surprising article. Who would have thought the Rendering Equation would be a little article in any popular magazine, ever? Sure, it’s mostly Wired establishing geek-cred – the equation could really use a figure and a bit more explanation to appreciate it – but still fun to see.

SIGGRAPH 2010 resource links

Naty and I (mostly Naty!) collected the links for most courses and a few talks given at SIGGRAPH 2010; see our page here. Enjoy! If you have links to any other courses and talks, please do send them on to me or post them as a comment.

Personally, I particularly liked the “Practical Morphological Anti-Aliasing on the GPU” talk. It’s good to see the technique take around 3.5 ms on an NVIDIA 295 GTX, and the author’s site has a lot of information (including code).

New Site for “Advances in Real-Time Rendering” SIGGRAPH Course

The SIGGRAPH Course “Advances in Real-Time Rendering for 3D Graphics and Games” has been held since 2006 with a consistently high level of quality. However the hosting of the materials is scattered around a few different websites, and the older years suffer from broken links and other issues. We are happy to host the course’s new home on a subdomain of this site: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/. At the moment only the SIGGRAPH 2010 course materials are present, but previous years will go up shortly.

Live Real-Time Demos at SIGGRAPH

So one problem with SIGGRAPH is that you hear about the cool thing that you missed and didn’t even know about until it was too late. Here’s one that’s getting repeated: the Computer Animation Festival’s Live Real-Time Demos session. Hall B, 4:30-5:15 pm Tuesday and Wednesday; I just caught the tail-end of Monday’s show and it was worth seeing, so I’ll go back for the rest tomorrow.

What else didn’t you miss yet? Hmmm, in Emerging Technologies Sony’s 360-degree autostereoscopic display is cute, I’ve heard the 3D multitouch table is very worthwhile, and you must try out the Meta Cookie (have someone take your picture while you’re in the headgear, it’s something your grandchildren will want to see). I was also interested to see QuintPixel from Sharp, as it justified their earlier Quattron “four primary colors” display.

More later – Mental Images reception time.

Fleet-Footed Faster Forward

The Fast Forward event at SIGGRAPH is set of very short presentations Sunday evening that runs through all the papers at SIGGRAPH. Lately SIGGRAPH has become a “big tent”, including a wide range of fields. This year there are, by my count, 133 SIGGRAPH papers, giving say 50 seconds to each presentation in the two-hour period. This is a pleasant-enough way to cull through all the papers and find which ones to see, and there is the occasional witty presentation, but to be honest, I’m a bit worn out on the method – too slow! In the past few years I find myself looking at my watch halfway through and thinking “egads, still another hour?” and my monocle pops from my eye with comic effect.

So I liked seeing that CGW is hosting a 3 minute 44 second video summary of some of the SIGGRAPH papers. Only 23 papers summarized, but I love that each gets just a sentence – you’re in, you’re out, and you have some sense if it’s a paper you need to see. I wish I had this for all the papers. Second in awesomeness would be a single web page that lists all the abstracts together, for a quick skim. I should write a Perl script that makes one from ACM’s SIGGRAPH 2010 TOC. Also at CGW’s site is a 2 minute 41 second (plus long credits) video summary of the Emerging Technologies area, purely visual – nice, it gives me a little taste, prepping my senses for what I will see there and want to learn more about.

Two and a Half Books

I’ve learnt of two new books in the past few weeks, worth mentioning as books to check out at SIGGRAPH (or using Amazon’s “Look Inside”, of course):

iPhone 3D Programming: Developing Graphical Applications with OpenGL ES, by Philip Rideout, O’Reilly Press. A better title might have been “Programming OpenGL ES on the iPhone”, as it focuses on OpenGL ES more than on the iPhone per se. Which is fine; there are already lots of iPhone programming books, and almost none that are focused more on OpenGL ES itself (the only other OpenGL ES 2.0 book I know of is this one). The book is C++ oriented, with some Objective C as needed for glue. From my brief skim, this looks like a well-illustrated, readable guide that hits many different effects: reflection maps, skinning, antialiasing, etc. That said, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to program on any mobile devices, so can’t give an expert review. When I do give it a try, this looks like the book I’ll read first.

Update: A draft of this book is free on the web, see it here. It looks to be essentially the same as the published work (but with some hand-drawn figures), and is nicer in some ways, as the pages allow color images (always good for a graphics book).

Light & Skin Interactions: Simulations for Computer Graphics Applications, by Gladimir V. G. Baranoski and Aravind Krishnaswamy, Morgan-Kaufmann Press. This one’s out of my league as a casual skim. Paging through and seeing “the eumelanin absorption coefficient is given by…” and “Scattering in either the stratum corneum or epidermis…” shows me how little I know of the world in general. Anyway, interesting to see a whole book about this critical type of material. Searching through it, there’s minimal coverage of, for example, d’Eon and Luebke’s work, so I can’t say it has much direct application to interactive computer graphics at this point.

That’s all for the real books…

The half a book (at best): Game GPU Graphics Gems: Real-Time Rendering The Redux (aka GGGG:RTRTR), by anyone who wants to edit it. When I “edited” the quasi-book Another Introduction to Ray Tracing a few months ago, I thought back then that I’d start another book for SIGGRAPH. Like the first stunning collection, this was an hour of work gathering Wikipedia articles (hardest part was choosing a cover). There are plenty more articles to gather about interactive rendering, and you’re most welcome to add any good ones you find to this book, make your own, etc. – it’s a wiki page, after all. More seriously, I like having a single, tight page of links to Wikipedia articles about interactive rendering, vs. wandering around and haphazardly seeing what’s there.

GPU Ray Tracing BOF at SIGGRAPH 2010

There will be a Birds of a Feather gathering at SIGGRAPH 2010 about GPU Ray Tracing: Wednesday, 4:30-6 pm, Room 301 A.

A brief description from Austin Robison: We won’t have a projector or desktop machines set up, but please feel free to bring your laptops to show off what you’ve been working on! Additionally, I’ve created a Google Group mailing list that I hope we can use, as a community, to share insights and ask questions about ray tracing on GPUs not tied to any specific API or vendor. Please sign up and share your news, experiences and ideas: http://groups.google.com/group/gpu-ray-tracing.

I3D 2011

The website for I3D 2011 is now up, including the time/place and CFP. I3D will be in San Francisco next year, from February 18-20th. I3D probably has a higher percentage of graphics papers relevant to games than any other conference; this year five of the papers described techniques already in use in games (including high-profile titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Civilization 5), and many of the other papers were also highly relevant. Unfortunately, very few game developers attend; I hope next year’s location (San Francisco is home to a large number of developers) will help.

I3D is a great small conference to publish real-time rendering papers. One advantage it has for authors over Eurographics conferences like EGSR, and co-sponsored conferences like HPG and SCA (in “Europe” years) is that it is not subject to Eurographics’ monumentally stupid “authors can’t post copies of their papers for a year after the conference” policy. This policy, of course, hurts the chance of your paper being cited by making it harder for people to read it – brilliant! Hopefully EG will see the error of its ways soon – until then, you are better off sending your papers to non-EG conferences like I3D.