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).
GPU Pro (the rebranded ShaderX series) will be published soon. Wolfgang Engel, the editor in chief of the series, has now put out a call for participation for GPU Pro 2; read about it here. Proposal deadline is May 17th.
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).
By the way, assuming you’re using Google Chrome for browsing (it’s what the cool kids use), I found AutoPager Chrome to be a nice little extension. Instead of needing to click at the end of every page of an article, it glues page after page into one long scroll.
SBIM = Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling workshop
NPAR = Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering
CFP = Call for Participation
SBIM-NPAR 2010 will be held June 7-10 in Annecy, France. The NPAR call for participation is up; due date is March 15th, but April 2nd for any SIGGRAPH rejections to be considered. In addition to research, they’re specifically looking to the games community for production papers on how game developers create their GUIs, editing tools, and NPR effects.
Every other year NPAR is held in Annecy, and it sounds lovely. In the evenings the Annecy International Animated Film Festival takes place—how perfect! Someday I’ll figure out a way to attend; until then, I can but dream.
I mentioned this I3D 2010 paper in a blog post a while ago, but there was no preprint for it at the time. Now the floodgates of information have been opened with the preprint, a video, and an extended paper all available on the first author’s website. The source code has also been open-sourced with the Apache 2.0 license and posted on Google Code.
I’m not that familiar with previous work in the area, so I don’t know how it stacks up against e.g. Gigavoxels; if anyone has any insight please let me know. One interesting detail from the paper was the way they enhance each cubical voxel with a pair of bounding planes, which they call contours.
They show that the data structure enables casting rays significantly faster than against a triangle model of equivalent complexity. Unfortunately, it appears to still be slower than rendering the triangles the “old-fashioned way”. The technique also requires post-filtering since it does not allow for filtering of color and normal information (which is effectively point-sampled). Finally, building the data structure takes a fair bit of time, making this not particularly well-suited for dynamic scenes.
I noticed Kirk & Hwu’s “Programming Massively Parallel Processors” book is back in stock at Amazon (and now with 2 mixed reviews), after being unavailable for a number of days. The part that made me laugh is Amazon’s ranking listing:
I usually end each “7 Things” post with a lighter item. Having beaten through my backlog of resources, there are a bunch of visual links left over. So, here’s a post of pure fluffy desserts. All images are clickable for more information.
Well, wait, there’s one more thing… Naty and I love the realistic CG in this piece, The Third & The Seventh. I’m not going to embed it here; follow the link and definitely watch it fullscreen. More amazing still, it’s the work of one guy, Alex Roman. The only elements that are not CG are the photographer, the pigeons, the time-lapsed sky and growing flowers, and the jet. There’s a compositing breakdown video of various scenes, showing the techniques used. That said, Naty likes it but for my tastes it’s pretty boring to watch for more than half a minute, as most CG demos are (jaded? Maybe; mostly, I just like plot).
If your interest wanes, skip to 8 minutes in (well, you can’t skip ahead with Vimeo; just let it load and come back later). Perhaps that’s the best way to appreciate the clip: play it as a loop and look at it now and then, in small doses. There’s a heavy hand with the focus/depth-of-field effect at times, but in one sense I do like seeing this effect overused: it’s like watching CPU cycles burn before my very eyes, knowing how much the algorithm costs. Last niggle (and I should probably be soundly thrashed with a riding crop for noting these things, but it stuck out for me): the wind turbines turn backwards. Quibbles aside, the images here are so much better than any I will ever make that I’m a total admirer of it on the “technical chops” and “incredible dedication” levels.
The first three are from Geeks3D, which is a worthwhile site I frequently reference. First: some noise textures, in case you don’t feel like making some yourself.
Finally, PyOpenGL_Lab, which calls OpenGL from Python. Interpreted languages like Python are lovely in that there’s no compilation step, making experimentation much more rapid. If you’re a Perl person, there’s this module.
Daniel Rákos has an article about how to perform instance culling using the GPU, using OpenGL 3.2. The basic idea is to run the bounding volumes through the geometry shader for frustum culling and pipe out results as transform feedback, which is then used in a second pass for which instances to actually render. This type of technique has been done using DirectX (e.g., Froblins), Daniel shows how to do it in OpenGL and provides source.
John Ratcliff’s Code Suppository has lots of little handy graphics code tidbits and chunks. It’s moving here and here on Google Code, but the original page is much easier to skim.
Wolfgang Engel provides a nice little page of books and resources he recommends for upcoming graphics programmers, with some good follow-up comments. I hadn’t heard of the 3D Math Primer before. It gets high ratings on Amazon, and you can use Look Inside. Skimming it over, it does look like a good book, covering many topics with the space they deserve (vs. our sometimes quick zoom through them in our own book). Code snippets are also given throughout. The book mentions “The First Law of Computer Graphics,” but unfortunately the pages explaining it are blocked. Happily, I found it on Google Books: “If it looks right, it is right”. Whew, good, I honestly was concerned there was some law I had been breaking all these years.
… and I’m all caught up, my queue is empty! Well, there will be a special post tomorrow.
