Seven things:

• I3D 2021 starts tomorrow, Tuesday, April 20th and runs for three days. Register for free in order to converse with speakers and attend special events, such as the VR posters and demos session, town hall, and social events. There, I’ve done my chairing duty for the day. Honestly, I’m looking forward to it – nice wide range of topics and activities this year, and three great keynote speakers.
• The Monster Mash animation system looks fun and indistinguishable from magic – the best kind of technology. Try it yourself (tips: make a core body and add separate strokes for limbs, etc. Hit the record button for each thing you want to animate and click & drag).
• I’ve updated our 3D graphics books page with a few volumes that came out last year, and two that are upcoming: Computer Graphics from Scratch in May, which I look forward to seeing, and Ray Tracing Gems II in August, which is jam-packed with articles. The cover of Ray Tracing Gems II is from the Marbles RTX project, which is a pretty incredible real-time demo worth a view.
• You probably know (or should!) about Jendrik Illner’s weekly roundups of 3D graphics programming articles. You probably didn’t know he has a searchable database.
• Monkey plays Pong purely using its brain. Fascinating? Horrifying? All I know is that I now want a smoothie dispenser on my monitor setup.
• An oldie from 2015 that I missed until now: the Rendering Equation described using only the top 1000 most popular words.
• Tatsuo Horiuchi uses Excel to make paintings. Which is a bit click-baity – he’s using the draw tools in Excel to do it. Still impressive, and I do appreciate his attitude: “yes, I am a fool.”