{"id":2018,"date":"2011-03-10T10:58:15","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T16:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2011-03-10T11:09:30","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T17:09:30","slug":"seven-things-for-march-10th-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/seven-things-for-march-10th-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Things for March 10th, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from a NYC trip (highlight: went to the taping of the Jimmy Fallon show and saw Snooki &amp; Laurie Anderson &#8211; now there&#8217;s a combo; if only they had collaborated) and a San Francisco trip (highlights: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/11998354@N07\/sets\/72157626218835820\/\">the Autodesk Gallery<\/a> &#8211; open to the public <a href=\"http:\/\/usa.autodesk.com\/gallery\/visit-us\/\">Wednesday afternoons<\/a> &#8211;\u00a0plus the amusingly-large and glowing\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/11998354@N07\/5506950801\/in\/set-72157626218835820\/\">heatsink on a motherboard<\/a> at the NVIDIA GDC reception). So, it&#8217;s time to write down seven other cool things.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A <a href=\"http:\/\/zigguratvertigo.com\/2011\/03\/07\/gdc-2011-approximating-translucency-for-a-fast-cheap-and-convincing-subsurface-scattering-look\/\">convincing translucency effect<\/a> was presented at GDC by the DICE guys (there&#8217;s precomputation involved, but it looks wonderful); Johan Andersson has <a href=\"http:\/\/repi.blogspot.com\/2011\/03\/dice-at-gdc11.html\">a rundown of other DICE presentations<\/a>. Other presentation lists include ones from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nvidia.com\/object\/gdc2011.html\">NVIDIA<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/software.intel.com\/en-us\/articles\/intelgdc2011\/\">Intel<\/a>, which I need to chew through sometime soon.<\/li>\n<li>Vincent Scheib has <a href=\"http:\/\/beautifulpixels.blogspot.com\/2011\/03\/gdc-2011-report.html\">a quick GDC report<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/beautifulpixels.blogspot.com\/2011\/03\/gdc2011-presentation-html5-and-other.html\">a presentation<\/a> on HTML 5 and other browser technologies (e.g. WebGL), with a particular interest in the handheld market. Vincent mentions the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=n3XeCHywNYM\">Unreal GDC demo<\/a>, which is pretty amazing.<\/li>\n<li>Intel has <a href=\"http:\/\/software.intel.com\/en-us\/articles\/shadowexplorer\/?cid=sw:ISNnews_69_ENG_5825\">a nice shadows demo<\/a>, showing the various tradeoffs with cascaded and exponential variance shadow maps. It compiled out of the box for me, and there&#8217;s lots to try out. My only disappointment was that Lauritzen et al.&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/visual-computing.intel-research.net\/art\/publications\/sdsm\/\">clever shadow tricks<\/a> are not demonstrated in it! Their basic ideas center around the idea of a prepass of the scene. They get tight bounds on the near and far view planes by finding the min and max depths, and tighten the shadow maps&#8217; frustums\u00a0around the visible points. Simple and clever, large improvements in shadow quality in real scenes, and relatively easy to implement or add to existing systems. <em>(thanks to Mauricio Vives)<\/em><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.feed43.com\/\">Feed43<\/a>: This is a nice little idea. It tracks any web page you want, and you specify what is considered a change to the page. When a change is detected, you&#8217;re given an RSS ping. Best part is, you can share any RSS feed created with everyone. Examples: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feed43.com\/kesenpapers.xml\">Ke-Sen Huang&#8217;s great conference paper list<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feed43.com\/raytracingnews.xml\">The Ray Tracing News<\/a>. If you make a good feed, let me know and I&#8217;ll pass it on here.\u00a0<em>(thanks to Iliyan Georgiev)<\/em><\/li>\n<li>This one&#8217;s old, but it&#8217;s a great page and I found it worthwhile, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antigrain.com\/research\/font_rasterization\/index.html#toc0008\">discussion of gamma correction and text rendering<\/a>. The surprising conclusion is that gamma alone doesn&#8217;t work nicely for text (it does wonders for line antialiasing, as I hope you know: compare <a href=\"http:\/\/realtimerendering.com\/gamma10.png\">uncorrected<\/a> vs. <a href=\"http:\/\/realtimerendering.com\/gamma22.png\">corrected<\/a>). It turns out that things like TrueType&#8217;s hinting has been tuned such that antialiasing and gamma correction can be detrimental.<\/li>\n<li>An interesting tidbit from the government report &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/microsites\/ostp\/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf\">Designing a Digital Future<\/a>&#8220;: on page 71 is an interesting section. A sample quote: &#8220;performance gains due\u00a0to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased\u00a0processor speed.&#8221; They give a numerical algorithms example where hardware gave a 1000x gain, algorithms gave a 43000x gain, 43 times as much. <em>(thanks to Morgan McGuire)<\/em><\/li>\n<li>My <a href=\"http:\/\/vokselia.com\">Minecraft addiction<\/a> has died down a fair bit (&#8220;just one more project&#8230;&#8221;), but I was happy to see Notch make <a href=\"http:\/\/notch.tumblr.com\/post\/3746989361\/terrain-generation-part-1\">a blog post with some technical chew<\/a>, with more posts to come. He talks about a problem many apps are starting to run into, how to deal with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1i7fW2xRQng\">precision problems when the terrain space is large<\/a>. His solution for now, &#8220;it&#8217;s a feature!&#8221;, which actually kinda makes sense for Minecraft. He also starts to describe his procedural terrain generation algorithm.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from a NYC trip (highlight: went to the taping of the Jimmy Fallon show and saw Snooki &amp; Laurie Anderson &#8211; now there&#8217;s a combo; if only they had collaborated) and a San Francisco trip (highlights: the Autodesk Gallery &#8211; open to the public Wednesday afternoons &#8211;\u00a0plus the amusingly-large and glowing\u00a0heatsink on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[256,28,421,113,445,446,287],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-gamma","tag-gdc","tag-minecraft","tag-shadows","tag-text","tag-translucency","tag-unreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2027,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/2027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}