{"id":6071,"date":"2024-01-01T10:20:31","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T16:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=6071"},"modified":"2024-01-01T11:20:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T17:20:52","slug":"seven-things-for-january-1-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/seven-things-for-january-1-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Things for January 1, 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Time to look both forward and back!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. It’s Public Domain Day<\/a>, when various old works become legal to share and draw upon for new creative endeavors. The original Mickey Mouse<\/a>, Lady Chatterly’s Lover<\/em>, Escher’s Tower of Babel<\/a>, and much else is now free, at least in the US. (Sadly, Canada’s gone the other direction<\/a>, along with New Zealand and Japan.) Reuse has already begun<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Speaking of copying, “3D prints” of paintings<\/a>, where the robot uses brushes to reproduce a work, is now a commercial venture.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Speaking of free works, happily the authors have put the new, 4th edition of Physically Based Rendering<\/em>, published in March 2023, free on the web<\/a>. Our list of all free graphics books (we know) is here<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Speaking of books, Jendrik Illner started a page describing books and resources for game engine development<\/a>. His name should be familiar; he’s the person that compiles the wonderful Graphics Programming weekly<\/a> posts. I admit to hearing about the PBR 4th edition being up for free from his latest issue, #320 (well, it’s been free<\/a> since November 1st, but I forgot to mark my calendar). This issue is not openly online as of today, being sent first to Patreon subscribers<\/a>. Totally worth a dollar a month for me (actually, I pay $5, because he deserves it).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. ChatGPT was, of course, hot in 2023, but isn’t quite ready to replace graphics programmers<\/a>. Pretty funny, and now I want someone to add a control called Photon Confabulation to Arnold (or to every renderer). Make it so, please.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. The other good news is that our future AI overlords can be defeated<\/a> by somersaults, hiding in cardboard boxes, or dressing up as a fir tree.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. What’s the new graphics thing in 2023? NeRFs<\/a> are so <\/em>2020. This year the cool kids started using 3D Gaussian splatting to represent and render models. Lots and lots of papers and open source implementations<\/a> came out (and will come out) after the initial paper presentation at SIGGRAPH 2023. Aras has a good primer<\/a> on the basic ideas of this stuff, at least on the rendering end. If you just want to look at the pretty, this (not open source) viewer page<\/a> is nicely done. Me, I like both NeRFs and gsplats – non-polygonal representation is fun stuff. I think part of the appeal of Gaussian splatting is that it’s mostly old school. Using spherical harmonics<\/a> to store direction-dependent colors is an old idea. Splatting is a relatively old rendering technique that can work well with rasterization (no ray casting needed). Forming a set of splats does not invoke neural anything – there’s no AI magic to decode (though, as Aras notes, they form the set of splats “using gradient descent and ‘differentiable rendering’ and all the other things that are way over my head”). I do like that someone created a conspiracy post<\/a> – that’s how you know you’ve made it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Time to look both forward and back!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071","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=6071"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6076,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071\/revisions\/6076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}