{"id":6162,"date":"2025-03-24T11:46:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T17:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=6162"},"modified":"2025-03-24T14:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T20:25:08","slug":"seven-things-for-march-24-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/seven-things-for-march-24-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Things for March 24, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/jcgt.org\">JCGT is back<\/a>, baybee! Six papers published in the past four months, two more to appear soon. Things were a bit stalled for a while, but we&#8217;ve reorganized and have caught up. I&#8217;m editor-in-chief until the summer, at which point Alexander Wilkie will take over.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Consider <a href=\"https:\/\/i3dsymposium.org\/2025\/\">I3D 2025<\/a>, May 7-9. It&#8217;s in Jersey City this year, just across the river from New York City. Some of the recent JCGT papers will also be presented there. Also, if you&#8217;re near the Boston area, consider the free one-day <a href=\"https:\/\/nesg.graphics\/\">NESG conference<\/a> at MIT on April 26th.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SIGGRAPH 2025 <a href=\"https:\/\/s2025.siggraph.org\/travel-accommodations\/\">hotel registration is open<\/a>. The page is a bit goofy: you have to pick from the list of hotels, sorted by distance, vs. something sensible like showing you a map and hotel options on it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>At GDC <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/directx\/announcing-directx-raytracing-1-2-pix-neural-rendering-and-more-at-gdc-2025\/\">Microsoft announced more_ray tracing extensions for DirectX 12<\/a>. Shader execution reordering (SER) is now supported, along with opacity micromaps. SER is a large performance boost for applications using ray tracing. Execution reordering is also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vulkan.org\/events\/vulkanised-2025#agenda\">a part of Vulkan<\/a>. Opacity micromaps help in ray tracing things like leaves rendered using cutout textures. As an example of the problem, back in 2020 Activision&#8217;s <em>Call of Duty<\/em> developers <a href=\"https:\/\/research.activision.com\/publications\/2020-10\/raytraced-shadows-in-call-of-duty--modern-warfare\">noted the heavy cost of alpha-testing textures<\/a> with AnyHit during ray tracing. This feature improves that situation by making cutout testing much faster.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I thought our &#8220;tools that we use&#8221; list was a bit long &#8211; see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/portal.html#programs\">the bottom of this page<\/a>. That&#8217;s nothing &#8211; Angelo Pesce gives <a href=\"https:\/\/c0de517e.com\/016_tools_that_I_use.htm\">quite the set of lists in his blog<\/a>. Some great ones in there, some I&#8217;ve never tried. Worth a look!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Fun free app: <a href=\"https:\/\/scaniverse.com\/\">Scaniverse<\/a>, by the Pokemon Go people, Niantic. <a href=\"https:\/\/nianticlabs.com\/news\/splats-change-everything\">3D Gaussian splats<\/a> capture places around the world. You can find scans available nearby on a map and add your own. To be honest, some of the scans are terrible, and I wish I could set a good starting viewpoint for the ones I&#8217;ve made. Here are two reasonable examples &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/scaniverse.com\/scan\/7kchgjhtc3mhxy7u\">one<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/scaniverse.com\/scan\/uxmj2u466lmhfcaw\">two<\/a> &#8211; from my neighborhood. On the technical side, they&#8217;ve open-sourced and MIT licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/scaniverse.com\/spz\">their SPZ file format<\/a> for compressed storage of splats, which I learned about from a talk at <a href=\"https:\/\/metaverse-standards.org\/members\/\">the Metaverse Standards Forum<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A new cool kids&#8217; term: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/what-is-ai-vibe-coding-its-all-the-rage-but-its-not-for-everyone-heres-why\/\">vibe coding<\/a>. Just hit &#8220;accept all&#8221; for whatever&#8217;s suggested by the AI chatbot and go with the flow. You can get pretty far if you&#8217;re lucky (debugging the actual code can be a nightmare), e.g., see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shadertoy.com\/view\/WcfGD2\">this Shadertoy experiment<\/a> by David Hart &#8211; the prompts are shown as comments in the code.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shadertoy.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"639\" height=\"359\" src=\"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shadertoy.jpg\" alt=\"ray tracer written with perplexity\" class=\"wp-image-6163\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shadertoy.jpg 639w, https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shadertoy-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shadertoy-624x351.jpg 624w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 639px) 100vw, 639px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","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-6162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162","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=6162"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6173,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions\/6173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}