Posts tagged as:

graphics

Office 2010's 3D pie charts... now with extra 3D!

January 25, 2010

Microsoft has announced the system requirements for Office 2010. That's news in and of itself. Once upon a time, system requirements (at least, ones that anyone paid attention to) were strictly for high-end professional software, cutting-edge games and the like: software that actually needed powerful hardware. But the real news here is that Office 2010 [...]

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Cameron and Jackson on CGI in film

December 23, 2009

Slate has posted a great interview with James Cameron and Peter Jackson - arguably the two leading directors when it comes to special effects in film (in fact, Jackson's Weta Workshop executed most of the FX shots for Cameron's Avatar). Of course, the discussion centers on an enthusiastic embrace of CGI, reflecting a belief that [...]

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Things that fascinate me: relief mapping

June 21, 2009

I've spent a couple days reading all about relief mapping (or a very similar algorithm called steep parallax mapping). Essentially these techniques implement ray tracing inside a texture map, resulting in dramatic representations of geometry without the need to render additional polygons. Key benefits include parallax tracking, occlusion, and self-shadowing again all without rendering extra [...]

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Overcharting

June 2, 2009

An article in Friday's NYT called "Let the Kid Be" was accompanied by this graphic: I don't like this presentation because I think it is misleading. But first, a little history: You may remember last year a JP Morgan chart was circulated which showed the deterioration of bank's market values. The old and new market [...]

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How to animate 10,000 balloons

May 29, 2009

and an old man's suit.

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Self-shadowing, briefly

May 20, 2009

The next great hurdle in consumer graphics technology is the successful implementation of self-shadowing. In every successive generation of graphics technology, programmers have made massive steps toward approximating the rendering equation. We've moved from simple vertices and shaded polygons to advanced geometry and multi-pass shader engines. But real-time graphics remain stuck in an uncanny valley [...]

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Rendering Cleverness

March 25, 2009

Austin Robinson of NVIDA makes an excellent point during his introduction of a new CUDA-based ray casting engine (NVIRT) at I3D'09 [paraphrased from his slides]: Rasterization is fast, but needs cleverness to produce complex visual effects. Ray tracing robustly supports complex visual effects, but needs cleverness to be fast. This is especially interesting because it [...]

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