Shaderx4 Advanced Rendering Techniques Graphics Series
Sacha Weakland
Vlad Stamate,
an American computer scientist, software and game developer with Romanian roots. He studied at Politehnica University of Bucharest and graduated in CS with a B.Sc. degree in graphic design from Richmond, The American International University in London in 2001. Actually affiliated with Apple, Vlad Stamate worked in the R&D department of Sony Computer Entertainment America, leading the GPU performance analysis software team for the Playstation 3 console, and as an engineer for Imagination Technologies taking part in developing OpenGL Linux drivers [2]. He has published various articles of the advanced rendering techniques book project ShaderX [3]. and further started chess programming in 2006 on a program called ps3chess, followed by ps3chess2, fastthink and in January 2009, Plisk [4].As collector of old and antique computers since 2012, Vlad Stamate features the Digilogue Museum [5], along with the Digilogue Collection YouTube channel [6].
This course is the next installment in the established series of SIGGRAPH courses on real-time rendering. It presents the best graphics practices and research from the game-development community and provides practical and production-proven algorithms. The focus of the course is on the intersection between the game-development community and state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, and the potential for cross-pollination of knowledge in future games and other interactive applications.
It's all about me me me. This page is mostly about my professional interests, newest to oldest, with some hobby bits interspersed. I tend to put graphics-related links on Twitter and blog here. You can also check LinkedIn. Write me at er...@acm.org.Along with Elena Garces, I'm a Program (aka Papers) Chair for EGSR 2024: July 3-5, Imperial College, London, UK.I co-edited the book Ray Tracing Gems, released in March 2019. On that site we provide an unofficial version of the free PDF version of the book, one with the errata corrected. Ray Tracing Gems II is now also out, which I helped on in various minor ways (and wrote a short reference article for).I coauthored Real-Time Rendering, now in its fourth edition, released in 2018. The book's site has and points to all sorts of resources.The portal page sums up what real-time computer graphics resources I use the most. There are also pages on ray tracing and WebGL resources.We also maintain the 3D Object Intersection Page, a handy table of references to algorithms for object/object intersection, and the obscure and entertaining (IMO) Real Artifacts collection. Oh, and a free graphics books list, a recent graphics books list, and a recommended graphics books list.I help with the free & open-access Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), the successor to the Journal of Graphics Tools (JGT).Various repositories I maintain: Graphics Gems, Journal of Graphics Tools, and Ray Tracing Gems code repos.I made a video tutorial for using NVIDIA's free instant-ngp NeRF software to make fly-throughs.If you're on an iPhone, download this Minecraft model and you'll see it in AR mode. This model is part of my two test scenes in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format. I made them to test viewers for features implemented, to help users understand the UsdPreviewSurface material, and to motivate clearer specification of some material elements. I co-chaired I3D 2020 and I3D 2021. Lots of the keynotes and talks are online.Here's a series of seven short talks I made back in 2019 on the basics of ray tracing, a total of about an hour of content.Sadly now in disrepair, back around 2013 I created and narrated Udacity's free course "Interactive 3D Graphics". Read more about it here. The site is starting to decay (the online exercise system has died), so this page can help you get going. If you don't like video instruction, you can instead download the 800+ pages of text making up the course - scroll down to the "Course Syllabus" section.I was a section editor for GPU Zen and ShaderX4.I like Minecraft, and wrote Mineways, a model exporter for the game. Twelve years it, it gets about 200 downloads a day.Andrew Glassner and I collaborated on T2Z, a little art project using Processing. I also like to keep track of basic resources for 3D printing.My various other public repositories are here, and includemodifiable illusions (see one here) and a simple, flexible tool for checking LaTeX and text files for errors.I finally made a demo for the demoscene, which was fun to do. The music has serious sync problems, for some reason. Toggling F12 on Windows sometimes helps. Fourth place, woo hoo, and about what it deserved. What's fun is that you can take control of the camera at any point, and change the music played.Other fun stuff: I now maintain a library box and micro-pantry map for the area where I live, north of Boston. More about this here, as well as a map of farmers markets northwest of Boston. I'm also making a Cottages (and more) of the Berkshires map, and an "interesting things in Somerville MA" map (which got a bit of news coverage here and here).I made some puzzles for Somerville Open Studios 2024.I have an ancient personal page with book and board game recommendations, plus wildflower, tree, and bird identification programs. These were kinda broken last I looked.Other me me me: SIGGRAPH and Wikipedia.People I'm not: the comedian/one-man-band/juggler/stilt-walker, the Nashville songwriter who penned "Moonshine Margaritas" and other tunes, the photographer, the rhythm guitarist with the pop punk band "Real Friends," and the karma-filled Unity developer eric5h5, to name a few. Past InterestsI helped start and worked on the editorial board for many years of the journal of graphics tools. This was a journal dedicated to presenting practical tools and techniques. The web site used to have useful code for some of the articles - sadly, CRC has let this repository founder. The code can still be found via the Way Back Machine.I created and rarely help maintain the ACM TOG Software Related Tools and Research Resources pages. Mentioned mostly so I can find the links.The now-slumbering Ray Tracing News contains articles about ray tracing. Nowadays I put my efforts into this page of ray tracing resources. I also once maintained The Realtime Raytracing Realm page of real-time ray tracing demos. Dated now, but some of the demos still astound me (256 byte ray tracer? Gotta love it).Decades ago I created the Standard Procedural Databases (SPD) software package, which occasionally still gets used for testing ray tracers. It was presented in an IEEE CG&A article in November 1987. Sphereflake, the most popular model of the set, now runs in real time with 48 million spheres.For I3D 2008 John Owens, Spike Hughes, and I came up with a pub quiz, meant to take about an hour for teams of about 6 people, 10 minutes per set of questions. Here is the answer key. Here's a photo of the scoreboard near the end.For some years I ran the Fantasy Graphics League - demented or silly, you decide...I edited the Ray Tracing News for many years, which grew out of coauthoring An Introduction to Ray Tracing from 1989 (now free to download)One last thing, from 1987: the Standard Procedural Databases, for testing ray tracers. Since you can scale up the number of primitives in a scene, they're still usable, e.g., here's a bit about Sphereflake. Kind of like me (I'm less blotchy - really - though am certainly noisier): Eric at SIGGRAPH 2014 by scanfab on Sketchfab
You could check my listing at the ACM Digital Library.
- A Taxonomy of Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function Lobes for Rendering Engineers by Morgan McGuire,Julie Dorsey,Eric Haines,John F. Hughes,Steve Marschner,Matt Pharr,Peter Shirley. Notable part:
After the tremendous success of ShaderX, the ShaderX2 books, ShaderX3, ShaderX4, ShaderX5, ShaderX6 a new book project with an entirely new set of innovative ideas, techniques, and algorithms will be started in 2008:
Game developers of all levels will find insightful tips and tools from this unique collection. Written by game programming experts, each contribution will cover advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX and OpenGL run-time with any shader language available.
Each section of the book(s) will be headed by a Section editor.
Shadows - Sam Martin
Beyond Pixels and Triangles - Sebastien St-Laurent
Handheld Devices - Wolfgang Engel
Environmental Effects - Matthias Wloka
Geometry Manipulation - Natasha Tatarchuk
3D Engine Design - Kenneth Hurley
Image Space - Christoper Oat
Rendering Techniques - Wessam Bahnassi
Global Illumination - Carsten Dachsbacher
1.3 Dynamic Terrain Rendering on GPU Using Real-Time Tessellation by Natalya Tatarchuk
1.4 Adaptive Re-Meshing for Displacement Mapping by Rafael P. Torchelsen, Carlos A. Dietrich, Lus Fernando, M. S. Silva, Rui Bastos, and Joo L. D. Comba
Wolfgang Engel is a videogame designer. He is the founder and CEO of Confetti. Previously he also worked as the Lead Graphics Programmer for Rockstar Games. He is also the founder and editor of ShaderX and GPU books series.
As a developer, Engel has developed videogames in addition to games for the television series Wetten, dass..?.[1] He was the Lead Graphics Programmer at Rockstar Games, where he led the graphics development of the RAGE engine. During his time at Rockstar he contributed to Rockstar Games franchises including Midnight Club, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto.[2] At that time Engel also developed the Oolong gaming engine for iPhone, that eventually shipped about a hundred games.[3] In 2008 Engel introduced light pre-pass rendering as a method of deferred shading variant in the development of videogame graphics,[4][5][6] and is known as an expert in shader programming.[7]
Engel then founded Confetti Interactive and Confetti Games in 2009,[8][9] where he serves as CEO.[citation needed] Confetti is a think-tank for real-time graphics research in the videogame and movie industry, graphics tools developer, and programming services company. Tools Engel has helped develop for the company include Aura, a global illumination system; Ephemeris, a skybox/skydome system; and PixelPuzzle, a Post FX pipeline system.[8][10] As a part of his role with Confetti, Engel works with external clients, and provides consultations to other game developers. Confetti contributed to games including Tomb Raider, Battlefield 4, Murdered Soul Suspect, Star Citizen, Dirt 4, Vainglory, Transistor, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Battlefield 1, Mafia 3, Quake Champions, and Phyre.[11]
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