Shaderx4 Advanced Rendering Techniques Graphics Series
Mercedes Mathena
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].
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 has written or edited more than 20 books on graphics software development in use by the videogame industry, in line with contemporary techniques and practices.[12] The book series he has authored include the ShaderX, GPU Pro, and GPU Zen books series.[11] The ShaderX4 book was awarded the Game Developer Front Line prize in 2006.[citation needed] His books have also included edited collections of pieces by other industry experts and designers,[13] and Engel has also served as technical editor to books published by other authors on the same subject matter.[14][15] Engel also writes articles for developer magazines and game tutorials for videogame-oriented websites.[1] Engel has also spoken at public conferences regarding various techniques in videogame creation[16] and is a faculty member and advisor to the Academy of Game Entertainment Technology.[1]
Wolfgang is the CTO of The Forge Interactive. The Forge Interactive is a think-tank for advanced real-time graphics research and a service provider for the video game and movie industry. We worked in the last nearly 13 years on many AAA IPs like Tomb Raider, Battlefield 4, Murdered Soul Suspect, Star Citizen, Dirt 4, Vainglory, Transistor, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Battlefield 1, Mafia 3, Call of Duty Warzone, Supergiant's Hades and others. Wolfgang is the founder and editor of the ShaderX and GPU Pro books series, a Microsoft MVP, the author of several books and articles on real-time rendering and a regular contributor to websites and the GDC. One of the books he edited -ShaderX4- won the Game developer Front line award in 2006. He is in the advisory boards of several companies. He is an active contributor to several future standards that drive the Game Industry. You can find him on twitter at
Kavita Bala is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. Bala specializes in scalable rendering for high-complexity illumination, interactive global illumination, perceptually based rendering, and image-based texturing. Bala has published research papers and served on the program committees of several conferences, including SIGGRAPH. In 2005, Bala cochaired the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering. She has coauthored the graduate-level textbook Advanced Global Illumination, 2nd ed. (A K Peters, 2006). Before Cornell, Bala received her S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Jim Blinn began doing computer graphics in 1968 while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. In 1974 he became a graduate student at the University of Utah, where he did research in specular lighting models, bump mapping, and environment/reflection mapping and received a Ph.D. in 1977. He then went to JPL and produced computer graphics animations for various space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, as well as for Carl Sagan's PBS series "Cosmos" and for the Annenberg/CPB-funded project "The Mechanical Universe," a 52-part telecourse to teach college-level physics. During these productions he developed several other techniques, including work in cloud simulation, displacement mapping, and a modeling scheme variously called blobbies or metaballs. Since 1987 he has written a regular column in the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications journal, where he describes mathematical techniques used in computer graphics. He has just published his third volume of collected articles from this series. In 1995 he joined Microsoft Research as a Graphics Fellow. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, has an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Otis Parsons School of Design, and has received both the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1983) and the Steven A. Coons Award (1999).
Tamy Boubekeur is a third-year Ph.D. student in computer science at INRIA in Bordeaux, France. He received an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Bordeaux in 2004. His current research focuses on 3D geometry processing and real-time rendering. He has developed new algorithms and data structures for the 3D acquisition pipeline, publishing several scientific papers in the fields of efficient processing and interactive editing of large 3D objects, hierarchical space subdivision structures, point-based graphics, and real-time surface refinement methods. He also teaches geometric modeling and virtual reality at the University of Bordeaux.
Franck Diard is a senior software architect at NVIDIA. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France) in 1998. Starting with vector balls and copper lists on Amiga in the late 1980s, he then programmed on UNIX for a decade with Reyes rendering, ray tracing, and computer vision before transitioning to Windows kernel drivers at NVIDIA. His interests have always been around scalability (programming multi-core, multi-GPU render farms) applied to image processing and graphics rendering. His main contribution to NVIDIA has been the SLI technology.
Nolan Goodnight is a software engineer at NVIDIA. He works in the CUDA software group doing application and driver development. Before joining NVIDIA he was a member of the computer graphics group at the University of Virginia, where he did research in GPU algorithms and approximation methods for rendering with precomputed light transport. Nolan's interest in the fundamentals of computer graphics grew out of his work in geometric modeling for industrial design. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in computer science.
Larry Gritz is director and chief architect of NVIDIA's Gelato software, a hardware-accelerated film-quality renderer. Prior graphics work includes being the author of BMRT; cofounder and vice president of Exluna, Inc. (later acquired by NVIDIA), and lead developer of their Entropy renderer; head of Pixar's rendering research group; a main contributor to PhotoRealistic RenderMan; coauthor of the book Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures; and occasional technical director on several films and commercials. Larry has a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from The George Washington University.
Evan Hart is a software engineer in the Developer Technology group at NVIDIA. Evan got his start in real-time 3D in 1997 working with visual simulations. Since graduating from The Ohio State University in 1998, he has worked to develop and improve techniques for real-time rendering, having his hands in everything from games to CAD programs, with a bit of drivers on the side. Evan is a frequent speaker at GDC and he has contributed to chapters in the Game Programming Gems and ShaderX series of books.
Yuntao Jia is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is very interested in computer graphics, and his current research interests include realistic rendering (especially on the GPU), video and image processing, and graph visualizations.
Andrew Lauritzen recently received his B.Math. in computer science and is now completing a master's degree in computer graphics at the University of Waterloo. To date, he has completed a variety of research in graphics, as well as theoretical physics. His current research interests include lighting and shadowing algorithms, deferred rendering, and graphics engine design. Andrew is also a developer at RapidMind, where he works with GPUs and other high-performance parallel computers.
Charles Loop works for Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Utah in 1987 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1992. His graphics research has focused primarily on the representation and rendering of smooth free-form shapes, including subdivision surfaces, polynomial splines and patches, and algebraic curves and surfaces.
David Luebke is a research scientist at NVIDIA. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science in 1998 from the University of North Carolina under Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., following a B.A. in chemistry from the Colorado College. David spent eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia before leaving in 2006 to help start the NVIDIA Research group. His research interests include real-time rendering, illumination models, and graphics architecture.
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