Mesh generation in Farbrausch demos

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Back in 2007, the German demogroup Farbrausch was releasing its masterpiece, fr-041 Debris. Aside from the artistic qualities of this demo, it is impressive by its size: just 177kB worth of binary, for a seven minutes long full featured animation. The equivalent of a mere ten seconds of mp3 of poor quality. Size coding at work.

Reaching such a result requires dedicated tools, compression of course, but more importantly, content generation. Fabian Giesen offered in a recent blog post to give some details of the techniques used for this demo. After a quick poll, he decided to start with mesh generation, hence the first post of a very promising series: Half-edge based mesh representations: theory.

Representing a mesh with half-edges (picture stolen from the aforementioned article; diagrams that took this much time to create are worth showing ;) )

Solarized environment

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During last year I tested and adopted two tools for my environment: the Anonymous Pro font and the Solarized color palette. After months of use, there is no way back: the difference of comfort is significant, and any text application allowing to be configured so gets them on my work stations.

Solarized has a repository of configuration files for various applications. Unfortunately those are made by different people, with different tastes, and thus the color choices are not consistent from one application to another. This means you may still have to go through a good deal of tweaking if this is annoying to you.

Paths of Hate

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Paths of Hate is one of the many animations that were shown at the Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH 2011, and among the ones that drew most attention (it was awarded the Jury Award). Directed by Damian Nenow, the film explores in a comic style how deep hatred can go. Unfortunately I haven’t found the long version on Internet, only the following trailer. If you have the opportunity to see the full version, do not miss it.

State of the art in real-time realistic skin rendering

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Jorge Jimenez posted yesterday the last results of his research on skin rendering: Separable Subsurface Scattering. He provides a very impressive real-time demo, which, some point out, does runs on actual current hardware (it ran, slowly, on my low-end laptop). So even though he provides the following video of it, you should definitely try the actual binary. Oh, and the source code is available too. :-)

Capturing and rendering tiny details

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Not so long ago I discovered this article presenting the CLEAN mapping technique used in Civilization V to manage how detail gets filtered with distance. I found the side effect of emerging anisotropic surfaces very seducing.

This week Angelo Pesce wrote some thoughts on how the problem of how to represent and render detail in general, how normal maps are not so well suited and what can be done instead.

Unintentional film looking shot

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Snow suddenly started to fall over Tokyo last night, quickly building a white layer over the never ending city. I was too lazy to grab my gear and all the stuff one needs to get out during a cold night, so I just hoped the snow would still be there on the morning and decided that I would take my camera with me on my way to work.

It was still there (although it had become ice) and it was giving the morning sunlight some exquisite tones. I love the morning light anyway: grazing, harsh, drawing bold shadows on faces and buildings… But the reflections due to the snow really make a difference.

While waiting for the train on the platform, I wanted to take a picture of that girl on the other side, lit by that light. But I didn’t even have time to aim and the train was there already. I took the shot anyway, in the hope I would catch it through the window.

The result is a bit unexpected: the tinted glass and blacklit inside give the picture a film feeling, as if tones were post-processed and black mattes were added.

The filmic train

The filmic train