The Video Mapping Blog references various examples of video projection mapping, done at any scale.
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Secret Garden – Versailles
A friend of mine pointed out this Dior video and it certainly caught my attention. Playing with black and white or color images, natural or artificial light, indoor or outdoor scenes, it presents three models wandering in the Galerie des Glaces and the gardens of the Château de Versailles.
As usual with world class fashion material, the image is absolutely flawless: you can pause the video at pretty much any moment and get a picture that is perfect. The montage is synchronized with the Depeche Mode song, Enjoy the Silence, and I would be curious to hearing the underlying idea that led the direction.
Splitscreen: A Love Story
The following is a short by James W. Griffiths. I completely forgot to mention it here; fortunately I remembered it today and felt like watching it again.
While it is simple, the direction and care for details are outstanding. The images were shot entirely using a Nokia N8 mobile phone, which sure puts in perspective the kind of stuff one can do with just such a device.
Is tiled forward rendering the new hot thing?
I see more and more people talking about tiled forward rendering, and it seems to be the new hot thing everyone wants to try. AMD recently released a tech demo using such a technique: Leo.
Aras Pranckevičius, rendering architect at Unity, discussed modern forward rendering in an article, 2012 Theory for Forward Rendering, and later dropped a bunch of Tiled Forward Shading Links (which I won’t duplicate here so just click). Wolfgang Engel argues tiled based approaches don’t pay back when many lights cast shadows, compared to deferred lighting. At last Brian Keris discusses Tiled Light Culling, for the diffuse and specular contributions.
Tools of Love
Talking about The Toolsmiths and content creation, the single most impressive content creation workflow demonstration I have seen so far is probably the one they made a post about a few years ago.
In this video, Eskil Steenberg presents the tool he wrote for his game, Love. The tool gives an instant feedback and shows the results of modifications just as they go, while any concept of loading, saving, exporting, synchronizing or even file in general is gone, abstracted away.
Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle
The Toolsmiths, a blog focused on content creation tools for video games, mentioned this enlightening talk by Bret Victor. The first part has some thought provoking ideas for programmers and anyone in a creation process in general. This will certainly strike a chord or two if you’re in the demoscene or in the video game industry.
Readings on vector class optimization
Now that Revision has passed, we feel tempted to grab the ax and happily chop into parts of our code base we wanted to change but couldn’t really since we had other priorities. One tempting part is the linear algebra one: vector, quaternion and matrix data structures. Lets say vector for a start. Not that it’s really necessary, but the transformations are the most time consuming parts after the rendering itself, and the problem itself is somewhat interesting.
After a little googling, I basically found three approaches to this problem:
Every here and there, people seem to think of SSE instructions as a silver bullet and propose various examples of code, snippets or full implementations. The idea being to use dedicated processor instructions to apply operations on four components at a time instead of one after another.
Quite on the opposite, Fabian Giesen argues that it’s not such a good idea. A quick look at the recently publicly released Farbrausch codebase shows they indeed use purely conventional C++ code for it.
At last this quite dated article (with regards to hardware evolution) by Tomas Arce takes a completely orthogonal approach, consisting of using C++ templates to evaluate a full expression component after component, thus avoiding wasting time moving and copying things around.
I am curious to implement and compare them on nowadays hardware.
Pixar online library
Toward physically based rendering, screenshot after screenshot
Here are the screenshots I made for the talk I previously mentioned. They show how the rendering evolves through the choice of shading. The setup consist of a close yellowish punctual light on the up right, and a distant red-ish punctual light on the back left, as well as a dim blue ambient. The objects only differ by the specular exponent, which jumps by a times two factor from one object to the next one, left to right.
One light, Lambert diffuse only.
Two lights, Lambert diffuse only, with variance shadow map.
Two lights, Lambert diffuse only, with albedo.
Two lights, diffuse and Phong specular. Notice the color on the left.
One light, Phong specular only. Notice the discontinuity on the left.
Two lights, diffuse and Blinn-Phong specular.
One light, Blinn-Phong specular only. Notice the absence of discontinuity.
Two lights, diffuse and normalized Phong specular. Notice the highlight intensity.
Two lights, diffuse and normalized Blinn-Phong specular.
Two lights, diffuse and normalized Blinn-Phong specular, Fresnel term with Schlick
Two lights, Heidrich-Seidel anisotropic specular.
Next steps: getting used to the Fresnel version, experimenting with the exponent as a texture lookup, and normalizing the Heidrich-Seibel specular.
Back from Revision
This article is a crosspost from Ctrl-Alt-Test.fr.
I don’t know if this is going to become some sort of tradition for us, but as a matter of fact, we attended all Easter parties since the creation of our group. This year was no exception, and we had a really great time at Revision.
Revision is the kind of party that is just big enough so even though at some point you think “Ok, I’ve met pretty much every one I wanted”, when you get home you realize how many people you wanted to meet and did not. It’s also the kind of party that is so massively awesome that when you get back to your normal life, you experience some sort of post-party depression, on top of the exhaustion, and you have to get prepared for when it strikes.
So we’ve been there, and this year we presented the result of the last months of work in the PC 64k competition. The discussion of the concept started back in May 2011, and we seriously started working on it maybe around August.
While Revision was approaching, rumors were getting stronger about who would enter the competition, how serious they were about it, and how likely they’d finish in time. It became very clear that the competition was going to be very interesting, but even though, it completely outran expectations. It even got mentioned on Slashdot!
Our intro, F – Felix’s workshop, ended up at the 2nd place, after Approximate‘s gorgeous hypno-strawberries, Gaia Machina. The feedback has been very cheerful, during the competition as well as thereafter. Also, as if it was not enough, to our surprise, our previous intro, D – Four, has been nominated for two Scene.org Awards: Most Original Concept and Public Choice. Do I need to state we’re pretty happy with so many good news? :) Thank you all!
Now a week has passed already, we’re back at our daily lives, slowly recovering, and already thinking of what we’re going to do next. :) Until then, here is a capture of our intro: