So yesterday was the announcement of a massive breakthrough: CERN have discovered a new particle thought to be a Higgs boson. This is a milestone discovery future generations will have in their textbooks. Maybe it is a good time to remind the excellent animation Jorge Cham published a few months ago, explaining in simple words what the Higgs boson is. (it is also a good time to have a look at the photos taken soon before the launch of the Large Hadron Collider)
Last year Cyril Crassin presented a voxel based approach for interactively computing indirect diffuse and specular lighting, along with a couple of demonstration videos, and kept working on the matter since then.
In this talk given in May at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, he briefly explains the technique:
Interestingly enough, as he points out, the technique has been implemented in the Unreal Engine 4 already.
A typhoon passed over Japan a couple of days ago, causing, at least in Tokyo, no more trouble than some serious rain and a couple of broken umbrellas. It was also an opportunity for photographers to catch some interesting scenes. This image in particular grabbed – as in, took and refused to give back – my attention.
With the kind permission of its author, Héctor García (aka. kirai / kirainet)
A real gem.
I have to disagree with the author when he argues the result is marred by the unbalanced composition (see the description on the Flickr page). I think on the contrary it makes the scene more vivid, more intense and in a sense, more fragile, bringing back the movement and life the high shutter speed froze away. It would have been so less interesting if it was perfectly aligned and balanced.
On a side note, also notice how the lines draw the attention on the model as the vanishing point is out of the frame. If it was within it, the feeling would be very different as the attention would drift toward the end of the street.
Last but not least, look at this light! Look at the warm reflections, the rim on the arm, the scattering through the drops…
This is exactly the sort of light I was referring to when I chose the title of this blog.
Update: Kirai made the following video out of some of the shots taken during that session.
Ubisoft made an impression at E3 by unveiling this video of its upcoming game, Watch Dogs. The mood definitely reminds the original Deus Ex.
Although I am not a fan of violent games, I like the effort put to make it not only look, but feel real: in particular the scene of the random guy trying to get his girlfriend to talk to him after getting shot is quite strong and disturbing.
On the rendering side, there is a lot to notice. Many materials completely nail it (look at that leather coat!), and the faces look really good, especially when back lit.
The platform is not specified, but this is advertised as being real-time. Source. Not quite out of the uncanny valley yet in my opinion, but quite some nice skin tones and hair rendering.
Update: Geeks3D pointed out that a video of the demo presentation at E3 is available.
Not exactly recent news: last Summer the Russian demoscene group Quite presented this 64kB intro as an invitation to the demoparty Chaos Constructions that took place in Saint Petersburg. I find very inspiring the way it uses reflections and chromatic dispersion to craft the final images.
You can get the binary version from the Pouët page.
The Video Mapping Blog references various examples of video projection mapping, done at any scale.