Long hiatus

Last week I was lucky enough to attend SIGGRAPH 2018, in Vancouver. My colleagues and I were presenting on a booth the work we had done, a VR story with a distinctive comic book look. I was also invited to participate to a panel session on demoscene, where I shared some lessons learned while making the 64k intro H – Immersion. The event brought a certain sense of conclusion to this work, aside from filling me with inspiration and motivation to try new things.

It has been a long time since I last posted anything here. For the last two years the majority of my spare time went into making that 64k intro. In fact the last post, “Intersection of a ray and a cone”, was related to it. I was implementing volumetric lighting for the underwater scenes, and wanted to resolve cones of light with ray tracing, before marching inside those cones. LLB and I have talked about the creation process in two making-of articles: “A dive into the making of Immersion”, and “Texturing in a 64kB intro”.

During that time, a lot of new things have happened in the computer graphics community. It has been difficult to keep track of everything. The last topic I started experimenting with is point cloud and mesh capture from photos; I might expend on it here in the future. I also want to experiment with DIY motion capture. Anyway, it’s time to resume posting here.

Technology showcase by BeautyPi

Back in 2009, Iñigo Quilez was leaving everyone in awe by releasing the milestone 4kB intro, Elevated, in cooperation with the group TBC. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece, watch it, and keep in mind this was generated from only 4096 bytes worth of data (just the text of this article is already more than a third of that).

After that, news were that he was hired by Pixar, and besides some in progress screenshots from time to time and some live coding experiments, not much was heard from him.

Then a couple of months ago this interview was published, and more recently this praising article of CGW, where we could read he had been in charge of the vegetation rendering in Pixar’s Brave. Needless to say, many people were looking forward to seeing what he would do next, especially in the real-time domain.

Today the group he’s part of, BeautyPi, which seems to be focusing on interactive animations (they presented their work earlier this year at SIGGRAPH), has published the following video. Being a showcase of their last experiments, it is not entertaining like an animation, a clip or a demo are. You could even say it’s boring. But it is visually very impressive, both technically and artistically. Although this is some real-time material, the quality is not that far from movie standards. Regarding the interaction, I am suspecting they are only scratching the surface and they may come up with some very interesting things. What these folks are doing is definitely worth following.

Epsilon, a 64k intro by Mercury

Last weekend the demogroup Mercury released at Tokyo Demo Fest the final version of their invitation to the upcoming Revision party: a 64kB demo called Epsilon. While the complexity of the scenes is very limited, the rendering, seemingly a raymarching shader, features a couple of very noteworthy real-time effects including ambient occlusion, reflexion (up to two iterations it seems) and refraction, caustics, and an hexagonal bokeh depth of field.