Tag Archives: Saarbrücken

A real-time post-processing crash course

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Revision 2015 took place last month, on the Easter weekend as usual. I was lucky enough to attend and experience the great competitions that took place this year; I can’t recommend you enough to check all the good stuff that came out of it.

Like the previous times I shared some insights in a seminar, as an opportunity to practice public talking. Since our post-processing have quite improved with our last demo (Ctrl-Alt-Test : G – Level One), the topic was the implementation of a few post-processing effects in a real-time renderer: glow, lens flare, light streak, motion blur…

Having been fairly busy over the last months though, with work and the organising of Tokyo Demo Fest among others, I couldn’t afford as much time as I wanted to spend on the presentation unfortunately. An hour before the presentation I was still working on the slides, but all in all it went better than expected. I also experimented with doing a live demonstration, hopefully more engaging than some screenshots or even a video capture can be.

Here is the video recording made by the team at Revision (kudos to you guys for the fantastic work this year). I will provide the slides later on, after I properly finish the credits and references part.

Abstract:
Over decades photographers, then filmmakers, have learned to take advantage of optical phenomenons, and perfected the recipe of chemicals used in films, to affect the visual appeal of their images. Transposed to rendering, those lessons can make your image more pleasant to the eye, change its realism, affect its mood, or make it easier to read. In this course we will present different effects that can be implemented in a real-time rendering pipeline, the theory behind them, the implementation details in practice, and how they could fit in your workflow.

Invitation to Revision party 2014

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Revision is a big demoparty held each year at Easter, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Whenever possible, it is a custom in the demoscene to release a production dedicated to officially announce upcoming parties: an invitation.

Last weekend at the Ultimate Meeting, the invitation to Revision 2014 was presented. The quality of invitations can vary wildly, from rushed and uninspired to works of art (Kings of the playground or You Should are two examples that come to mind); this new invitation is rather on the higher end of the spectrum. Aiming for epic feeling, and nailing it, it imagines a time when the mostly unheard off sub culture has become a dominant one and the reason for a major Super Bowl like event in a Tron like set.

Enjoy it and its dry wit jokes. :)

How to use light to make better demos?

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This is the third day at Revision, and my contribution this year is the talk I gave yesterday. Unlike last year, this seminar is not technical at all but focused on the design aspect and, to some extent, how it relates to the technical one. The context is demomaking, but many ideas are still valid in other media.

There were some issues with the recording unfortunately, which means some elements are missing (you will notice some blanks at the beginning). In particular after 5mn, there is an important point which was completely cut out. The text was:

Throwing a new technique at whatever you’re doing is not going to make it any better. It’s only going to change what you can achieve. There are two sides of image creation: the technical one and the artistic one. Different techniques allow to do different things, and the more techniques you master, the better you understand what you can and cannot do with them, and how to do it. Technique becomes a tool that changes how you can express yourself.

Here are the slides with notes (~5MB), or a low quality version (~1MB).

For more demoscene related talks, here is the full list of seminars at Revision 2013.

Talking about light at Revision, 2

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Last year I gave a talk at Revision in which I summed up some of the things I had been gathering on light shading.

This year too I will be attending Revision, in Saarbrücken, Germany, and will give a talk about light again. I will present some of the new stuff I learned. This time the topic is going to be focused on the use of light from a design perspective, in particular in the context of demo-making. It will also be an opportunity to improve on the things I wasn’t happy with regarding the performance: hopefully a better diction, flow and construction.

The talk is scheduled for Saturday, March 30th, at 12:00: “How to use light to make better demos?”. Please come and don’t bring tomatoes. :)

Also make sure to have a look to the complete list of talks, there is a lot of exciting stuff scheduled.

Back from Revision

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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.

Sidrip Alliance performing at Revision

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:

Introduction to light shading for real-time rendering

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I am finally back in Tokyo after two intense weeks in Europe, during which I did things as various as being a perfect tourist in four capitals (stolen bag experience included) or attending the world biggest demoparty, getting nominated with the rest of my group for some awards, ranking 2nd in a competition and getting slashdotted for that. :)

As previously advertised, I presented at Revision a talk on light shading. A video was recorded for the streaming and has been made available online pretty much immediately, thanks to the work of the Revision team:

Unfortunately, the last minutes are missing. I was basically comparing the Fresnel version with the manually tweaked version, and explaining that while the former might not look perfect yet, it was an out of the box result, while the latter required me to introduce some fudge factor I had to tweak. Regarding references, I couldn’t list them all so I just mentioned the most significant ones (the first part of this talk is strongly inspired by Naty Hoffmann’s course introduction) and referred to here for the rest. At last I mentioned an evaluation sheet for whoever cared to give some feedback.

Performance wise, when seeing the video I feel embarrassed. The flow is far from what I was aiming, some explanations are not crystal clear as I wanted them to be, and you can notice I was confused a couple of times by the surrounding noise (hey, did I mention it’s a party?). But on the other hand various people told me it was a good seminar so even though there is much room for improvement, it’s not that bad of a start I guess.

Anyway, you can download a quick export of the party version of the slides. When I have some time I will try to get a better looking export (without text and images cropped out), and fix a couple of slides.

Talking about light at Revision

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Over the last months I have been reading various resources on light shading, and shared the most relevant ones on this blog. Along the way I became more and more thrilled by how light interacts with materials and how we can model it to get more convincing rendering.

I found some insights to be really enlightening and very worth sharing. Therefore as a way of challenging my own understanding of this matter and as an opportunity to practice talk, I decided to speak about real-time lighting during a seminar at Revision.

Revision is a big demoparty that will be held during four days over the Easter weekend in Saarbrücken, Germany. If you are coming (which I recommend) and want to hear about shading, specular and Fresnel, come and see me!

Update: the talk is scheduled for Saturday April 7th, 14h – 15h.

“Introduction to light shading for real-time rendering”

Update: see this post for the material.