The physics of cloaking

In this seminar, Dr. Greg Gbur presents the current state of research on cloaking devices, the differences between science fiction and what seem to actually be possible, and different applications beyond invisibility, like protection from thermal radiation or earthquakes.

A real-time post-processing crash course

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.

GDC 2015 presentations

The Game Developers Conference took place last week in San Francisco. As I am starting to see more speakers publish their slides, I am creating this post to keep track of some them (this list is not meant to be exhaustive).

For a more extensive list, Cédric Guillemet has been garnering links to GDC 2015 papers on his blog.

How to use light to make better demos?

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

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.

Talking about light at Revision

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.