When rendering is that beautiful

Sébastien Linage, who is a lead artist for Electronic Arts, published a video that completely nails what I value in rendering.

This video is just a montage of in game scenery shots from Need For Speed: The Run. There are no action scenes, no race, no cars running, no tires screaming: only a flyby through the environments crafted by the team who worked on this game. The scenes and the rendering are just that beautiful: beautiful enough so simply showing them with some soundtrack already makes a nice video.

Those guys really did an awesome job in that regard.

Real-time lens flare rendering

Back in May, on a French demoscene forum, demoscene.fr, Patapom mentioned a list of lens flare effects used by Video Copilot and presented his idea of implementing all of them in real-time. A few weeks later he finally presented his lens flare real-time rendering implementation as well as how his experiment turned out and provided the following video.

A physically-based real-time lens flare rendering method was also presented at SIGGRAPH in August.

Images from Cassini

When I was a child, astronomy was a big thing to me, and while I gave up on the idea of ever becoming an astronomer since then, I am still in love with that field. At the time, images would come from books, a scarce resource to a kiddie. But nowadays, high quality pictures are just a click away, on websites such as the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

One of the recent missions that most impresses me is the Cassini one. The images that spacecraft has provided over the last years on its journey to Saturn and its satellites are magnificent.

Chris Abbas made a video out of some of them, resulting in this mesmerizing two minutes film:

Here are a couple of photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft:

Also don’t miss the compilation published on the The Big Picture.

Calligraphy and lettering art

When it comes to typography, my main source of information is Geoffrey Dorne, a tech savvy graphic artist who reports (in French) things of interest on his design news blog, graphism.fr.

This is where I heard of Luca Barcellona, an Italian graphic artist and calligrapher. I consider typography and calligraphy to be ones of the finest forms of art, so seeing videos of his work just leaves me in awe.