Secret Garden – Versailles

A friend of mine pointed out this Dior video and it certainly caught my attention. Playing with black and white or color images, natural or artificial light, indoor or outdoor scenes, it presents three models wandering in the Galerie des Glaces and the gardens of the Château de Versailles.

As usual with world class fashion material, the image is absolutely flawless: you can pause the video at pretty much any moment and get a picture that is perfect. The montage is synchronized with the Depeche Mode song, Enjoy the Silence, and I would be curious to hearing the underlying idea that led the direction.

Splitscreen: A Love Story

The following is a short by James W. Griffiths. I completely forgot to mention it here; fortunately I remembered it today and felt like watching it again.

While it is simple, the direction and care for details are outstanding. The images were shot entirely using a Nokia N8 mobile phone, which sure puts in perspective the kind of stuff one can do with just such a device.

Is tiled forward rendering the new hot thing?

I see more and more people talking about tiled forward rendering, and it seems to be the new hot thing everyone wants to try. AMD recently released a tech demo using such a technique: Leo.

Aras Pranckevičius, rendering architect at Unity, discussed modern forward rendering in an article, 2012 Theory for Forward Rendering, and later dropped a bunch of Tiled Forward Shading Links (which I won’t duplicate here so just click). Wolfgang Engel argues tiled based approaches don’t pay back when many lights cast shadows, compared to deferred lighting. At last Brian Keris discusses Tiled Light Culling, for the diffuse and specular contributions.

Tools of Love

Talking about The Toolsmiths and content creation, the single most impressive content creation workflow demonstration I have seen so far is probably the one they made a post about a few years ago.

In this video, Eskil Steenberg presents the tool he wrote for his game, Love. The tool gives an instant feedback and shows the results of modifications just as they go, while any concept of loading, saving, exporting, synchronizing or even file in general is gone, abstracted away.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle

The Toolsmiths, a blog focused on content creation tools for video games, mentioned this enlightening talk by Bret Victor. The first part has some thought provoking ideas for programmers and anyone in a creation process in general. This will certainly strike a chord or two if you’re in the demoscene or in the video game industry.