Tag Archives: demoscene

SIGGRAPH 2013

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More and more material and news are being released about the next edition of SIGGRAPH, so here is a short summary.

Technical papers

The video teaser of the technical papers has been published. It looks like there will be some really cool stuff to see. As every year Ke-Sen Huang maintains a page with the list of papers.

Real Time Live!

The Real Time Live! program looks very nice too, and it is good to see at least two demoscene related works will be presented there (the community GLSL tool ShaderToy by Beautypi, and some experiment by Still with a LEAP Motion controller on their production, Square).

Courses

Not much to say, it looks great and I want to see most of them… The Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games and Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice courses are a must see as usual. The Recent Advances in Light-Transport Simulation: Theory & Practice and Ray Tracing is the Future and Ever Will Be courses sound promising too.

Our work to be shown at SIGGRAPH

Lastly, we had some awesome news yesterday, when we were told our last released demoscene production, F – Felix’s workshop, has been selected to be shown as part of the Real-Time Live! demoscene reel event.

Released last year at Revision and ranking 2nd in its category, Felix’s workshop is a 64k intro: a real-time animation fitting entirely (music, meshes, textures…) within a 64kB binary file meant to run on a consumer level PC with a vanilla Windows and up to date drivers.

I was also told Eddie Lee‘s work, Artifacts, was selected as well. His outstanding demo won at Tokyo Demo Fest earlier this year.

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.

Chaos Constructions 2011 invitation, by Quite

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Not exactly recent news: last Summer the Russian demoscene group Quite presented this 64kB intro as an invitation to the demoparty Chaos Constructions that took place in Saint Petersburg. I find very inspiring the way it uses reflections and chromatic dispersion to craft the final images.

You can get the binary version from the Pouët page.

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:

Mesh generation in Farbrausch demos

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Back in 2007, the German demogroup Farbrausch was releasing its masterpiece, fr-041 Debris. Aside from the artistic qualities of this demo, it is impressive by its size: just 177kB worth of binary, for a seven minutes long full featured animation. The equivalent of a mere ten seconds of mp3 of poor quality. Size coding at work.

Reaching such a result requires dedicated tools, compression of course, but more importantly, content generation. Fabian Giesen offered in a recent blog post to give some details of the techniques used for this demo. After a quick poll, he decided to start with mesh generation, hence the first post of a very promising series: Half-edge based mesh representations: theory.

Representing a mesh with half-edges (picture stolen from the aforementioned article; diagrams that took this much time to create are worth showing ;) )

Epsilon, a 64k intro by Mercury

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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.