Tuesday, March 29th, 2005

If anyone out there is reading this blog and understanding the topics discussed, you should take a look at this job posting from BioWare of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Yes its that BioWare. Also there are a few other interesting postings here. I just read about this today and was immediately interested in [...]

Thursday, March 10th, 2005

This message brought to you by the association for cross hardware compatibility (ACHC).
As demo writers we often ignore animation as unnessesary but when we use it, its usually a dirty hack job. I can admit that up until last year I too was guilty of this infraction but it must stop. I can’t count the [...]

Wednesday, March 9th, 2005

I have noticed a few things when working with the two different concepts for textured particle effects. Here are some of the points for each.
Point Sprites

Quarters the vertex data that needs to be passed down the vertex pipeline
No need to use (s, t) coordinates for the point sprite vertex
Rotation is difficult
Disappearing particles around edges due [...]

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

A Physics Processing Unit (PPU) is a hardware device whose sole job is to process physics calculations. These chips are specialized to handle the particular data structures and operations in hardware. I can’t wait until I can afford a brand new “PeForce” card :o)
I just saw this on Slashdot and I couldn’t believe [...]

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

I was bored the other day and decided to experiment with textures above and beyond the norm or even point sprites that I have used previously. I decided to see what could be done with The Gimp and some billboarded squares. Here is the result …

Figure 1. Text Balloon over 3D scene.
Put simply [...]

Monday, March 7th, 2005

The basis of fast collision detection systems usually is one of the many space partitioning algorithms. Here is a list of some interesting techniques for the space partitioning storage. Note that actual collision detection is separate from these since you need to operate on these to find the collisions, they simply make the checking faster [...]

Sunday, March 6th, 2005

Here are a few links of interesting for computer shadowing techniques. There are also a few cool volumetric rendering papers at the bottom.
Volumetric Shadows using Splatting
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~crawfis/Publications/shadow_vis2002.pdf
Stencil Shadows Volumes
http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore/shadowvolume/
- Depth-pass
- Depth-fail (Carmack’s Reverse)
NVidia Example of Stencil Shadow Volumes
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/robust_shadow_volumes.html
NVidia Fast Stencil Shadow Volumes (optimized)
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fast_shadow_volumes.html
Cg Shadow Volumes
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1990.asp
Another Example
http://www.paulsprojects.net/opengl/shadvol/shadvol.html
Multiple papers on shadowing techniques
http://graphics.cs.lth.se/research/shadows/
Interleaved sampling for Volume Rendering
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~heidrich/Projects/InterleavedSampling/volume.htm
Multi-Dimensional Trees for [...]