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Writing Tools Faster
Niklas Gray of Our Machinery walks through the design failings of their previous game engines (Bitsquid and Stingray) and how they applied those lessons to their new engine. Topics include frameworks, data definition, and UI.
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Revision 2020: Physically Based Shading Without Locking Yourself In
Implementing a physically based shading model without locking yourself in
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Advanced Global Illumination Using Photon Mapping
Photon mapping provides a practical way of efficiently simulating global illumination including interreflections, caustics, color bleeding, participating media and subsurface scattering in scenes with complicated geometry and advanced material models. This class will provide the insight necessary to efficiently implement and use photon mapping to simulate global illumination in complex scenes. The presentation will briefly cover the fundamentals of photon mapping including efficient techniques and datastructures for managing large numbers of rays and photons. In addition, we will describe how to integrate the information from the photon maps in shading algorithms to render global illumination.
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Bidirectional Path Tracing and Multiple Importance Sampling (2 Minute Papers)
With a classical unidirectional path tracer, we'll have some scenes where it is difficult to connect to the light source, and therefore many of our computed samples will be wasted. What if we would start not only one light path from the camera, but one also from the light source, and connect the two together? It turns out that we get a much more robust technique that can render a variety of "packed" scenes with lots of occlusions with ease.
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Daniel Shiffman's Youtube
Daniel Shiffman teaches creative coding. Mostly using high level languages but certainly worth a peek or two.
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How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in JavaScript by Mary Rose Cook
"Little Lisp is an interpreter that supports function invocation, lambdas, lets, ifs, numbers, strings, a few library functions, and lists. I wrote it for a lightning talk at the Recurse Center to show how easy it is to write an interpreter. The code is 116 lines of JavaScript. I will explain how it works."
There is also a video version of this article: https://youtu.be/hqnTvuvXPCc
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How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes
A short video listing the tricks developers can use to fit a game into a small NES cartridge.
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Matrix row-column sampling for the many-light problem
Computing global illumination using the many-lights approach is expensive, this algorithm presents a method ("exploration") for reducing the amount of lights to be sampled.
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Metropolis Light Transport (2 Minute Papers)
Metropolis Light Transport is a powerful technique that can outperform the convergence speed of Bidirectional Path Tracing on most difficult scenes (what makes a scene difficult is a story on its own). It promises optimal importance sampling "along multiple steps" in the stationary distribution of the Markov chain.
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Path Tracing and Next Event Estimation (2 Minute Papers)
A description of Path Tracing, a ray tracing solution to the rendering equation, and one of its traditional optimizations, Next Event Estimation.
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Photon Mapping (2 Minute Papers)
Describes the Photon Mapping solution to light transport.
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Practical Global Illumination with Irradiance Caching
Lighting usually only changes smoothly over a surface, Irradiance Caching is a classic approach to reduce the computational cost by only computing lighting at points where it changes quickly.
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Radiosity
Lecture describing how to solve the radiosity equations used to compuse diffuse global illumination.
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Ray-Traced Irradiance Fields (Real-Time Light Probe Rendering)
[...] how to combine glossy reflection ray tracing with diffuse ray-traced irradiance field probes. This creates a complete dynamic global illumination solution that scales across all DXR GPUs and minimizes light leaking without requiring manual per-probe or lightmap work by artists.
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Revision 2020: Modern 64k Intro Compression
Squishy is a new 64k intro compressor used by top groups in 7 productions at revision 2019, 3 of them meteorik-nominated 64k intros, and it has recently been released in the wild. This talk start by an intro to 64k intros and executable compression, and will continue with a deep-dive into squishy's internals, what makes it special, and some tips on how you can start making your own executable compressors.
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Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care
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Stochastic Lightcuts
A solution to the global illumination problem by sampling from many lights. Stochastic Lightcuts is an improvement on the earlier Lightcuts algorithm. Presentation at HPG 2019.
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Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping (2 Minute Papers)
Describes improvements to Photon Mapping, called Progressive Photon Mapping, Stochastic Photon Mapping, and their combination.