Shadow Explorer was designed for shadow map technique comparison. Currently it has four techniques implemented:simple shadow maps, percentage closer shadow maps, variance shadow maps and exponential variance shadow maps. Two different scenes and a full set of parameters should keep us busy for a while 🙂
Graphics Runner blog. Instant Radiosity is a theoretically simple method. It traces paths from the primary light source and creates virtual point lights (VPL) when the path hits the scene. These VPLs approximate the reflected light from that region of the scene.
The path can then be reflected, possibly with a new random direction, and is further traced until it intersects the scene again. The decision to further pursue a path can be as simple as russian roulette. The approach in the Graphics Runner blog optimizes this by defining a grid of voxels and merging all the VPLs in each voxel into a single VPL. The scene is then lit with all the computed VPLs. Graphics Runner uses nVidia Optix for Ray Tracing. The article includes a small tutorial and provides some source code.
Randi J. Rost, Bill Licea-Kane, Dan Ginsburg, John M. Kessenic, Barthold Lichtenbelt, Hugh Malan, Mike Weiblen
This is the third edition of the orange book. It covers GLSL 1.4 and entry points from OpenGL 3.1. As usual the book is part tutorial, part reference. Very well written, clear and concise. Check out the companion site.
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[youtubeV youtubeurl=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo” width=”350″ height=”300″]
Truly Remarkable! This is worth a million words!
Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines,Naty Hoffmann
Bigger and Better than the previous editions. This book is becoming a reference on real time graphics. It covers a very large set of topics on CG. The companion site is also worth looking into.
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A new section with Maths Topics has been added to Lightouse3D.
It includes vector operations (cross product, dot product, projection), Lines, Rays, Planes, Intersections (Ray-Sphere and Ray-Triangle), and Catmull-Rom Spline.
There is a new section on the GLUT tutorial. It introduces the glutPostRedisplay function.
This function replaces the idle function, and allows us to save CPU when the application is idle. Full source code is provided as usual.
A C++ library which can be used to parse an expression in a string. The syntax of the expression is similar to the way we write expressions when coding in C.
The expression can be evaluated as weel, just provide the values for the variables. The performance seems very good from the numbers presented in the speed tests. The library comes with documentation and an example.
C Programming Tips, by Philip Guo from Stanford University, is a collection of tips about C programming.
C, and C++ are two of the most used programming languages when building applications with OpenGL. Application maintenance can become a nightmare as apps grow larger and larger. Following these simple tips can partly avoid countless days hunting for bugs.
Rick Parent
An excellent introduction to computer animation. Facial animation, particle systems, flocking, natural phenomena, and rigid body simulation are just some of the topics covered by this volume.
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