Here's a list of course notes that I could find; there's plenty more courses but these are the one I was interested in / tried to attend.

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I just saw this neat paper in the High Performance Graphics 2010 list: GPU Random Numbers via the Tiny Encryption Algorithm.

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Dumping some photos I took of the gameplay for future reference. Damn this skin looks good. Minor spoilerage.

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Usually game development means years of hiding in a cave until marketing says "Go", but thanks to GDC, we get to reveal some stuff we're working on right here, right now! If you're not watching this in HD, I will come over and kick your ass.

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Planets have always been the poster child for procedural rendering, or shaders approximating that, and the latest expansion to Eve added some great examples. There's now a blog post about how it works. Too bad I wasn't on this task, it sounds like the team was having a blast :)

A quick visual summary of the three main types of Compute Shader IDs. Nothing new let alone spectacular here, just a quick reminder for myself. I like pictures.

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Here are a few test images using the modified butterfly scheme to do surface subdivision. Implementing this seemed like a good way to dust off the tessellation business before diving into DirectX11, plus, I was curious how it would look on assets that were not built with this in mind at all. Pretty well, it turns out.

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Naty's excellent HPG'09 overview over at the RTR blog pointed me to an interesting paper in the family of image space global illumination, which I think relates closely to the Reflective Shadow Mapping I discussed earlier.

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Here's a few screenshots from the basic PRT technique derived earlier.

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This text brings a number of concepts related to PRT together, trying to turn them into a straight A-to-Z derivation of the basic technique (diffuse, no bounce, no scattering). ”Straight” here does not mean simple; this is not really a tutorial. Depending on how much you already know about the subject, this is a math cheat sheet, a quick refresher, or a starting point to learn what's involved.

Note: for worry-free reading and printing, you can also use this pdf file which is exactly the same thing. The html below is autogenerated so it may or may not look very good in your browser.

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Like everybody else, I like deferred rendering for the neat way it fixes the exploding cost of adding tons of light to a 3D scene. Unfortunately it costs you one of the most underused features (imho) of forward rendering: the ability to add tons of custom shaders to give more diversity and fidelity to a scene. So when Damian Trebilco promised the best of both worlds in ShaderX7, I paid attention :)

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Let's take a look at a technique for computing Global Illumination (GI) entirely on the graphics card. GI deals with the problem of letting light bounce around, just like it does in real life, so the light reaches nooks, crannies, and surfaces that are just generally not pointing straight at the light source.

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Here's a debug screenshot of my new 3D engine, showing both the shadow depth map values and resulting filtered shadows...

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Finally got around to playing with this feature, another one that's been on the to do list for years.

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Pfew, finally working :)

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