Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 164 — January 3, 2021


[video] How to texture a procedural object

  • the video tutorial explains the fundamentals of texture mapping in ShaderToy
  • describes how to apply a texture map to a 3D cube, sphere using tri-planar mapping
  • additionally describes how to animate a second texture set onto a sphere as well as displacement mapping


[video] Getting Started with Compute Shaders in Unity

  • this Unity tutorial aimed at beginners presents a starter guide for compute shaders
  • shows how to convert CPU based random cube generation tp GPU
  • demonstrates how much quicker even a simple GPU based version can be


Unorganized Unit Vectors Sets Quantization

  • the paper presents a new technique of on-the-fly quantization for unorganized sets of unit vectors
  • approach detects groups of windows that are then uniformly mapped onto the whole sphere surface before unit vector quantization is applied
  • the presented technique can archive better results than octahedral quantization with only 16 bits


Render Scale - Scaling Up and Down

  • tutorial series about creating a custom scriptable render pipeline in Unity
  • decoupling the render resolution from the target resolution to allow variable resolution at runtime
  • presents how to deal with post FX and the difference between upscaling with different color spaces


Basic Tessellation setup in URP

  • the Unity tutorial provides a starting point for how to use tessellation shaders
  • example shows to tessellate a simple terrain


Graphics Studies Compilation

  • collection of articles that provide a breakdown of various games
  • contains links from analyses since 2015 from multiple authors


Rendering Astronomic Stars

  • the article shows the steps required to use star databases to enable the correct rendering of stars
  • covers data parsing, dealing with different time reference frames, color conversion
  • provides sources and code for the implementation


Best shots from 2020

  • Collection of impressive screenshots from Games (mostly PC, a few from PS4 Pro)


Practical Hash-based Owen Scrambling

  • the paper presents an implementation of a hash-based Owen scrambling for Sobol sampling with nested uniform shuffling to enable multidimensional padding
  • presents practical considerations for use cases and provides an example implementation


Thanks to Dirk Dörr for support of this series.


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