Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 52 — August 19, 2018

• slides for the layered real-time shading model discussed in issue 38
• using a statistical analysis of light transport in layered structures
• a visual explanation of the statistical analysis framework
• presentation of results, comparison against stochastic references and discussion of limitations of the technique

• slides for the technique discussed in issue 45
• explanation of problems with linear blending
• how contrast-preserving blending is able to mitigate some of these problems
• presents a histogram-preserving blending algorithm that has many use cases besides the introduced procedural texturing technique
• whenever you blend
  • weighted data: use premultiplied blending
  • data chosen randomly: use histogram-preserving blending

• video discussing a fully automated UV unwrapping tool
• explains all steps of the pipeline that tries to find the best projection technique for local parts of the model
• tool available for licensing

• added pixel history view for D3D12 and added support for support for Vulkan ray trace extension
• new GPU trace activity view visualizes the GPU utilization in more detail
• provides a breakdown of wrap level activity, connected to events and performance markers

• overview of the PICA PICA hybrid raytracing pipeline
• thought about DirectXRaytracing constraints related to acceleration structures
• presentation of a texture LOD technique developed with Nvidia
  • preprint available here
• Pica Pica assets are avaible with with a non-commercial license on sketchfab

• comparison of 3 techniques to generate blue noise
• visual quality comparison of three methods to generate blue noise
• the void and cluster technique produces the best results in the test

• integration of spherical harmonics over spherical polygons
• using a closed form expression with linear cost
• shows applications for area lights and approximating shadows from area lights

• Nvidia open sourced the MDL SDK (Material Definition Language)
• set of tools that allow materials to be shared between different renderers
• can generate texturing functions for multiple backends; however the GLSL backend is NOT part of the open source release

slides and video for the “Introduction to DirectX RayTracing” track from Siggraph 2018 have been released

• the pdf version of the Ray Tracing Minibooks series has been released for free

• growing collection of links to SIGGRAPH 2018 content

• new GPU architecture from Nvidia
• dedicated ray tracing hardware
• volta cores have int8 and int4 support
• support for variable rate shading

• course notes are available

• slides and videos for the Khronos talks from SIGGRAPH 2018

• list of author’s favorite papers with a brief summary of the content

• slides for the Siggraph course about the fundamentals of color science and color management for games and film

• slides for the Siggraph course
• provides an overview of all API interfaces required to render 3D meshes

• fully vulkan 1.1 compatible
• support for VK_EXT_conditional_rendering, VK_KHR_8bit_storage