Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. My time has been spent focusing on the 19lights.com blog and making HDR video a reality. But somehow I got into twitter fight last evening during the Super Bowl. And as it turns out, it’s not easy to explain the subtleties of [...]
For those who are interested in the HDR side of things, I’ve got a new blog for you. As most of you know, www.filmicgames.com is my personal site. And I’ve finally put together a blog for 19lights, the company I’ve started. If you’re into all things HDR, you should check out the [...]
Hopefully you all had a good time at Siggraph. For game programmers, the one course that you absolutely must check out is Filtering Approaches for Real-Time Anti-Aliasing. Make sure to check out the course webpage which will include slides and sample images. Here’s my general thoughts on it.
1. We don’t need [...]
Hey guys. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what I’ve been up to since leaving Naughty Dog last January. And today I’m finally able to announce something!
NaturalHDR Trailer from 19lights on Vimeo.
After leaving, I started 19lights, LLC, where I’m the Founder/CEO. I’ve got big plans for world domination, and it starts [...]
Arithmetic encoding patents in JPEG images.
To be clear, I strongly oppose software, semiconductor design, and business method patents. That’s a longer discussion. So I was looking at how much time/money/innovation we actually lose from patents. IMO, the most damaging set of patents to the world are the ones covering Arithmetic Coding in [...]
Ah yes, the “Retina Display” post. I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while, and decided to let it go, but then it came up in a private conversation so I decided it was time to go through with it. Guess what my take on it is??? I talked about [...]
Got a face you have to render? CG faces are hard. Of course, some are harder than others so I’m introducing the “How Hard is Your Face” test.
How Hard is Your Face:
Does it have real human proportions (vs. creature-like)
Is it light-skinned (vs. dark skinned)
Is it younger (vs. older)
Is it attractive (vs. ugly)
Is it [...]
Let me ask you a question. Suppose Intel came out with a CPU that was 10x faster. But there was a catch: every once in a while it would just give you the wrong number. So suppose that you calculate x=x+7, and once in a while it just gives you x-4 instead. [...]
Graphics researchers and games programmers don’t talk to each other. That’s just how it is. I can’t count how many Siggraph papers that claim to be applicable to games. Naty has a post over at realtimerendering.com where he summarizes some of the discussion at I3D about this and adds some insights as [...]
You can sorta think of this post as part 2 of my “Everything is shiny rant”. While standard specular lighting is pretty common in games, one effect that we rarely see in games is proper fresnel.
Hopefully, you know what specular is by now. The most common model for specular in video games is [...]
