brainwagon

Back around 1984 or so, I first became interested in computer graphics. I was going to college at the University of Oregon, and we didn’t really have any graphics courses or any computers that you would think would be good at displaying graphics. Eventually they got a Tektronix 4115 terminal (which was huge, and cost […]

I keep thinking that I should build one of these, but have never gotten around to it. Bookmarking this interesting link for future reference: Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners. Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Course Notes View more documents from Douglas Lanman.

Without further explanation, here’s Daniel White’s “Mandelbulb” formula. (x, y, z)n = rn (cos(n θ) cos(n φ), sin(n θ) cos(n φ), -sin(n φ)) r = sqrt(x2 + y2 + z2) θ = atan2(y, x) φ = atan2(z, sqrt(x2+y2))

The other day I was lucky enough to be invited by Bob Whitehill to share a lunch up at UCB with Marty Banks, Kurt Akeley and a bunch of other vision researchers from their lab. I was lucky enough once to have been interviewed by Kurt when he was at SGI back in 1994 or […]

I didn’t make it to this year’s SIGGRAPH, but I still try to keep up on my reading. There are several nice courses that occurred, and the guys over at the Real-Time Rendering blog were nice enough to link ’em for us. Enjoy: Real-Time Rendering · SIGGRAPH 2009 Course Pages

Yep, I’m actually at the NVIDIA (why do I type NVIDIA like nVidia? everything seems to indicate that it is all caps now, I dunno) GPU Technology Conference, trying to once again get into the swing of things with respect to GPUs. Sadly, almost everything I know about computer graphics (which is actually considerable) predates […]

Thanks to Kevin Bjorke for pointing out this paper. It combines a couple of interesting features to create a point-based renderer that efficiently uses the GPU to render scenes with global illumination. I’ll have to read it more carefully when I have time. Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9u8EdFbmiI

Another of my attempts to make pictures from volume data…

Okay, this is a bit gruesome, but I’ve been dusting off some old papers that I never really understood on Fourier Volume Rendering, and testing my understanding by writing some simple code that takes in a volume dataset and uses the fast Fourier transform to convert it into simulated X-ray pictures. The data set that […]

While re-reading Ren Ng’s paper on light field cameras, I saw reference to a much earlier paper by Adelson and Wang. I added it to my growing collection of Google Docs for later reference. Single Lens Stereo with a Plenoptic Camera

A few days ago, I posted links to a couple of videos that used fractal rendering techniques. One was the Genesis effect of Star Trek 2, Wrath of Khan, the other, a 4KB demo contest entry. My intent was to show how computer graphics have evolved over the past 25 or so years. But the […]

It was originally my intention to compare and contrast Loren Carpenter’s Vol Libre, a mile stone in computer animation, the first film to use fractal techniques with the second video, which is a 4KB demo contest winner, but sadly, I was unable to find Vol Libre on Youtube. So, instead, I’ll compare it to the […]

Well, I’m sitting at The Standard (a frankly far too chic hotel for a forty something computer geek like myself), it’s not quite 7 A.M. and I spent my first day at SIGGRAPH. I’m hear mostly for the benefit of recruiting: sitting in the booth, answering questions and showing up at our Pixar User’s Group […]

This week I’m busy at work trying to complete dozens of SIGGRAPH sketch reviews, so it seems like an opportune time to present the usual link to  online copies of the SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers that have been accepted.  I haven’t had a chance to review these yet, but there is usually something good in this […]

Josh over at tinyscreenfuls is digging some of the fancy “pencil sketch” effects that the Mac can do with its internal camera.  Back in 1998, I experimented with writing some filters that did much the same, with some examples that I generated shown on the right.   Macintosh?  I don’t need no steekin’ Macintosh. 🙂 And […]