The Production Pipeline, Webinar
As part of ongoing promotions for the book, The Digital Visual Effects Studio: The Artists and Their Work Revealed, Mayur hosted webinars on December 6 and 7, 2009. In the sessions, Mayur made the case for artist-centric pipelines, as opposed to data-centric pipelines and he shared some insight as to why production pipelines fail to be fast, light and powerful.
We are pleased to make available a recording of one of the sessions, with a run-time of 56m30s.
If you wish to download the webinar, it is available in FLV (26MB) and MP4 (28MB) formats.
The Digital Visual Effects Studio
As part of the release of The Digital Visual Effects Studio: The Artists and Their Work Revealed, we are making available excerpts from the book, including the index, table of contents and cover.
To order your own copy, please visit our eStore or look for the book at Amazon.com.
Technical Downloads
From time to time, we are pleased to make available technical papers or source code of interest to the computing community.
Travelling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods
Unpublished work from 2008: We present a solution to the travelling salesman problem, with neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are approximated with bounding volumes. The technique also allows insertions, searches and deletions to be interleaved, so it is dynamic in that sense. PDF.
Bounding Volumes
We present a series of operations for comparing bounding volumes. Traditional metrics based on intersections or unions sometimes do not give meaningful information across the entire range of relative positions. Reference: Similarity Metrics for Bounding Volumes. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Posters Session. PDF.
Random Numbers
We present a hashing function suited for computer graphics applications, including random number generation. Reference: Random Numbers for Computer Graphics, Sketches and Applications, ACM SIGGRAPH 2006. PDF. Here is a more complete (unpublished) description of the Goulburn hashing function. PDF. Unfortunately, Goulburn has been shown to have flaws for general hashing applications. Use for computer graphics noises seems to be an acceptable application.
Simulation Noise
We present a simple noise function that generates a divergence-free field. Our technique appeared before curl noise, it executes more quickly, and we still prefer its aesthetics. The shapes in simulation noise are more rounded and natural. See what you think. Reference: Simple Divergence-Free Fields for Artistic Simulation, ACM Journal of Graphics Tools, Volume 10, Number 4; December 2005. PDF.
Shuffle Trees
Unpublished work from 2002: Shuffle trees are a randomized self-adjusting binary search tree that conduct no more than one rotation per operation. For this reason they have interesting similarities and contrasts with splay trees. We believe they are easier to implement than top-down splaying and better for use when writing to memory is expensive. Here is a technical memo without proofs. PDF. The Travelling Salesman Problem paper elsewhere in this section informally argues why shuffle tree traversals operate in lgN time. Here is a reference implementation that implements a subset of the STL interface for associative data structures: C++. Here is an interesting experiment, using shuffle trees for data compression: C++.
Line Art Rendering
The A-buffer hidden surface evaluator can be extended to efficiently and robustly support line art rendering. Reference: ACM SIGGRAPH 2000 Conference Abstracts and Applications. PDF. A concise technical memo on the technique. PDF.