Self Shadow

I've been following this paper to implement materials in a raytracer I'm building. As well as https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course/burley/s… and this homework assignment https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/cse272/homework1.pdf

The blue light of the sky is technically the result of Rayleigh scattering of the sun through the atmosphere, which can be emulated (and often is these days! [0]), but fair; it's often cheaper and easier for an artist to model them separately. I was going for a classic physics demonstration to point out how simple sources can often result in beauty. [0] The classic is Naty Hoffman's 2002 work on atmospheric scattering http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/GDC_02_HoffmanPreetha… , but it has been developed over the years, e.g. Sebastian Hillaire's work on both Frostbite https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/eacom/frostbite/files/s201… and Unreal Engine https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2020-shading-course/hillaire…

Ghosts of Tsushima may be the best Playstation game I have played EVER. It's a testament to how late in the console release cycle, developers are just now mastering internals. It's the ideal video game: open world, 13-century feudal Japan, Age of the Samurai. High contrast "Kurosawa" mode, 4K HDR is cinematically photoreal. I really hope it remains a Major IP for many years to come ;) https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2020-shading-course/

This is one of my favorite graphics/rendering papers from 2017; great work from the entire DWA Moonray team! In addition to the main paper, there are some other materials that were presented at HPG and SIGGRAPH 2017 by the same team. HPG Slides: http://www.highperformancegraphics.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/Papers-… SIGGRAPH Course Notes (the relevant part begins on Page 35): https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in-production/part1.pdf SIGGRAPH Slides: https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in-production/MoonrayV3.pdf Also, the actual shading system they used was also presented at SIGGRAPH 2017: http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2017-shading-course/dreamwork…

That is where this originated, at least in part. :) BTW one of the best references is this: http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/

Kotaku is a video game blog, so "Next-Gen" specifically refers to games running on Playstation 4, Xbox One and sometimes high-end PCs. Specifying "Game" on Kotaku is kind of redundant as almost all technology related posts are referring to games in some way. I could see it on a general technology, art or VFX site though. The siggraph physically based shading course is a great resource if you're interested in the techniques people are using in production. 2012 - http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2012-shading-course/ 2013 - http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/ 2014 (not yet available) - http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2014-shading-course/

A wonderful feature of Timothy Lottes' blog is a continuously updated list of blog articles from other graphics programmers down the right side. http://blog.selfshadow.com/ has several great articles and a great blogroll. Meanwhile, here are a few favorites: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ http://www.iquilezles.org/ http://0fps.wordpress.com/

I picked up graphics maybe three years ago and have been mostly learnt all the stuff I needed through different sites scattered all over the internet. For ray tracing Peter Shirleys books are very good. OpenGL stuff are usually found at docs.gl, https://learnopengl.com/About. For Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material checkout the bool Real-time Rendering and all the cool stuff has been coming out of Siggraph these past years, https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/. If you can, go take an elementary linear algebra course or prepare to spend time studying these. It is well worth it. One thing I have found when hacking on my own engine (see here: https://github.com/Entalpi/MeineKraft) is that graphics APIs (especially OpenGL) can have a lot of hidden meanings or even old names still being used, etc. Try to find out how the API evolved and get the reasoning behind the design decisions. This way it makes more sense and it gets a bit easier to learn. GLHF

And here's [1] Stephen Hill's list of links for 2018: [1] http://blog.selfshadow.com/2018/08/16/siggraph-2018-links/

The Disney BSDF [1, 2] is extremely flexible and offers a lot of artistic freedom. The only real limitation is that the BSDF is required to be energy conserving, but that's hardly a limitation. A physically-based renderer is still able to produce non-photorealistic results. [1] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2012-shading-course/burley/s2… [2] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course/burley/s2…

- As a starter Realtime Rendering [0] - The siggraph courses on shading [1]. The 2017 course will be on 30th of July [2]. Current techniques from AAA engines. - Papers from JCGT [3]. - Plus the paper collection from Ke-Sen Huang linking all graphics related conferences [4] have fun reading [0] http://www.realtimerendering.com/book.html [1] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2016-shading-course [2] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2017-shading-course-draft/ [3] http://jcgt.org/read.html?reload=1 [4] http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/