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If all you want is to be able to browse the latest graphics research papers in a convenient fashion, the #1 site to go to is Ke-Sen Huang's page. Every paper released at every major conference from the past 10 to 20 years is there, with links to everything you'd want: ACM reference page, free access preprint if available, website for the paper if available, etc. It's an amazing resource and something you just have to have bookmarked.

If you want something more curated, it becomes trickier, but a fun way of doing it is to look for the "technical papers preview" videos online for SIGGRAPH. A fairly long-standing tradition of that particular conference is to kick off the whole thing with a very short, usually humorous blurb of every technical paper being presented that year, done by the authors of each paper, in one giant marathon session on the first day. Each paper gets like 30 seconds to pitch its idea and show it off visually, and while you can't find the full 2-3 hour presentation that contains all of them, there's usually a shortened version online with some interesting/promising examples.

Here http://kesen.realtimerendering... This truly helpful fellow collects nigh every paper from every conference covering such in an easily browsable site. The only 2 things not covered are here http://gdcvault.com/ and here http://advances.realtimerender...

Here http://kesen.realtimerendering... This truly helpful fellow collects nigh every paper from every conference covering such in an easily browsable site. The only 2 things not covered are here http://gdcvault.com/ and here http://advances.realtimerender...

Link me to the powerpoint presentations that have those points then. I doubt they exist, they are your points and they are derived from your own misinterpretation of the information.

Here's a short summary from a Vulkan IMPLEMENTOR on where OpenGL is better than Vulkan, and vice-versa:
https://developer.nvidia.com/e...
Then if you read Graham Seller's own Powerpoint AND have experience in developing LARGE applications you can see massive potential pitfalls in using Vulkan that you won't get with OpenGL:
http://nextgenapis.realtimeren...
Of course, as an amateur you are not used to looking for indications of the limitations of an API rather than the marketing points - as doing this only comes with experience (and as I was a fanboi once but learned to look through the marketing spiel with a critical eye - a habit which it appears you have not yet developed).

If that is how you feel then use one of the various alternative solutions I already outlined for you.

Nope, OpenGL is more than sufficient - especially with the "Approaching Zero Driver Overhead" approaches and extensions. You don't seem to grok that the increased productivity of OpenGL for desktop workloads more than makes up for the few cases where Vulkan is better. For example, Vulkan produces zero benefit when rendering tessellated terrain on the GPU in my flight simulator, because the GPU is doing all the work and the use of the Vulkan command-buffer model gains nothing, but increases development cost. Hence, OpenGL is still a better option when your problem is rendering hundreds of millions of polygons per second on a discrete workstationGPU, and not submitting tens of thousands of sprites to a phone GPU with the phone's limited CPU.

But it isn't poorly designed, your specific criticism is that it has memory barriers - just like GLSL does - so when you say you have all this experience yet you don't understand the basics of asynchronous programming and don't even know GLSL very well certainly calls your claims into question.

Yes, OpenGL has that feature (so why use Vulkan?) but you don't HAVE to use that feature. This is the two-level API design I mentioned a few posts back, and why OpenGL gives you some control if you need it, plus higher-level options too - but you are not forced to do everything as if you were programming for a console with a shelf-life of a few years. Plus, on my MacPro with dual D700s the glMemoryBarrier call s not yet supported (grrrrrr crappy Apple spending effort on Metal instead).

No, I said post your objective criticism, the problem is you are so misinformed that you don't have one. You've gone to great effort to make baseless claims about things you clearly don't understand but then tell me you don't have time to post such things on the Khronos forum? No sorry that's just rubbish. If you really thought it was a waste of time and not that you're just going to look like an idiot then you wouldn't be spending all this time trying to convince me. Quite frankly when your only criticism of the design of the API is because it has memory barriers (and you think that is telling you the internal state of the GPU, which it isn't) then you have proven all this credential-dropping is untrue since you don't even have any experience with the basics of asynchronous programming and you think application code belongs in the driver. Every time you get backed into a corner you throw out the obviously false claim that you are expderienced, which you clearly are not.

Wrong. EVERYBODY says that Vulkan is more work. Everyone says that Vulkan drivers don't check for errors, which means it is easier to not only crash your application, but crash the whole damn machine - you wait until Vulkan is used in the Real World (tm). Everyo

Presto is not even directly related to rendering.

In terms of rendering, try making an architectural visualization with PRman. Try doing product shots. Try doing anything besides exactly what it was built to do within the confines of Pixar. There's a reason other rendering tools exist, and price alone is not it. Keep in mind that PRMan couldn't even do accurate reflections for the longest of times, and the general sentiment at the time was that it didn't need to be able to anyway, as few things in the movies it was being used for had reflective surfaces, and where they did, they could always find a work-around or use another tool. It didn't take very long for them to add a raytracing subsystem, though.

That said, rendering is more or less old news, simply because the computational power now exists to render things using physically accurate equations within a reasonable time frame without having to resort to cheats like photon mapping, render cache, etc. (even if many still opt to do so), and flexible enough to let artists bend the rules of physics where they feel it delivers a better aesthetic result. Moreover, this is within reach of prosumer budgets. Anybody serious enough can buy a decent graphics card, and VRay for [choice of animation package here], and off they go. There haven't been particularly great advances in core rendering technology shown off at, for example, Siggraph or EuroGraphics for a while now. Most of it is just about speeding up the existing computations a little bit more, or finding somewhat more efficient ways to do X, where X is usually a somewhat obscure portion of rendering that might not even be related to the visual at all, but e.g. transfer of properties, sound propagation, and others). If anything, there appears to be more research in Non-Photorealistic Rendering than there is in photorealistic.

So if all rendering is practically equal, where do you get artists to focus? On modeling tools, animations tools, rigging tools, etc. All the actual artist-side-of-things which can interface with whatever renderer they want (as long as they use reasonably agnostic shaders); which are exactly the areas where Pixar's tools shine.

Presto is not even directly related to rendering.

In terms of rendering, try making an architectural visualization with PRman. Try doing product shots. Try doing anything besides exactly what it was built to do within the confines of Pixar. There's a reason other rendering tools exist, and price alone is not it. Keep in mind that PRMan couldn't even do accurate reflections for the longest of times, and the general sentiment at the time was that it didn't need to be able to anyway, as few things in the movies it was being used for had reflective surfaces, and where they did, they could always find a work-around or use another tool. It didn't take very long for them to add a raytracing subsystem, though.

That said, rendering is more or less old news, simply because the computational power now exists to render things using physically accurate equations within a reasonable time frame without having to resort to cheats like photon mapping, render cache, etc. (even if many still opt to do so), and flexible enough to let artists bend the rules of physics where they feel it delivers a better aesthetic result. Moreover, this is within reach of prosumer budgets. Anybody serious enough can buy a decent graphics card, and VRay for [choice of animation package here], and off they go. There haven't been particularly great advances in core rendering technology shown off at, for example, Siggraph or EuroGraphics for a while now. Most of it is just about speeding up the existing computations a little bit more, or finding somewhat more efficient ways to do X, where X is usually a somewhat obscure portion of rendering that might not even be related to the visual at all, but e.g. transfer of properties, sound propagation, and others). If anything, there appears to be more research in Non-Photorealistic Rendering than there is in photorealistic.

So if all rendering is practically equal, where do you get artists to focus? On modeling tools, animations tools, rigging tools, etc. All the actual artist-side-of-things which can interface with whatever renderer they want (as long as they use reasonably agnostic shaders); which are exactly the areas where Pixar's tools shine.

Minecraft is the easiest 3D modeling software you will ever find. Once you've built your model, export it with the free Mineways software: http://www.realtimerendering.com/erich/minecraft/public/mineways/

"brings... into the real world" should really be something more like a system to format your creations for use with a 3-D printer.

That exists also. In fact it seems that there are a number of projects working on the basic idea of exporting from Minecraft to a 3d printer.

"brings... into the real world" should really be something more like a system to format your creations for use with a 3-D printer.

That exists also. In fact it seems that there are a number of projects working on the basic idea of exporting from Minecraft to a 3d printer.

In undergrad (CS) I did more math than was required, and honours math at that. When I started grad school I was introduced to a transform we were using to analyze medical images. There's an article somewhere where I'm quoted as saying that some smart grad student is going to come along some day and improve the algorithm for calculating that transform so that it's actually practical. It turns out the smart grad student didn't come along, so I had to do it. That involved a lot of calculus, both continuous and discrete. Now I mostly develop new medical image processing techniques and analyze data, which involves fairly high level statistics. Statistics is all calculus and, when you get further on, calculus and linear algebra.

You say you want to be a game programmer? Here are some of the papers from SIGGRAPH this year. Take a read through some of them. This one might be a good place to start... most of the authors are from Pixar. How much math do you see? How much math do you understand? These are the algorithms you'll be working with by the time you graduate. Note that there isn't a lot of continuous calculus in these (but a lot of discrete!). Somebody has already done much of the hard work of discretizing it for you. That's not always the case.

You can probably get away with not learning any math and being a run of the mill code monkey. If you want to be good at what you do though, learn the math.

Yes, enough trees together definitely hold up, this model (one of my favorites) is printed at an even smaller scale, 1 mm/block, and the canopy prints fine. The forest has to be pretty dense, though. The default Mineways print size of 2 mm/block is mostly good enough that normal trees are unlikely to snap off. More info here.

Wow, fantastic article, thanks! The problem is much worse than I previously thought: search on ICON Group International on Amazon and you'll see 472,237 results! Makes VDM's mere 57,000 (well, between yesterday and today they added 659 titles so far) seem wimpy.

The bot idea of 1-star reviews: yes, I mentioned this idea too, in my original article, linked from the original Slashdot submission. Some nerd somewhere, make it so! Amazon can't possibly complain that you're spamming, considering the target.

VDM Publishing itself specializes in print of demand of various people's theses. Something like a vanity press, but as a bonus the authors don't have to pay anything, and VDM takes 80% of the earnings. These are sometimes weak offerings, and often available to download for free, but the practice itself is nothing out of the ordinary. So VDM Publishing's authors really are authors, but of theses and similar.

Alphascript and Betascript Publishing (and Fastbooks, in German) are the Wikipedia-aggregation publishers, imprints of (i.e., marketing names for) VDM Publishing. They entirely avoid the expense of looking around for theses and approaching authors, instead simply sucking related articles from Wikipedia. The book titles are goofy as a result, there are no authors, but the costs are miniscule. With a pool of a few hundred million unsuspecting customers exposed via Amazon and others, it just takes one out of every thousand to misstep to make for a profitable business, one that basically makes money off of people's ignorance. At least cigarettes offer nicotine in addition to lung cancer. To the people who argue, "well, you should just be aware of the problem", this sounds to me like smug "I'd never get fooled, I'm so smart" blather to me. Would you say the same if you were the one who bought such a book? Maybe you would, maybe you're the type of person who blames themselves for getting conned, but I blame the con man.

Speaking of blather, I'm sad that no one's commented on one of the Betascript "editors" names is Lambert M. Surhone, which the Internet Anagram Server turns into "Blather Summoner" as the first match, a great fit for the products offered. My original article on VDM mentions this and other fine anagrams.

One ray of sunshine is that giving these books 1-star ratings on Amazon does kick them down the lists. For example, I gave 1-star ratings to a number of their so-called books on Transnistria on Amazon. 3 of their books were the top three books listed on this subject on Amazon before I rated them, now they appear further down the list.

As far as other firms go, AbeBooks indeed sells Alphascript Publishing (45333) and Betascript Publishing (953) books. Oddly, they are all the same price (vs. those on Amazon, which appear to be priced by the pound), from a few different shops. Borders, to their credit, does not carry any Alphascript or Betascript books. Barnes and Noble does.

I will say one thing for VDM, they do add a tiny bit of value (beyond the wacked titles) in their choices of covers, e.g. this peculiar one for a book on legal disputes about Harry Potter.

VDM Publishing itself specializes in print of demand of various people's theses. Something like a vanity press, but as a bonus the authors don't have to pay anything, and VDM takes 80% of the earnings. These are sometimes weak offerings, and often available to download for free, but the practice itself is nothing out of the ordinary. So VDM Publishing's authors really are authors, but of theses and similar.

Alphascript and Betascript Publishing (and Fastbooks, in German) are the Wikipedia-aggregation publishers, imprints of (i.e., marketing names for) VDM Publishing. They entirely avoid the expense of looking around for theses and approaching authors, instead simply sucking related articles from Wikipedia. The book titles are goofy as a result, there are no authors, but the costs are miniscule. With a pool of a few hundred million unsuspecting customers exposed via Amazon and others, it just takes one out of every thousand to misstep to make for a profitable business, one that basically makes money off of people's ignorance. At least cigarettes offer nicotine in addition to lung cancer. To the people who argue, "well, you should just be aware of the problem", this sounds to me like smug "I'd never get fooled, I'm so smart" blather to me. Would you say the same if you were the one who bought such a book? Maybe you would, maybe you're the type of person who blames themselves for getting conned, but I blame the con man.

Speaking of blather, I'm sad that no one's commented on one of the Betascript "editors" names is Lambert M. Surhone, which the Internet Anagram Server turns into "Blather Summoner" as the first match, a great fit for the products offered. My original article on VDM mentions this and other fine anagrams.

One ray of sunshine is that giving these books 1-star ratings on Amazon does kick them down the lists. For example, I gave 1-star ratings to a number of their so-called books on Transnistria on Amazon. 3 of their books were the top three books listed on this subject on Amazon before I rated them, now they appear further down the list.

As far as other firms go, AbeBooks indeed sells Alphascript Publishing (45333) and Betascript Publishing (953) books. Oddly, they are all the same price (vs. those on Amazon, which appear to be priced by the pound), from a few different shops. Borders, to their credit, does not carry any Alphascript or Betascript books. Barnes and Noble does.

I will say one thing for VDM, they do add a tiny bit of value (beyond the wacked titles) in their choices of covers, e.g. this peculiar one for a book on legal disputes about Harry Potter.

• The NeHe tutorials are a good place to start, if you want to start with code...
  
• From a theory perspective, books are good, like 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, and some community sites too, like GameDev's Graphics Theory section.
  
• Realtime Rendering - the website associated with the book of the same name. I never really made it through the book, but the web page has an excellent collection of links to other sources of information....
  
• Forums like GameDev.net and Devmaster are another approach.
  

Thanks for the kind words about the Ray Tracing News. I actually have a new issue ready to go, it's just a matter of converting it to HTML. Tonight, I hope...

- Eric