INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS

finally done.

gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype

is this anything

This is very close to how eyes work in our pipeline.

Bonus: our eye shader internally implements a variant of manifold exploration to handle eye caustics. The eye shader is literally a more advanced light transport system than the main renderer, inside of a shader, inside the main renderer.

[BLOG] A frame analysis of Dark Souls III
blog.simonrodriguez.fr/articles/202...

A detailed look at how the FromSoftware game renders a frame, with step-by-step comparisons and explanations.

Good read as always! The page title of issue 424 seems to be 423.

レイトレアドベントカレンダー2025に投稿しました
k-ishiyama.github.io/gpn/blog/202...

In-Engine · Double Fine's Keeper - Unreal 5 Exploration YouTube video by Double Fine

the "in engine" double fine keeper video is making me feel so affirmed right now. they solved similar problems that i've had to solve over the years in similar ways! i do actually know what i'm doing! that's nice

youtu.be/VMa5xbjL3BU?...

A strand based hair simulation running on GPU YouTube video by Jorrit Rouwe

A sneak peak of what I've been working on: A strand based hair system for Jolt Physics (WIP): youtu.be/Rl19G0c003o

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt...
I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

Our #SIGGRAPHAsia 2025 paper "Sample Space Partitioning and Spatiotemporal Resampling for Specular Manifold Sampling" improves #realtime #caustics rendering.
Project Page: graphics.cs.utah.edu/research/pro...

@daqilin.bsky.social @tizian.bsky.social

A modernized Utah Teapot model with interior! You can see/customize/download it, along with historical versions on the official teapot page:
graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/

SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances: STRAND-BASED HAIR AND FUR RENDERING IN INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "Strand-Based Hair And Fur Rendering In Indiana Jones and The Great Circle" by Sergei Kulikov from MachineGames is now online: youtu.be/jSE1XXBEK-w

Game Architectures with Alex Evans and Anton Mikhailov YouTube video by Wookash Podcast

i had a chat with lukasz and @antovsky about gamedev and stuff, if youre into that sort of thing! the middle hour is the juiciest but its all fantastic, ofc ;) youtu.be/mFBmoCv5EcQ?...

In order to get to the morphs we have in Keeper now I first experimented with different approaches. Here is one of the early tests in which "surflets" are used to transform from one to another mesh. I still love the "wiggly paths" during the transition.

a 2D proof of concept of the jump flooded cone map

I'd heard of cone stepping before, but the big question for me was whether it was even possible to generate them in real-time with jump flooding, especially cones of different sizes rather than just at different heights, and if you can scale it from 1D to 2D

turns out, the answer is, yeah, you can!

via the magic of laion_clap embeddings and umap, my live coding thingy has a sample browser at last!

I've pushed some updates to github.com/andrewwillmo... over the last weeks, including an incremental Sobol generator, some ToTriangle/ToRot variations, Gaussian walks and events, and a jitter modifier. My little test-suite GUI app for it is now online too: andrewwillmott.github.io/app/GenDistT...

Couple pieces about this work -

about the sphere packing, using voxel "dart throwing" on the GPU:
jbaker.graphics/writings/sph...

about the reuse of the data structure from the sphere packing, reinterpreting it as a grid-based raytracing acceleration structure:
jbaker.graphics/writings/dda...

The performance impact of vertex shader exports Following up on the previous post on GPU utilization and performance, and to provide a practical example, I expanded a bit on a topic discussed in brief: vertex shader exports and their impact on p…

Continuing on the topic of GPU utilisation and performance, as a practical example, I looked a bit deeper into the impact of vertex shader exports on the cost of a drawcall and wrote another blog post with some observations interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/09/21/t...

Computer graphics image of a classical building with intricate geometric details in ornaments. Rendering and scene statistics

Anpther major update to our cluster lod ray tracing sample.
Zorah scene available as glTF
raw.githubusercontent.com/nvpro-sample...
BLAS caching github.com/nvpro-sample... BLAS merging github.com/nvpro-sample...

Special thanks to Adam Marrs, Pyarelal Knowles for ideas and Chris Perrella for zorah.

Advances in Order Independent Transparency for Real-Time & Virtual Production Workflows - P. Kakkar YouTube video by Academy Software Foundation

Brief introduction to a number of OIT techniques: "Advances in Order Independent Transparency for Real-Time & Virtual Production Workflows" www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXSJ...

Hi, is there any particular reason the "Part I" is not livestreamed nor recorded? Really like to watch the talk with virtual access.

Somehow "Part I" of Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games is not livestreamed while the "Part II" is...

Most of the slides and course notes for the SIGGRAPH 2025 Physically Based Shading in Theory and practice course are now online, with more to follow:
blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

As the date for the 20th anniversary of Advances is coming, I realized some content was missing.
Posted 2007 and 2008 courses online - check them out!

advances.realtimerendering.com

UE Toolbox Update - Parametric Assets, Open Source, and Hiatus — gradientspace UE Toolbox has been updated with a powerful new feature - Parametric Static Mesh Asses. The FAB version has full source now, and you can also find it on Github. But, unfortunately, I also will be shel...

my UEToolbox plugin now has support for Parametric StaticMesh Assets. And it now full source is on FAB, and the code is on Github, too. And also unfortunately I have to move on to other projects :( Wrote a big ol' blog post about it all here: www.gradientspace.com/tutorials/20...

Alright, due to popular demand, let's start talking about the

🎶 Beasts with the fur (with the fur) 🎶

in ✨HERDLING ✨

Here's a 🧵 with the process and tech behind the fur on our fluffy Calicorns:

Herdling Future Games Show & Demo Trailer YouTube video by Panic

I worked on HERDLING (coming out soon!) for the past ~3 years and there's a lot of tech-art goodness there, from fur and foliage to clouds and water shaders ✨

I'm planning on sharing some behind the scenes goodness, but is there anything in particular you're interested in learning more about? 👀