Sunday, December 27, 2015

floats versus doubles

When to use floats and when to use doubles is one of those classic topics of discussion and much less pointless than the code formatting religious fights.   A fun thing in the new edition of FCG is that Steve Marschner and I are in opposite camps.   I just checked what amazon previews to the reader with "look inside" and found this (note-- I think that discussion of debugging is something I wish I could send back in time to myself-- it's VERY basic but graphics debugging is different in some ways):

Screen capture from Amazon preview of Fundamentals of Computer Graphics 4th edition
See-- sometimes opposing camps can get along :)

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Winner of the annual University of Utah teapot rendering contest

Once again Cem Yuksel hosted his annual University of Utah teapot rendering contest.    Last year's winner Laura Lediaev won again.   Here is one of her pictures (my favorite):


Laura's other images and some technical details (including Christmas trees(!) are here).

New edition of my graphics text is out.

The newest edition of my intro graphics book is done early.   It looks like the kindle edition is out and the hardcopy will at at amazon soon. I just got my copies in the mail today!   I am a big fan of this edition.   It is also now Marschner and Shirley et al., instead of Shirley and Marchner et al.   Any great improvements in the book I am pretending are correlation and not causation.   But being second author is like I hear being a grandparent is-- all the benefit and none of the responsibility.   Please report any problems to Steve.

This edition we have moved to color:
That retro image in the bottom right is there for nostalia's sake.  It was my first good image (1988 I think).   It was 1024x768 and took two weeks to do radiosity and light maps and 16 viewing rays per pixel on a VAX 11-780.   It was my first "real" C++ program (I think).     Modeled in vi (for real) and some hand rolled rotate a piece-wise linear curve code.   Here it is in all its low-res noisy glory.