It’s already advertised somewhere else, but I’ll add it as well: Casey Muratori has an amazing lecture on Immediate Mode GUI. I like the idea, and while I think IMGUI mostly applies to realtime UIs (in-game, editors etc.), this is a good read (er… watch) for any UI programmer.

I was subconsciously heading towards that UI style as well; drawing and processing some UI “immediately”, though not at the level Casey does.

Received GPU Gems 2 and A Theory of Fun from amazon today. The first one I bought because hey, I need it; and the second one because it’s (relatively) cheap and seemed like a good read. Indeed it is - it’s a great thing to read!

I’m reading Siggraph 2005 preprint papers that are nicely gathered here. Some of them are really amazing! What I’m impressed with so far:

Texture Montage: looks cool. Just made me realize how primitive the “usual” texturing tools are… It makes me want to create some texturing tool…

LDPRT and Local PRT are steps in the needed direction for precomputed radiance transfer. Though Ignacio says that CPCA compression of SH is patented my M$… Bah!

Relational Debugging for the Graphics Pipeline is like NVPerfHud on steroids!

Reading on…

Finally I’ve put the MeshTexer tool online, with some documentation, the tool itself and some sample data. Basically, it takes a mesh with unique UV mapping, a normalmap and a tileable texture, and “wraps” the texture (nearly) seamlessly onto the given model. Well, the truth is that it just projects the texture onto the model from several sides, weighting by normal.

However, it worked like a charm during in.out.side demo production. Paulius has written whole texturing workflow here - the tool was used to generate base material textures, material blend maps, gloss maps etc. Later these were hand-painted in “strategic” places and combined into final textures.

Enjoy!

Watched some new&old demos in the last couple of days. Here (when there’s a link to Lithuanian page, the ‘download’ looks like ‘parsisiųsti’):

Rapid Eye Movement by Matt Current. Now that’s unreal; technically simple but excellent composition and creates a very strong feeling. The similar feeling I only remember from The Planet by mfx. Also, I think the concept of “rapid eye movement” (i.e. the phase of the sleep) is done very well. I want to (be able to) do this!

Aether by mfx. The first time it didn’t leave me very impressed. However, I recommend watching it for the second time. Fascinating, though I can’t say what exactly.

Old ones with a very strong music: A Significant Deformation Near the Cranium by kewlers and Coma (on the dance floor) by Cocoon. I want that music :)