The Graphics Codex

by board • 1 year ago

71 27 1 year ago

danwills5• 1 year ago

I definitely have a big interest in this (It sounds like it'd be the more advanced-bits mainly (I've worked in VFX for 23 years)) but was a bit disheartened to learn that it was a paid service.

I also searched the 'try it for free' version and the word 'aliasing' only seemed-to-be-mentioned once!? I would've thought that the arch-enemy of computer graphics (at least the raster-display kind) might have gotten more of a mention!?

It also seemed odd to not really talk about 'filtering' and (at least from a brief investigation) it doesn't seem to really concern itself much with pixels at all! Maybe that's why there's a section titled "Rendering is Very Hard"?) Edit: I read-on from there a bit and this turns out to be about algorithmic complexity side of the rendering equation and not that it's hard to talk about pixels! fair enough! this document still seems more about CG in-the-abstract than the practical to me!

At least 'smootherstep()' got a mention, although what about 'smootheststep()'!? (easier to read if u split the words up: "smoothest step" example here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltSfWV)

somethingsome3• 1 year ago

I'm writing a book on computer graphics, I would love to have a list of in depth topics people are interested in :) let me know if you have some requirements

integricho• 1 year ago

some really in-depth coverage of debugging and troubleshooting tools, e.g. usage of RenderDoc, but not just fluffy introductions, but some really deep down guides.

and something similar for performance profiling also!

danwills5• 1 year ago

These are not requirements (it's your book!) but here are some suggestions for things that I'd find interesting:

Convolution (including via-FFT where it's mainly just complex-multiplication). Different neighborhoods and operations on them: Laplacian, curl/divergence, derivatives/slopes, completely-custom-weights/operations etc. Non-raster (ie analytical) convolution is something I find fascinating and haven't experimented with.

Noises both in the Perlin sense and the Blue-noise sense. Such a fundamentally useful building block!

Dealing with anisotropy both in shading, and texture filtering.

Color spaces. Hardly need to say more than that (apart from maybe 'HSV' should get a solid go). I think getting some solid clarity on what 'linear-to-light- color spaces are and how and when to work with them, is a critically important thing that is very often overlooked.

Acceleration structures - you often see stuff written about these for 3d (to speed up ray-intersection-tests for example) but I think there's probably lots of interesting acceleration stuff for 2d graphics too!

Feedback (ie 'solvers') in the 2D pixel realm - Game of Life (I have HashLife in mind) is just the tiniest-tip of the iceberg there, and Reaction Diffusion takes some solid steps but there's also repeated-warping (ie cheap 'advection') and repeated neighborhood-based pixel/cell operations that I think are an under-explored area.

Complex numbers and Orbits-based fractal-rendering. Mainly because I think it's fascinating, but also very useful for getting more comfortable with complex numbers and antialiasing these beasts that can indeed cause a LOT of aliasing!

Lots-of-points style fractal/etc rendering (eg Flame fractals, IFS, Buddhabrot, that kind of thing, or just HEAPS of particles!) Including how to cope with zooming-in when using that rendering scheme (I have not used it myself but I heard-about and saw great things that used 'Metropolis sampling' in order to make zooming practical.)

I think it would be great to include a section covering all the amazing work that originates in the demoscene and all the great techniques that have come from it. ShaderToy is one example of this, and there are many more.

That's enough for now! Best of luck with your book! Happy to talk further if u want! Email is on my profile.

truckerbill• 1 year ago

Compute shaders from a high-level pipeline perspective. How data moves from CPU and between shaders to accomplish a task.

omershapira• 1 year ago

a paid service

It's a book you purchase. I've never had a book charge me a recurring fee, and this one is no exception.

dahart4• 1 year ago

This is a book mostly about writing a more modern Monte Carlo global illumination path tracing style of renderer, rather than, say, a rasterizer. This is why ‘antialiasing’ is replaced with ‘sampling’ and ‘integration’. When you start with Monte-Carlo and the assumption that you’re multi-sampling, aliasing and filtering are generally small problems, not big ones. The code provided does loop over pixels. You’re right that the book doesn’t contain a chapter on signal processing, but graphics is now far too big a topic to be covered in one book, and it’s certainly questionable whether one needs to rabbit-hole on filtering in a college intro course; Monte-Carlo integration of multiple rays over a pixel is okayish at antialiasing & filtering, and pretty good for a first renderer. Antialiasing and filtering aren’t solved problems anyway, especially for HDR, so it makes sense to leave that topic for advanced courses.

danwills5• 1 year ago

Thanks! I see what you're getting-at and mostly agree but I think it really would be helpful to mention a bit more about the actual pixel-production side of things in a document like this, to help make it a more complete picture of the whole rendering process.

For instance, just shooting N-samples-per-pixel and then averaging them, is not what most 'Production'-renderers used in VFX actually get up to. There's also the 'Pixel Filter' (Box, Gaussian, Catmull-rom, Sinc, Nearest, Farthest, Highest-coverage etc) that the samples have to go through too! And I think it's useful and interesting to cover some aspects of that, even if it's not a full-on signal-processing section.

homarp• 1 year ago

paid service

What's new section says:

App Changes

    Moved web hosted version to graphicscodex.com, made access free for everyone.

danwills5• 1 year ago

Ah nice! That is very cool thanks for the heads-up!

thelaxiankey• 1 year ago

it looks alright -- 10 bucks is not much for a book. but there are already many great graphics books out there, and resources like inigo quilez's blog are absolutely incredible for the burgeoning graphics programmer

malauxyeux• 1 year ago

but there are already many great graphics books out there

Would you mind listing your personal top n books?

WillAdams4• 1 year ago

Where is the $10 purchase link?

corysama• 1 year ago

It used to be on the iOS App Store. But, apparently it is “No longer available”?

Anyone know how to buy it today?

mjfl• 1 year ago

It’s a great book!

WillAdams4• 1 year ago

How does this compare to:

https://projectivegeometricalgebra.org/

My current project requires better solutions for conic sections than I have thus far been able to find --- the last time I tried solving the problem I was chaining trigonometric triangles and got 5 or 7 deep (plus calculating the chord of a circle) and performance bogged down --- this was in OpenSCAD, and I think before Manifold, so maybe I need to revisit my code in Python in (Open)PythonSCAD w/ Manifold enabled.

dahart4• 1 year ago

It doesn’t really compare, very different topics and very different content. The Graphics Codex is about rendering, and Projective Geometric Algebra is pure geometry presented in a subset of Clifford Algebra. I think the only ‘conics’ covered in the Graphics Codex might be sphere-line intersection, and calling that conics is a stretch. ;)

Out of curiosity, what kind of conics problem are you trying to solve?

WillAdams4• 1 year ago

I am trying to work out a toolpath problem for tapered ball nose tooling on CNC machines as a part of:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

vrighter• 1 year ago

This looks like it focuses on path tracing.

In which case, https://pbr-book.org/ is a great, completely free book.

tgum• 1 year ago

This seems quite interesting, I'll probably read it later. "Computer graphics from scratch" by Gabriel Gambetta is also a good resource if you want to write a renderer

hulitu• 1 year ago

The Graphics Codex

Light gray and light blue on white.

The Graphics Codex

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