Icare3D Blog

I started to compile links to websites where free 3D models can be found. If you know other good websites, feal free to post them in the comments :-)

Static models and scenes:

• Great collection of models for scientific publications on Morgan McGuire webpage: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml
• 3D Render challenge: http://www.3drender.com/challenges/
• Crytek: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/downloads
• Keenan Crane : http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~keenan/models.html
• Sibenik model: http://hdri.cgtechniques.com/~sibenik2/download/
• AIM@Shape : http://shapes.aimatshape.net/
• Characters Creative Common: http://artist-3d.com/
• Characters: http://www.3dvalley.com/3d-models/characters
• Blender files: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/category/featured/
• Archive 3D: http://archive3d.net/

• Ingo Wald: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/animrep/
• MIT CSAIL 1: http://people.csail.mit.edu/drdaniel/mesh_animation/index.html
• MIT CSAIL 2: http://people.csail.mit.edu/drdaniel/dynamic_shape/index.html
• MIT Animals and Face: http://people.csail.mit.edu/sumner/research/deftransfer/data.html
• Face data: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/software-data/stfaces/index.html 
• Pants: http://www.ryanmwhite.com/research/cloth_cap.html

Full story here :-D

1. We want the code to be as generalized as possible.
2. We design everything future-proof and extendible.
3. When a feature request arrives, we’re doomed we need to change a lot of code.
4. Why?
5. Because everything was designed as generalized as possible.
6. goto 1;

GDC 2011 is over now and presentations start to appear on-line :-)

DICE: http://publications.dice.se/
NVIDIA: http://www.nvidia.com/object/gdc2011.html
AMD: http://developer.amd.com/documentation/presentations/Pages/default.aspx#GDC
INTEL: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intelgdc2011/
Khronos on OpenGL: http://www.khronos.org/library/detail/2011-gdc-opengl

More links can be found on this blog: http://msinilo.pl/blog/?p=724

This is the season of the new game engines : Dice Frostbite 2, Crytek CryEngine 3 and Epic Unreal Engine 3 !

Here it is, CUDA 4.0 RC just got released to NVIDIA Registered developers.

Interesting stuff from the CUDA manual:

• Layered Textures Support (GL_TEXTURE_1D/2D_ARRAY)  : New tex.a1d/.a2d modifiers in PTX. But unfortunately the surface instruction do not support them yet, Grrrr
  Layered textures are created using cudaMalloc3DArray() with the cudaArrayLayered flag. New cudaTextureType2DLayered/ cudaTextureType2DLayered texture sampler types and tex1DLayered()/tex2DLayered() access intrinsics.

• New .address_size PTX specifier : Allows  to specify the address size (32b/64b) used throughout a PTX module.
• Inline PTX assembly: This feature was already present since CUDA 2.x but was not officially supported. It's now fully supported and documented :-D
• Driver API, new thread-safe stateless launch API function cuLaunchKernel(): cuLaunchKernel(kernelObj,   blocksPerGrid, 1, 1,   threadsPerBlock, 1, 1,   0, 0, args, 0);
• FERMI ISA documented and supported by cuobjdump.
• Enhanced C++: Support for operators new  and  delete, virtual functions.

Today, I would like to invite you to follow an awesome new participating game development blog called #AltDevBlogADay. This blog has been founded in January by Mike Acton who is engine director at Insomniac Games, and group together many very good game developers who publish one article each day on the website.

Here is a short list of the article I particularly liked and I advice you to take a look at, among those already published:

• Aliasing, the silent killer 
• Forward vs. Deferred Rendering: why/when forward rendering still matters
• Think low level, write high level
• Preparing for Parallelism
• Intuition for Gamma Correct Rendering
• Link time sorting
• Research tastes better when served with source
• Managing Decoupling
• Radix Sort for Humans
• Non Virtual Interfaces
• Vectiquette
• The Virtual and No-Virtual
• Refactoring for Task Concurrency
• Performance metaprogramming
• The Rendering Equation - A Pictorial Introduction
• Managing Coupling Part 2 — Polling, Callbacks and Events
• Alternatives to malloc and new
• Data Structures: One size does not fit all

I have not been posting here for a while and I am sorry about this. I have been quite busy lately with a paper submission and also the writing of my PhD thesis ! Anyway, I wish everybody an happy new year :-)

• NVIDIA Announced Project Denver : A fully integrated CPU+GPU chip dedicated to high-performance computing and based on ARM cores. It is designed to power future products ranging from personal computers to servers and supercomputers. It looks like NVIDIA's answer to AMD Fusion and is also clearly a "we don't believe in the future of x86 architectures" launched to the industry. I really believe this is the right approach  to bring high performance CPUs to all market segments. Thanks to the rise of mobile and tablet like devices, we may finally see the end of the hegemony of the x86 architecture. I really hope that it will not be the last dinosaur from NVIDIA ;-)
• gDebugger is now free !
• “Principles of Digital Image Synthesis” book is now free for download. And a nicely formated PDF can be found here.
• Data-Oriented Design - Links and Thoughts : The concept of Data-Oriented Design (DOD) as opposed to Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a concept that is emerging and gaining popularity among the game developers community lately. The idea is that instead of building performance sensitive parts of applications around classes that represent individual objects with ineficient -non-cache coherent- memory access patterns, it is more efficient to build them by thinking in terms of data flows and memory access patterns. That's a concept that may not be unfamiliar to GPU developers :-D
• Overtime vs Productivity : Two very interesting blog posts by Allan Mckay that discuss on how people work, why we often get burned out and how to avoid this.
• A lot of very interesting technical documentations about NVIDIA GPUs and coming from reverse engineering of various hardware can be found on pscnv Git repository. Pscnv is a fork of the nouveau project, an open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs.