The ‘mod­ern’ look­ing sans-​serif font I use recently in equa­tions on this blog is called ‘Com­puter Mod­ern Bright’, and actu­ally is not so mod­ern at all: Designed by Wal­ter Schmidt in 1996, it is still to date the only free sans-​serif font avail­able for with full math sup­port. Type-​1 ver­sions of this font are avail­able in the cm-​super pack­age, but I didn’t need to install any­thing, because appar­ently, Quick­La­TeX has them already. The only thing to do was adding just one line to the preamble:

\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{cmbright}   % computer modern bright

I also turned on the SVG images fea­ture that was added with ver­sion 3.8 of Quick­La­tex, so the equa­tions are no longer pixel­lated on retina dis­plays or when zoom­ing in! Neat, huh?

I am a backer of the upcom­ing Elite Dan­ger­ous game and have par­tic­i­pated in their pre­mium beta pro­gramme from the begin­ning, pos­i­tively enjoy­ing what was there at the early time. ‘Pre­mium beta’ sounds like an oxy­moron, pay­ing a pre­mium for an unfin­ished game, but it is noth­ing more than pur­chas­ing the same backer sta­tus as that from the Kick­starter cam­paign.

I came into con­tact with the orig­i­nal Elite dur­ing christ­mas in 1985. Com­pared with the progress I made back then in just two days, my recent per­for­mance in ED is lousy; I think my com­bat rat­ing now would be ‘com­pe­tent’.

But this will not be a game­play review, instead I’m going to share thoughts that were inspired while play­ing ED, mostly about graph­ics and shad­ing, things like dynamic range, sur­face mate­ri­als, phase curves, ‘real’ pho­tom­e­try, and so on; so … after I loaded the game and jumped through hyper­space for the first time (actu­ally the sec­ond time), I was greeted by this screen fill­ing disk of hot plasma:

Con­tinue read­ing →

I always won­dered when X-​Plane would jump on the PBR band­wagon. I like X-​Plane, I think its the best actively-​developed (*) flight sim­u­la­tor out there, but I always felt that shad­ing could be bet­ter. For instance, there is this unre­al­is­tic ‘Lambert-​shaded’ world ter­rain tex­ture, which becomes too dark at sun­set; another is the dreaded ‘con­stant ambi­ent color’ that plagues the shad­ing of objects.

Now in this post on the X-​Plane devel­oper blog, Ben announces that Phys­i­cally Based Ren­der­ing is a future devel­op­ment goal, yay! Then he goes on to say that, while sur­face shad­ing will be a solved prob­lem™ because of PBR, oth­ers like par­tic­i­pat­ing media (clouds, atmos­phere) would still need magic tricks for the fore­see­able future. Con­tinue read­ing →

I have exper­i­mented recently with zone plates, which are the 2-​D equiv­a­lent of a chirp. Zone plates make for excel­lent test images to detect defi­cien­cies in image pro­cess­ing algo­rithms or dis­play and cam­era cal­i­bra­tion. They have inter­est­ing prop­er­ties: Each point on a zone plate cor­re­sponds to a unique instan­ta­neous wave vec­tor, and also like a gauss­ian a zone plate is its own Fourier trans­form. A quick image search (google, bing) turns up many results, but I found all of them more or less unus­able, so I made my own.

Zone Plates Done Right

I made the fol­low­ing two 256×256 zone plates, which I am releas­ing into the pub­lic so they can be used by any­one freely. Con­tinue read­ing →

This page is my per­sonal col­lec­tion of high­lights from GDC 2014. I was not able to attend in per­son, so I had to rely on Twit­ter to get updated. The immer­sion was not per­fect, but some of the thrill was def­i­nitely car­ried over. So here it goes (in release order): Con­tinue read­ing →

… Twit­ter!

So out of a whim I just embar­rassed myself and tried to write in (prob­a­bly wrong) latin that I joined twit­ter. You can fol­low me under: @aries_code.

If you won­der how this came about, this was my train of thought:

• Twit­ter has some­thing to do with birds
• Birds have fancy latin species names
• The species name for Spar­row is Spasser domes­ti­cus
• This doesn’t sound too fancy …
• How do you say ‘I joined twit­ter’ in latin anyway?

But then I dis­cov­ered that I am onto some­thing: Accord­ing to one argu­ment, the brand name of Twit­ter should have been ‘Titi­a­tio’, had it existed in antiq­uity. And accord­ing to another argu­ment, latin should be an ideal twit­ter lan­guage, because it is both short and expressive.

But I digress. If you are into com­puter graph­ics, then you know of Johann Hein­rich Lam­bert, the eponym of our beloved Lam­bert­ian ref­electance law. The book where he estab­lished this law, Pho­tome­tria, is writ­ten entirely in latin — now this is hardcore!

So, now you know what to do if you want to stand out in your next SIGGRAPH paper …

Some­times real­ity looks like if it was taken straight out of Half-​Life.