My Siggraph Schedule

Here is my schedule:

• Sunday: Avatar in Depth,
• Monday: All about Avatar, Detailed Surfaces, Volume and Precipitation, Real-time Live Demo,
• Tuesday: Simulation in Production, Computer Animation Festival, Blowing $h!t up, Real-time Live Demo,
• Wednesday: Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games I and II,
• Thursday: Beyond Programmable Shading I and II.

There is a lot of uncertainty for some sessions because many are overlapping with others I am interested in (hair rendering, stylized rendering, global illumination, physically based shading, etc). It is really hard to make my final choice.

Moreover, two friends are presenting this year:

• Nicolas Stoiber, PhD student at Orange Labs like me: The Mimic Game: Real-Time Recognition and Imitation of Emotional Facial Expressions. (He will write an article here about his very interesting work after SIGGRAPH),
  

• Guillaume François, shader writer at Weta Digital : Importance Sampling for Production Rendering.

I wish them good luck with their presentation. I hope one day I could contribute to SIGGRAPH to. Indeed, my PhD was not really suited for such graphic/animation research... Maybe during my future job!!

I will post here about SIGGRAPH during the next week if I can find time between sessions and SIGGRAPH night parties. :)

OpenCL

Before I even did something with CUDA, I have decided to move to OpenCL. Just because I prefer the GLSL-like approach to load program instead of using an additional dedicated compiler. I am close to finish my C++ library with nice classes encapsulating OpenCL objects (And I am using the C interface). It looks really like what I did for my Shader manager (like in the demos on my personal website). I will post it here soon in case someone want to get it and modify it. Also, choosing OpenCL is for the ability to use any platforms, not only nVidia. The current problem is that I don't have a single clue about how ATI parallel architecture is (their Stream Computing technology).

In addition to a review and my PhD thesis I have to finish writing, I am also preparing my travel to Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH 2010. I will post my schedule tomorrow in a second post.

Bonus:
- a nice real-time CUDA ray-tracer called brigade.
- a new A-Buffer method using per-pixel linked list to manage dynamic allocation of pages containing depth layers. In OpenGL! :)