3d engines

minimme traces the timeline of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance, from early experiments to commercial 3D games, covering techniques such as voxel rendering. It is a history and showcase of what developers coaxed out of the limited hardware.

Microsoft Research demonstrates holoportation, which reconstructs and compresses high-quality 3D models of people in real time and sends them anywhere. With a HoloLens, remote participants appear as if present in your room.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

Real Engineering explains the materials science behind metal 3D printing, including crystal structure, laser sintering, and why printed parts develop fatigue cracks. It shows how process imperfections limit the strength of printed metal.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

A GDC 2015 talk by Arc System Works technical artist Junya Motomura on how Guilty Gear Xrd rebuilt a classic 2D fighter in full 3D while keeping a hand-drawn look. It covers the art and programming R&D and the stylistic decisions behind it.

A short demo of a 3D Wayland compositor built with Qt 5 and QtWayland, mapping input to and compositing the output of Wayland applications in a 3D scene, also running on a Raspberry Pi.

A short Insider Tech video on New Story and ICON building 3D-printed homes that can go up in under 24 hours for around $4,000. It frames the effort as a way to address global homelessness.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

Engineering Explained argues that internal combustion engines are far from dead, and discusses the continued development of ICEs and the problems facing electric vehicles.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Veritasium explains how jet engines run hotter than their components' melting points, using cooling air and single-crystal superalloy turbine blades. It covers how the blades are grown as aligned crystals.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

A Veritasium video touring Relativity Space and explaining why 3D printing whole rockets cuts tooling costs, allows rapid iteration, reduces part count and enables new designs. It includes an interview with Scott Manley on aerospace engineering.

A short screen recording of an Ubuntu Karmic Koala desktop running KDE4 with Compiz Fusion 3D cube effects and CairoDock.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.

A two-minute explainer of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the rendering technique from a 2023 research paper. It outlines why it could change how 3D graphics are made.

A Computerphile video in which Dr Mike Pound and PhD student Lewis Stuart explain 3D Gaussian splatting, a quick technique that turns photos of a scene into a 3D model without much compute. It includes a demo and compares the approach to NeRFs.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

The Plasticity creator explains what a geometry kernel is and compares commercial options C3D, ACIS, and Parasolid, describing his months of research and why he chose as he did.

A short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

Zack Freedman introduces Gridfinity, his free, open-source modular workshop storage system of 3D-printable bins and baseplates. The video walks through the design, the parametric templates and the many module types that fit parts, tools and accessories.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A short claymation music video by animator savannahXYZ satirizing how bad web search has become, with SEO spam and ads crowding out real answers. It is comedic rather than analytical.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Blender Guru's beginner tutorial series, in which you model, light, texture and render a donut while learning Blender's core features. This is Part 1 of the Blender 3.0 version.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the Looking Glass 8K holographic display, a glasses-free 3D monitor. The video shows the display in action and explains how it works.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.