rendering

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.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

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.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

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 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.

ScienceClic visualizes what you would see falling into a black hole, from the approach and the accretion disc to crossing the horizon, in 15 minutes.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Posy explores segmented displays, from the seven-segment display to alternative designs with fewer or more segments, with patents and history.

Pannenkoek explains how Super Mario 64 handles wall, floor and ceiling collisions, including triangles, normal vectors, quarter steps and out of bounds. It is a detailed 37-minute technical walkthrough of the game's physics.

jan Misali traces the history of the letter W, including why it is called double u. The video is part of a series of deep dives into individual letters.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

SalC1 explains how the seed behind the Minecraft title screen panorama was found, using community effort and the Minecraft@Home project. It covers the search through Beta 1.7.3 world seeds.

Professor Brailsford of the University of Nottingham describes how the university set out to print its own mathematics exam papers in the 1980s. The story centers on getting a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 typesetter to work with their own software.

Technology Connections explains how RGB light and color work, from hue and saturation to color vision and how objects appear under different lighting. It uses a studio setup with colored lights to demonstrate the effects.

Tom Scott and Matt Parker investigate some of the small deceptions and oddities of the London Underground, such as misleading signage and map distortions.

Tom Scott explains why a vivid pink pigment by artist Stuart Semple cannot be fully shown on a screen, and touches on the dispute over exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment. It is a short explainer on color gamuts and pigment politics.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.