Indices of Refraction

I'm a member of ACM, SIGGRAPH, and a subscriber to the Digital Library.

I like having the bound SIGGRAPH proceedings on hand, so I do spend the $50 or so to have everything mailed to me each year.

 

Just continuing on from G King (who, as a member of both ACM and SIGGRAPH, is a step up from "SIG-only" me ), another good place to look for (usually recent) papers is The NEC Citations Server. It is mainly for cross referencing papers but it often has links to online copies.

For example the beam tracing paper is online (sans pictures unfortunately).

 

The ATI crystal ball demo uses photographed lightfields from real world scenes IIRC. It's an Image Based Rendering trick, translated right from a demo Paul Debevec did. None of the lighting in that scene is "calculated" like it would be in a raytracer. Instead, it is photographed from a real scene using stand in objects (usually reflective metal spheres), scanned, and turned into a lookup table.

I don't know people are so big on raytracing anyway. 90% of offline rendering uses scanline renderers with only very few scenes using raytracing or radiosity (switch from PRMan to BMRT briefly). Raytracing has its uses, but it consumes too much performance and only shines (no pun intended) in specialized situations. Radiosity is immensely useful for some things, but it's performance characteristics are even worse.

 

Some Siggraph 2000-2002 papers online here:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2000.html
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2001.html
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2002.html

 

So is the Radeon 9700. Although it's possible the NV30 will be even more flexible or better at it.

 

OT: The ACM you refer to, is that the same one that accredits universities. Also, is this particularly prestigious?

 

No, the ACM we're talking about is the Association for Computing Machinery. You can read all about their mission statement and purpose at their website, www.acm.org. It's a professional/academic organization that seeks to improve technology and tech skills. In many ways, it's a computer science version of the IEEE.

Being a member of the ACM isn't a prestigious symbol -- anyone can join who is willing to pay the membership dues. The organization itself is highly prestigious, though -- a significant amount of research is published every year through the ACM's special interest groups (e.g., SIGGRAPH).

 

That is the ACM I"m thinking of. I'm pretty sure they have some sort of accreditation branch/wing as well.

Thanks for the info.

 

The TreasureChest demo on the 8500 does per pixel refraction. We do this in our engine also, except on the PS2/GC where it's done per-vertex. Looks real nice for "Predator" style effects and distortions.