http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog Grab your polygons and start your compilers - the Will Miller blog. Tue, 27 May 2008 20:55:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As part of my RenderMan for real-time research, I have for some time, been working on a solution for generating spherical harmonic coefficients from arbitrarily complex lighting environments for use in real-time. While not completely finished with this, I have some promising preliminary results. First, some background. Spherical Harmonic ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=79 So the other day, I got the urge to do some retro-programming. What better platform, I thought to myself, than the Nintendo Entertainment System. Unfortunately, for the beginner, programming even a very simple ROM and running it in your favorite emulator can be challenging. So here now ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=72 Those familiar with creating 3D assets for games or other real-time applications are probably familiar with the process of baking static lighting information as a series of maps which are combined with dynamic light contribution at runtime. Precomputed light maps can represent even the most complex lighting rigs ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=63 The RenderMan Shading Language is very feature rich, but at some point, you may need to extend the language to do something it doesn't do out of the box. To do this, you must write a DSO Shadeop. I have written several of these using PRMan's SDK at school, but ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=59 When using the PRMan SDK for Windows, I ran into a strange linking issue. Linking against prman.lib and libprmansdk.lib caused about 100 undefined symbol errors. It took me a while to track down a fix (there is very little documentation for the RenderMan SDK). It turns out ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=58 I was reading an article from a back issue of Game Developer (August 2007, I believe) wherein several prominent programmers were discussing a wide range of topics. Not surprisingly, the discussion found its way to the problem of multi-threading. One of the programmers described an approach which I ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=57 I have been investigating solutions for real-time global illumination over the past few weeks, and thought I might share some of my thoughts on a potential approach to this problem. To create a global illumination effect for static geometry and lights is relatively easy. One must simply bake the lighting ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=55 In order to render volumes in Renderman, one has two options. The first is to render a large amount of points (several million to get good results) or ray march through a volume using some density function to compute the volume's accumulated color and opacity along the ray. In this ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=47 I've been working on a project for my Italian renaissance art class for the past few days, which not surprisingly considering my interests, involves a computer, Wiimote, funny sunglasses, and some infrared LEDs.  I'm trying to recreate an early Italian renaissance painting (from the likes of Fra Angelico or Piero ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=45 For all the great things Lua has done for my current game development endeavour, it is now proving to be a royal pain in the ass. The problems began when I added a background loading system to load new scenes in a separate thread without interrupting play.  This all worked until ... http://www.bestdamnpodcastever.com/millerblog/?p=42