The new Witcher 4 UE5.6 tech demo that was shown today is the most amazing realtime tech demo I've seen yet. Nanite Foliage is particularly impressive- I've always liked the idea of voxel-based LOD and this is the best implementation I've ever seen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aorRfK478RE

@gfaster wow, that is great to hear!

@self_shadow Thanks Steve! You probably don’t know this but you were one of the first in the larger graphics community I connected with after I reached out about HZB. After which at SIGGRAPH 2010 you introduced me to a number of others that I knew of but never met through the simple “hey a bunch of us are going to get lunch, want to join?”. Up until that year I had attended numerous conferences but never really talked to anyone.

@breakin thanks!

@zeux thanks!

@rygorous thanks!

@anteru thanks!

@aras thanks!

@dpiponi thanks!

I am honored and humbled to share that I’ve been selected for this years ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award https://www.siggraph.org/award-winners/announcing-the-2025-award-winners/. I don’t know what to say.

@dpiponi just watched this https://youtu.be/Ni82f1-cAXg?si=UkSBUTRx5M4IepPc the other day. Use acetone.

@yiningkarlli use after free

@demofox The one thing an academic education provides over self taught in my experience working with great people from both backgrounds is the knowledge is less spiky. Self taught folks can often have odd unexpected holes in their knowledge that a typical education would have covered. Often these are on the more theoretical side, either math itself or where CS gets more mathy.

@mbr I was looking for exactly this recently for a form of stochastic translucency for voxel bits in a brick. I needed it in a shader though so no pdep :(

Well really rand permute of known popcnt was just a way to achieve what I really wanted which was each bit being an independent 1b rand number with specified probability. Can get for a small set of probabilities by combining multiple rands with &,|. Ultimately for my case in a shader a LUT is probably best but was an interesting exercise

The painterly brushstroke tools add on they used is released here: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/brushstroke-tools #blender

Project Gold - blender stylized rendering showcase https://youtu.be/nV_awXI9XJY?si=rTWUQjVcbUPtp6md

Cost being independent of scene complexity is a great property if you are in budget. Nothing from art can hurt you. But if you aren’t in budget, art can’t do anything to save you.

meshoptimizer 0.22 is out! Featuring significant improvements to simplifier (attribute simplification, fewer topology restrictions, component pruning), new provoking vertex algorithm (thanks to John Hable), clusterization improvements & gltfpack size optimizations.

Thanks to Valve for sponsoring most of the work on the core library in this release!

GH stars / boosts welcome as usual ;)

GitHub release link: https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer/releases/tag/v0.22

@mtothevizzah @lisyarus https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/umbra-ignite-2015-rulon-raymond-the-state-of-skinning-a-dive-into-modern-approaches-to-model-skinning-52881253/52881253

There has NEVER been paper at #SIGGRAPH on Black, Afro-textured hair in its entire 50 year history.

UNTIL NOW.

We introduce CURLY-CUE: GEOMETRIC METHODS FOR HIGHLY COILED HAIR. When you STOP assuming straight hair is a universal baseline, lots of new science opens up.
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