Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 260 - November 6th, 2022


[video] Global Lecture with Ed Catmull - The Wild, Unexpected, Exponential Ride Through Computer Graphics

  • the lecture presents an overview of computer-graphics technology of the last 50 years as experienced by Ed Catmull
  • shows how individual developments combine over time and cause the speed of innovation to accelerate
  • contains a large number of anecdotes about the history of computer-graphics


GM Shaders Mini: Noise

  • the tutorial covers how to generate different noise type in shaders
  • covers a basic hash function, value noise as well as perlin noise
  • shader code is provided in ShaderToy


[video] Shader Sauce: How to Use Shaders to Create Stylized VFX

  • the video talk introduces a collection of fundamental shader concepts and tricks aimed at the creation of VFX
  • some tricks covered are UV distortion, Masks, LUTs & Gradient Mapping, Debugging advice, and much more
  • code examples are provided in Unreal Engine 4


Jobs

Senior Graphics Programmer

San Francisco, CA (remote work is an option)

Double Fine Productions is looking for a full time graphics programmer to join its San Francisco based development studio. Having recently shipped the award winning Psychonauts 2, we are looking to expand our graphics and systems programming team to support the development of our future titles.

You will be responsible for developing rendering features, optimizing game performance and memory usage, and building low level systems on PC and Xbox.

Applicants should have a strong preference for working in a highly creative, innovative, and nimble development environment, where collaborating with design, audio, art, animation, tech, and other disciplines is standard.


Vector text rendering in Unreal Engine

  • the article covers how to extend UE4 with a custom vertex format and shading pass
  • the provided example code is meant to replicate the logic required to implement the Slug text rendering library


[video] Investigating and Dispelling Shader Myths... with Science!

  • the talk presents a set of common misconceptions about shader code patterns
  • shows what instructions are generated and how these patterns affect performance
  • examples are provided using UE 5.1 custom shader nodes
  • talking about multiply vs. divide, packing floats, use of Lut’s vs. Math, as well as the effect of exponential powers


Write your first GPU Kernel using Metal

  • the tutorial explains the basic steps required to execute a metal compute shader kernel
  • shows how to initialize the metal library, upload buffers, compile shaders and execute compute-shaders


Unreal Engine Game Optimization on a Budget

  • the presentation provides an overview of essential concepts when optimizing an Unreal Engine game
  • explains the foundational settings that are required for correct profiling
  • covers how rendering performance can be optimized
  • touches on culling, draw distances, occlusion queries, shadow proxies
  • additionally provides a valuable list of debug commands


Thanks to Jonathan Tinkham for support of this series.


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