Comment by pjmlp
1 month ago
Well, there is enough knowledge on those SIGGRAPH papers, even if not everything can be directly applied to real time game rendering.
1 month ago
Well, there is enough knowledge on those SIGGRAPH papers, even if not everything can be directly applied to real time game rendering.
Absolutely! In a way it's really cool you can go to ACM archives and start reading from something like https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/563858.563893 (Blinn, Models of light reflection for computer synthesized pictures) and then track forward from there.
But the developments in the field have mostly been motivated by "I think this looks better than that" followed by a formal mathematical model. The aesthetic aspect has been far more impactful in driving development than drive for technical precision as such.
"Does it look good" is far more important metric than displaying graphs with error bars.
This is not to say the field _isn't_ extremely technical. It is! But the main motivation for all developments has been aesthetic - hence it's IMHO almost as hard to learn computer graphics by just reading about it as it would be to learn something like academic oil painting just reading about it.
A seminal example of aesthetics based development to me is the Mitchell-Netravali filter kernel: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~fussell/courses/cs384g-fall2013/l...
"In the center of the display, images reconstructed from filters with random values of (B, C) were displayed ... Nine expert observers took part and over 500 samples were taken...It would not be credible to suggest that a single ideal parameter pair can be deduced from subjective testing"
So they basically did kernel fitting based on what looks good - while the theory of the kernel function itself was more technically motivated.