Unity3D “Special Effects with Depth” talk at SIGGRAPH

Unity3D continues to publish their SIGGRAPH 2011 talks.

Thanks guys!

Original Unity blog post.

Ole and I promised to share the slides from our talk at the SIGGRAPH 2011 Studio. The presentation covers various graphics techniques that use depth, normals and color buffers. The methods range from improving standard techniques to creating entirely new ones, like approximate volumetric effects or advanced image post-processing. The buffers used are in many cases the natural products of the rendering pipeline and offer a way to infer surprisingly much information about the scene, thus allowing for very rich and fast graphics effects.

It may be a worthy read both for artists and programmers, as we discuss the possibilities of some unusual special effects and their technical side.

Fast mobile shaders or rather Mobile! Fast!

I post the slides of what seams to be a great talk about 3D rendering on mobile devices (with Unity3D) by Aras Pranckevičius (@aras_p) and Renaldas Zioma (@__ReJ__) Unity Technologies.

The presentation is kind of general in the beginning focusing on the global differences and challenges between the "new" mobile and "classic" desktop rendering environments. Later they go in detail with actual techniques you can or should use to improve your rendering with Unity3D on a mobile device.

The presentation is quite extensive and all slides contain comments, which give a lot of details.

To give one example, MipMaps are your friends, even better with anisotropic filtering for cryspiness and use texture compression if your device support it. Moreover you can filter the Android market for texture compression support, which allows you to optimize your app for devices with different compression systems. If you want to!

How can the CPU be used to improve quality and speed of your 3D without draining the battery and how Unity3D does it.

Have fun!
 

KinectFusion: Real-Time Dynamic 3D Surface Reconstruction and Interaction - Microsoft Research

KinectFusion: Real-Time Dynamic 3D Surface Reconstruction and Interaction - Microsoft Research presented at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver Canada.

KinectFusion, a system that takes live depth data from a moving Kinect camera and in real-time creates high-quality, geometrically accurate, 3D models. Our system allows a user holding a Kinect camera to move quickly within any indoor space, and rapidly scan and create a fused 3D model of the whole room and its contents within seconds. Even small motions, caused for example by camera shake, lead to new viewpoints of the scene and thus refinements of the 3D model, similar to the effect of image superresolution. As the camera is moved closer to objects in the scene more detail can be added to the acquired 3D model.

SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies Lab

Hi there,

its SIGGRAPH time. This year in wonderful Vancouver. Unfortunately I cannot be there, but there are some great new technologies to gaze at, to test and to touch. So if you are there, enjoy and share your experiences with us! Or at least with me.

A venue, often overseen at SIGGRAPH, is the Emerging Technologies Lab (short ETech). Although it is probably the most spectacular place at the conference, where you can see the most recent emerging interactive and graphics technologies. This can be new interfaces, (3D) displays, input devices, robotics, sensors, etc... Unfortunately, there is no augmented reality demo this year. Watch the video preview below to get an idea about ETech.



In the following I would like to shed some light on several selected projects, that seems to be particularly interesting.