June 20, 2009 • No Comments
Ever heard of neutrinos? Not neutrons, but neutrinos. They’re part of the Standard model of particle physics. There isn’t just a single kind of them – they come in a pack of 3 (as all of the fermions):
- Electron neutrino
- Muon neutrino
- Tau neutrino
They are so called Leptons, which have no electrical charge, but (a bit of) mass.
Whenever a neutrino (which really doesn’t happen that often) collides with a charged particle (e.g. proton or electron) in a medium, where the speed of light is slower than in vacuum (e.g. in water), it is absorbed and partially re-emitted as so called Cherenkov radiation. This kind of radiation is also generated within nuclear reactors and is visible as blue light (opposed to the green glow known from movies).
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This time no physics or maths, but some impressive engineering awesomeness.
We all played with some LEGOs when we’ve been young (you haven’t ???).
But nowadays playing with LEGO can be really different.
Just check out this case of ingenious use of LEGO:
Mindstorms Aircraft Factory
June 19, 2009 • No Comments
June 18, 2009 • No Comments
TSVolume is a small application I developed using C++/MFC back in 2005.
It’s original purpose was to adjust the volume of music players and TV-applications while playing World of Warcraft and talking in Teamspeak.
It adjusts the volume to configurable levels when one of the defined persons is talking and puts it back to the original value after talking ends. It was really useful while being in big raid groups and listen to music. It would level down the volume of my music player only while the raid leaders were talking.
Nowadays I use it for all kinds of LAN and Internet games and while talking to my flatmate in the other room :>
Download TSVolume 1.4.1 (383 KB .zip)
June 16, 2009 • No Comments
Ever wondered how it’s possible to render such impressive CG images and videos like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Final Fantasy: Advent Children?
The (non-secrect) formula behind such achievements is this:
It’s the so called “Rendering Equation”, which was independently introduced by David Immel and James Kajiya in 1986.
It’s a physically based (classical physics – no relativity or quantum physics) equation that quite nicely represents light distribution within a N-dimensional space (usually 3 or 4-space).
It’s only indirectly applicable to CG, because the (infinite) integrals have to be implemented with discrete and finite sampling methods.
Common mathematical tricks to achieve acceptable render times (at expense of photo-realism) are:
- Markov Chains
- Importance Sampling
- Photon Mapping
- Irradiance Caching
- Monte Carlo / Quasi Monte Carlo techniques
- Adaptive rendering (use computing power only on perceivable effects)
- Spherical harmonics
- many more…
June 15, 2009 • No Comments
As parts of the image below are used in the blog header i thought i could inform you about the origin of it…
This image shows a refractive sphere-flake, which was rendered with my homebrew raytracer “SimRay”, which i implemented in C++ a few years ago.
Features of SimRay:
- Path Tracing (with Importance Sampling)
- Photon Mapping (separate caustic & global photon map, Final Gathering)
- Scene scripting language (Objects, Lights, Cameras, Materials, Animation)
- 3DS meshes, WoW models, custom (smooth) polygonal meshes & quadrics
- Still-Image and video rendering
A few more shots:
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Small Pong game which was hacked together in a few hours with Adobe Flex 3
Included source code contains:
- ActionScript source files (.as)
- User Interface file (.mxml)
- Sounds [ripped from Plasma Pong] (.mp3)
Controls
| Action |
Player 1 |
Player 2 |
| Move paddle up |
Arrow Up |
Mousewheel Up |
| Move paddle down |
Arrow Down |
Mousewheel Down |
Download game (.swf)
Download source code (.zip)
