Hello, world!

Welcome to my blog!

I'm a computer graphics hobbyist for nearly two decades and in the meantime I accumulated some knowledge that I want to share / dump here. I love interacting with the hardware, learning how it works and how to better use it. I also love implementing some cool rendering techniques and effects. So my posts will mainly revolve around this.

I'm also a die-hard fan of simplicity, and thus I got quite frustrated with Vulkan for example. Wanting to write a simple application to play with cutting edge features, like computing ambient occlusion of a simple scene with hardware ray tracing, without having to write more than 30 lines of simple boilerplate code? That's something I would have hoped to be possible a decade after the introduction of the modern graphics APIs, but good abstraction layers are still scarce in 2024. So we will talk about that too, as I want to share my ideas and solutions to address this issue.

And why not talking about useless, completely outdated stuff that belongs to museums? MS-DOS, the VGA display controller, the Adlib/Sound Blaster ISA sound cards, the Game Boy, …, who knows if I manage to write something compelling enough to be worth posting. And no, I'm not that old.👴

To tease a bit, here is a pseudo random importance sampling of how-to topics I want to do, with no guarantee of when or if it will come out 😅:

• Shadow mapping, normal mapping, MSAA

• GPU architecture, Benchmarks

• HDR Image Based Lighting (diffuse, physically based specular)

• Sampling tricks and recipes (blue noise, low discrepancy sequences)

• Marching cubes / Meta-balls

• Volumetric scattering (atmospheric / Rayleigh scattering, shadows in fog)

• Ray tracing / Path tracing

• Lightmaps (the FUTURE!!!)

• Mandelbrot

I'm pretty confident about the last one though. In all cases, I would like to focus on the practical aspects, on the intuitions behind them, and not too much on the formal theory. Bonus point if I can find a way to give you something simple to tinkle with, or even modify yourself easily. It will be more fun to learn things if you can put your hands in it!