Hacker News with Generative AI: Computer Graphics

Don't "optimize" conditional moves in shaders with mix()+step() (iquilezles.org)
In this article I want to correct a popular misconception that's been making the rounds in computer graphics aficionado circles for a long time now.
Computer Graphics, Optimization, Shaders
409 points by romes 9 days ago | 229 comments
Generating Voronoi diagrams using Fortune's algorithm (redpenguin101.github.io)
Generating Voronoi Diagrams using Fortune’s Algorithm
Algorithms, Computer Graphics, Geometry, Data Structures
204 points by redpenguin101 10 days ago | 19 comments
Simulating water over terrain (lisyarus.github.io)
If you don't want a long an boring introduction, skip directly to the virtual pipes method description.I will get a little bit sad if you do this, though x)
Simulation, Computer Graphics, Terrain, Water
387 points by ibobev 12 days ago | 58 comments
How Are Images Stored? A Deep Dive into GIF, PNG, and JPEG (cefboud.com)
This post is me indulging in a rabbit hole. I somehow found myself thinking about images, probably after my recent exploration of some compression schemes. It’s common knowledge that images are either grayscale or RGB, that mixing red, green, and blue creates new colors. But there’s certainly more to storing an image than just aligning three-byte RGB values.
Image Formats, Digital Images, Image Compression, Computer Graphics
5 points by Cef111 12 days ago | 0 comments
Bezier Curves and Picasso (jeremykun.com)
Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall:
Art, Design, Computer Graphics
4 points by memalign 14 days ago | 0 comments
Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing (radfoam.github.io)
Research on differentiable scene representations is consistently moving towards more efficient, real-time models.
Real-Time Rendering, Differentiable Programming, Computer Graphics, Ray Tracing
212 points by w-m 14 days ago | 23 comments
Keep 'em (not) separated: detecting discontinuities in grid graphs (holm.dog)
In this post, I'm going to describe how I efficiently detected enclosed spaces in my browser game's map.
Game Development, Algorithms, Computer Graphics
27 points by friendshaver 15 days ago | 12 comments
Building a Mesh Using Spherical Embedding (andrews.wiki)
When trying to build a 3D model of an object in the real world, the goal is most often to construct a connected mesh of triangles or quadrilaterals that represents that object's surface.
3D Modeling, Computer Graphics, Geometry, Algorithms
55 points by CarpeQueso 18 days ago | 6 comments
Rapidly rendering fractals on stupidly unsuitable machines (cowlark.com)
So a week or so ago I wrote a toy Mandelbrot generator for the BBC Micro, capable of using 2.6-bit fixed point arithmetic to draw a pretty terrible vaguely-Mandelbroid image in twelve seconds. That program is now obsolete: the very poorly named Bogomandel is capable of drawing pretty good actual Mandelbrot and Julia images, at higher precision, faster. Here it is.
Fractals, Programming, Retro Computing, Computer Graphics
9 points by rbanffy 20 days ago | 0 comments
Bilinear down/upsampling, aligning pixel grids, and that infamous GPU half pixel (2021) (bartwronski.com)
See this ugly pixel shift when upsampling a downsampled image? My post describes where it can come from and how to avoid those!
Image Processing, Computer Graphics, GPU, Pixel Manipulation, Downsampling/Upsampling
136 points by fanf2 22 days ago | 23 comments
The Graphics Codex (graphicscodex.com)
Graphics, Computer Graphics, Programming, Resources
71 points by board 24 days ago | 27 comments
Subpixel Zoo: A Catalog of Subpixel Geometry (geometrian.com)
An image pixel might be a little square with a flat color[1], but to actually present the image on a physical display (or related technology), we illuminate discrete 'subpixels'. The perceived color in an area is then the addition of the subpixels' emissions in that area.
Computer Graphics, Display Technology, Image Processing
3 points by tigerlily 25 days ago | 0 comments
Hunyuan3D 2.0 – High-Resolution 3D Assets Generation (github.com/Tencent)
We present Hunyuan3D 2.0, an advanced large-scale 3D synthesis system for generating high-resolution textured 3D assets.
Generative AI, 3D Modeling, Computer Graphics, AI, Machine Learning
323 points by TheGuyWhoCodes 28 days ago | 142 comments
Ask HN: State of the Art in Video Stabilization? (ycombinator.com)
I know of Hyperlapse Pro, which did some kind of 3D reconstruction of the scene to stabilize a video, Hyperlapse Mobile which just does frame selection (but still works very well), and LocalRF [0] which seems to use NeRFs to construct a smoothed video. But all are relatively old given the rapid rate of improvement in AI and computer graphics, and all are hard to run.
Video Stabilization, Computer Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
7 points by ChadNauseam 29 days ago | 1 comments
Rapidly rendering fractals on stupidly unsuitable machines (cowlark.com)
So a week or so ago I wrote a toy Mandelbrot generator for the BBC Micro, capable of using 2.6-bit fixed point arithmetic to draw a pretty terrible vaguely-Mandelbroid image in twelve seconds. That program is now obsolete: the very poorly named Bogomandel is capable of drawing pretty good actual Mandelbrot and Julia images, at higher precision, faster. Here it is.
Programming, Fractals, Computer Graphics, Retro Computing
4 points by rbanffy 29 days ago | 0 comments
CFRS[] Community Demos: Patterns drawn with turtle graphics with 6 commands (susam.github.io)
This document contains a collection of CFRS[] demos contributed by community members. CFRS[] is an extremely minimal drawing language that consists of only six simple commands: C, F, R, S, [, and ].
Programming, Computer Graphics, Community Projects, Open Source
57 points by susam 30 days ago | 2 comments
Dissecting "Tiny Clouds" shadertoy (2017) (demofox.org)
There is an amazing shadertoy called “Tiny Clouds” by stubbe (twitter: @Stubbesaurus) which flies you through nearly photorealistic clouds in only 10 lines of code / 280 characters (2 old sized tweets or 1 new larger sized tweet).
Graphics Programming, Shadertoy, Computer Graphics
122 points by Lammy 31 days ago | 4 comments
A ray caster tutorial in ASCII art (github.com/shikaan)
A ray caster in Typescript and HTML Canvas with annotated explanations in ASCII art.
Computer Graphics, Tutorials, JavaScript, ASCII Art
3 points by shikaan 31 days ago | 0 comments
How hard would it be to display the contents of an image file on the screen? (nereid.pl)
How hard would it be to display the contents of an image file on the screen? You just load the image pixels somehow, perhaps using a readily available library, and then display those pixels on the screen. Easy, right? Well, not quite, as it turns out.
Programming, Computer Graphics, Image Processing
214 points by ingve 33 days ago | 82 comments
Maze Generation: Recursive Division (2011) (jamisbuck.org)
A novel method for generating fractal-like mazes is presented, with sample code and an animation
Maze Generation, Algorithms, Computer Graphics, Programming, Fractals
46 points by homarp 35 days ago | 12 comments
Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm (marian42.de)
This article describes how I generate an infinite city using the Wave Function Collapse algorithm in a way that is fast, deterministic, parallelizable and reliable.
Generative AI, Algorithms, City Planning, Computer Graphics
278 points by klaussilveira 35 days ago | 67 comments
Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (pbr-book.org)
Photorealistic computer graphics are ubiquitous in today's world, widely used in movies and video games as well as product design and architecture.
Computer Graphics, Rendering, 3D Modeling, Visual Effects
218 points by ahamez 36 days ago | 67 comments
From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon (a1k0n.net)
For many years after coming up with donut.c, I wondered in the back of my mind if it could be simplified somehow, like maybe there was a way to raytrace a donut with a small chunk of code. In October 2023, I tweeted a dumb random epiphany where I figured out another way to do it which requires no memory, no sines or cosines, no square roots, no divisions, and technically, not even any multiplications.
Programming, Hardware, Computer Graphics
162 points by a1k0n 37 days ago | 25 comments
B800 Text (shikadi.net)
B800 Text is a text-mode screen dump, and under x86 real mode (such as used by DOS) can be copied byte for byte into video memory starting at B800:0000, causing the data to appear on the screen when the video card is in text mode.
Computer Graphics, Operating Systems, DOS
3 points by susam 42 days ago | 0 comments
Nvidia Blackwell GeForce RTX 50 Series Opens New World of AI Computer Graphics (nvidia.com)
CES—NVIDIA today unveiled the most advanced consumer GPUs for gamers, creators and developers — the GeForce RTX™ 50 Series Desktop and Laptop GPUs.
Nvidia, Graphics Cards, Artificial Intelligence, Gaming, Computer Graphics
76 points by OnlineInference 43 days ago | 23 comments
How to draw an outline in a video game (ameye.dev)
Rendering outlines is a technique that is often used in games either for aesthetic reasons or for supporting gameplay by using it for highlights and selections around an object.
Game Development, Computer Graphics, Rendering
555 points by alexanderameye 46 days ago | 70 comments
The Invention of Battlezone (2022) (ieee.org)
Three-dimensional displays first appeared on computer screens in the 1960s, and very large machines could manipulate those images in real time, but it was not until 1980 that a video-game player could maneuver at will through an imaginary landscape, wreaking havoc until brought to an untimely end by enemy tanks.
Video Games, History, Technology, Computer Graphics
44 points by ycnews 46 days ago | 12 comments
VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020) (github.com/s-macke)
Let us go back to the year 1992. The CPUs were 1000 times slower than today and the acceleration via a GPU was unknown or unaffordable. 3D games were calculated exclusively on the CPU and the rendering engine rendered filled polygons with a single color.
Terrain Rendering, Algorithm, Computer Graphics, Programming, Retro Computing
339 points by lnyan 46 days ago | 87 comments
Ray Tracing in One Weekend (raytracing.github.io)
I’ve taught many graphics classes over the years. Often I do them in ray tracing, because you are forced to write all the code, but you can still get cool images with no API. I decided to adapt my course notes into a how-to, to get you to a cool program as quickly as possible. It will not be a full-featured ray tracer, but it does have the indirect lighting which has made ray tracing a staple in movies.
Computer Graphics, Programming, Ray Tracing, Tutorials
110 points by bjourne 48 days ago | 14 comments
Sub-pixel distance transform (2023) (acko.net)
This page includes diagrams in WebGPU, which has limited browser support. For the full experience, use Chrome on Windows or Mac, or a developer build on other platforms.
Computer Graphics, Image Processing, WebGPU
183 points by ChadNauseam 54 days ago | 25 comments