Gian Schellenbaum

@renderwonk 4. There is room for some cheap in-between solutions for specific needs (like photoreal skin) to become widely adopted by DCC tools and renderers before we have new good models. The path of progress is littered with stopgaps. (6/6)

@renderwonk Thus keeping your army of artists from picking up their pitchforks. And at that point, losing artistic control over just e.g. skin shading might be perfectly acceptable for many studios. (5/6)

This might be the most important paper on surface shading to come out in years. TL;DR: microfacet models are wrong and proposed wave-based or hybrid alternatives are wrong too. This is an exciting opportunity for new research! ssteinberg.xyz/2026/04/01/acc…

@renderwonk Thus keeping your army of artists from picking up their pitchforks. And at that point, losing artistic control over just e.g. skin shading might be perfectly acceptable for many studios. (5/6)

@renderwonk 2. Whether you're going to do some numerical error correction or use a better model that's not widely adopted, artists will lose the benefit of DCC tooling giving an accurate preview of what the target renderer will produce. Raising the bar will cost you. (3/6)

@EricLengyel Thank you, Mr. Lengyel.

New blog post: A Decade of Slug This talks about the evolution of the Slug font rendering algorithm, and it includes an exciting announcement: The patent has been dedicated to the public domain. terathon.com/blog/decade-sl…

Eric Lengyel announced today that he is "permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain." This is great news and I hope my 7-year old Slug CPU and GPU rendering prototype can be a useful learning resource for someone out there! github.com/mightycow/Slug…

@yiningkarlli If their approach is based on surfels like DF claims then it's likely they've been inspired by EA's GIBS. That was presented at SIGGRAPH in 2021.

I really hope Pearl Abyss presents at SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering this year! They've really pulled off something remarkable; the game looks like a zillion bucks and it's actually well optimized. Long live custom in-house engines.

There's a pair of @digitalfoundry videos out about Crimson Desert. Their completely custom Blackspace Engine looks to be an absolute technical marvel- highly performant ray traced GI running on mid-tier hardware across the board. youtube.com/watch?v=3uUIBU… youtube.com/watch?v=SlRpJ5…

Dmitrii is friendly, proactive, pragmatic, always willing to lend a hand and a good communicator. He's the type of person you want as your colleague.

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphi…

Debuggers and profilers are tools that allow you to gain insight into your app and system to solve problems. Their value is directly proportional to how fast you get to that insight. This is why UI matters. And why e.g. RAD Debugger/Superluminal run circles around e.g. GDB/WPA.

I just bought the @SuperluminalSft profiler after using it for ~15 minutes and managing to confirm suspicions on 2 separate OS-level perf issues. Other tools can collect the data but showing/searching/filtering it in a fast/convenient/useful/intuitive way is key. UI does matter.

@CharlieMQV @squelcher0808 @cmuratori Must set the drive, otherwise it searches all of your drives. Afaik it always builds/updates the index first so when cold, it's super slow even without content search. As for your search query, I think that this is the correct form: "C:\" ext:cpp;hpp;h content:hello

@g_Schellenbaum @squelcher0808 @cmuratori Right, I forgot that there is an "advanced search" thing. I never got it working. It's either not working or just slow enough to not give me any results before my patience runs out. (Or there's the option of me not understanding how it's supposed to work)

Existing search tools on Windows suck. Even with an SSD, it’s painfully slow. So I built a prototype of Nowgrep. It bypasses most of the slow Windows nonsense, and just parses the raw NTFS. On an SSD, this ends up faster than ripgrep, even on a cached run (Nowgrep bypasses most Software caching). Demo: Filtering 2 million and searching ~270K files under C:/ for the substring "Hello". I have many ideas to make these an even smoother experience. Let me know if this is interesting, and I might pursue it further to make a shippable product with good UX.

@CharlieMQV @squelcher0808 @cmuratori "Nowgrep searches file contents." Everything can do that too. The syntax is "content:pattern" for searching in files. It would be nice to have the cold duration on the same test folder for reference.

@squelcher0808 @cmuratori Nowgrep searches file contents. Finding file names is easy enough to do instantly (there's no excuse for it to not be instant). Nowgrep does this if you leave the search field empty.

Will be talking about idTech 8 Global Illumination at CEDEC 2025. Visiting Tokyo/Japan for first time - very excited. cedec.cesa.or.jp/2025/timetable…

@yiningkarlli I really liked the old website having nothing but the Kajiya equation and some text saying something like "let us handle it for you".

One small bummer when Autodesk bought Solid Angle and the Arnold renderer is that Autodesk got rid of Solid Angle's cool domain expert logo. The A just looks like a weird fancy A to most folks, but rendering folks recognize that it's a drawing of a geometric solid angle.