Catchup Post: Graphics & GPU's & Physics

A long overdue catchup post for various interesting things I've spotted over the last two or three months. SIGGRAPH recently finished, so it really deserves a round-up, although I haven't had time to review all the interesting things.
The annual tutorial on
realtime collision had some interesting presentations, I quite liked the one from Erwin Coumans (Bullet) this year - it gives a good overview of the recent advances in the Bullet engine including the GPU optimizations. Simon Green also has a presentation on CUDA SPH rendering (also see Jihun Yu's particle fluid surface reconstruction) and another open source GPU SPH simulation from HPC lab.
The realtime graphics tutorial, stylized rendering, volumetrics, and programmable shaders has some great stuff that I'll look into in more detail in a future post. Ofcourse there is also always the SIGGRAPH 2010 papers list, and SIGGRAPH asia papers (again more on this later..).

Some GPGPU software/links:

• AMD's Stream SDK - the new version allows printf in OpenCL kernels - very handy for debugging and OpenCL1.1 support.
  
• AMD's OpenCL sample page.
  
• an interesting article on larrabee's demise
  
• CUDA Vision Library - another library, but this one has quite a few functions including optical flow and hough transforms plus some color space conversions.
  
• AMD OpenCL tutorial.
  
• OpenNL has some GPU based sparse matrix structures and iterative linear systems & least-squares solvers, etc.
  
• Back40 has a fast radix sort.
  
• OpenCL and OpenGL interoperability particle system example.
  
• and a now-old-hat story on theGPU supercomputer in the top 500 list.
  

and MPTL is a parallel version of the STL algorithms.


Some physics links:

• A new version of the PhysX SDK is available with some SSE optimizations and the source code to the tetgen program. A new version of the PhysX visual debugger is also available.
  
• Creature Control in a Fluid Environment - an interesting paper, reminds me that I should really publish my PhD at some point...
  
• While we are on the topic of underwater physics, Underwater Cloth Simulation with Fractional Derivatives is worth a look.
  
• Example based wrinkles for cloth simualtion an interesting take on one of the more difficult aspects of good cloth simulation.
  
• FASTCD - fracture aware collision detection - a lot of good things coming out of KAIST recently in this field.
  
• Dynamic Local Remeshing for Elastoplastic Simulation, is a Finite Elements method for achieving a range of physical material behaviors. Neat.
  

Some graphics links:

• Alex describes the making of the Ergon 4k intro
  
• ryg has a great post on optimzing packed pixel blend operations for non-SIMD systems.. nifty! I wish I knew this previously! (ryg also has an interesting post on morton-codes, which you can use for organizing your data for easy n-dimensional nearest neighbor retrieval. See codexon's explanation.
  
• I stumbled upon this interesting description of a global illumination shader including ambient occlusion, GI, bump maps, etc.
  
• Kyle has a post on his implementation of
  animating water with flow-maps
  
• The excellent page on screen space ambient occlusion at Meshula has been updated.
  
• NASA released a collection of NASA 3d Models
  
• Auld's blog has some interesting posts describing his 4k modeling tool, with some input from iq.
  
• GL minify to compress GLSL shaders.
  
• Steve Hollasch has a nice
  collection of interesting graphics-related newsgroup posts.
  

And finally a documentary on the history of the Future Crew demo group and Second Reality. Brings back the memories.