Thursday, July 14th, 2005
The Vision Engine supports a number of different texture space effects including bump mapping and specular mapping. In addition to these, it also supports extruded heightmaps. These heightmaps add extra visual detail to the geometry, particularly when viewed at fairly wide angles - where normal bump mapping often breaks down.
As a result of this effect, any shadows cast onto an extruded surface will flow naturally over detailled contours, rather than fall flat along the plane of the underlying geometry. The following video shows this technique in action:
Friday, January 9th, 2004
A crucial aspect of realistically modelling the interactions between light and participating media is subsurface scattering. This process takes into account the subsurface characteristics of absorbed light, with respect to the microfaceted absorptive and reflective properties of a material. The most recognizable visual result of this process is translucency.
This post describes a very simple technique for simulating the effect of subsurface scattering for use at interactive frame rates inside a game engine. While not a robust solution, if it happens to fit your needs it can be cheap and effective.
Thursday, August 7th, 2003
You're walking through a casino and you spot a roulette table. Next to the table is a list of past results that indicate
that the past 9 outcomes were all black. You have a preference for betting on red, so you pause for a moment
to think. If you decide to make the bet, then you've just committed the gambler's fallacy.
Each spin on a roulette wheel is an independent event, so the past history does not provide any indication of future
outcomes. If you rely on the past results, then you are incorrectly assuming that the next spin is a dependent event.
Probability is the study and measurement of uncertainty. This concept is crucial to the study of many areas of computer science, including cryptography, compression, and artificial intelligence (to name a few). The following article provides a brief discussion of independent and dependent events that illustrates the nature of the gambler's logical fallacy.
