Awesome Graphics

A faction of the computer graphic Demoscene prides itself on creating visuals with the least code possible. Programmer Alcatraz turned up at the Revision 2024 demo party with this surreal scene – a post-apocalyptic black-and-white city created with just 256 bytes of Gopher code running on DOS. Revision posted some competing 256-byte demos here.

Mangazi Music has an awesome way of showing off his guitar-playing skills: the neck of his electric guitar shows lyrics and animations in sync with his performance. It appears that he uses a green screen and motion tracking to superimpose perfectly timed graphics onto the guitar, and the results are impressive.

It’s easy to take the high-fidelity 3D graphics in today’s video games for granted, but a lot of artistry, hardware, and software goes into every frame you see on screen. Branch Education provides an in-depth yet understandable explanation of the processes and technology at work when rendering video game graphics.

Anyone who has worked with 3D graphics software knows about composing scenes with virtual cameras. Sirrandalot used Blender’s Cycles path-tracing engine to model a 3D camera body, simulate the optical properties of a film camera, then render scenes through its virtual lens. Check out the final not-photos on Imgur. (Thanks, Orion!)

Valve’s classic 3D puzzle game Portal has been upgraded to run on Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. The new version has dramatically better ray-traced graphics with new textures, volumetric lighting, fog, smoke, and shadows. Best of all, it’s a free download for all players with Portal in their Steam game library.

Unity is one of the most powerful graphics and gaming engines out there, and it keeps getting better. Led by Creative Director Veselin Efremov, the Unity Demo Team put together Enemies, a short film that shows off Unity’s HD render pipeline, adaptive probe volume lighting, strand-based hair, and lifelike digital human capabilities.

Love the look of old-school advertising mascots? This collection of digital assets from Brian Ritter Design makes it easy to incorporate these whimsical characters into your designs. The set includes five ink brushes and 250 stamp brushes for use in Procreate, along with Adobe Illustrator AI, PNG, and Affinity Designer asset files.

Fractal images are generally made with math algorithms on a computer. But it turns out that there was a way to create fractal images in the 1930s using multiple cameras and projectors. CodeParade explains how these analog patterns would have worked, and how to simulate them with a webcam and a monitor.

Based on NVIDIA’s GauGAN research project, Canvas is an AI-powered computer graphics app that can produce realistic landscapes from doodles. It can even export parts of the drawing as Photoshop layers. The Beta version of the app is available for Windows 10 users with any RTX graphics card.

With an amazing amount of graphical detail and real-world map data, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is closer than ever to recreating the experience of flight. Digital pilot TheNinjaCowboy shared this video footage of some of their favorite locations from the game, looking out from the pilot’s window and above their single-engine plane.

While computer graphics are becoming more and more realistic, we appreciate when artists use the medium to create things that are simply outlandish and impossible in the real world. Take, for example, this ridiculously-long and flexible bicycle-built-for-five from Cool 3D World.

Visual effects artist RubenFro creates imaginative 3D worlds. He starts by capturing a point cloud matrix of locales using 360º cameras, then manipulates and renders the dots using a custom shader in Unity, resulting in incredible, ethereal imagery. This footage was captured in the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam.

Starting with a handful of 2D images, and using a deep network to synthesize volume and reflective properties, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) can transform flat images into detailed 3D objects. Engineer Matthew Tancik shows off the tech developed with co-authors from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Google Research.

Computer graphics animator C4D4U was playing around with some digital hair rendering techniques when he came up with this hilariously weird creation. After asking his YouTube followers to name the blue-green, dancing sasquatch, one of them put it best: “When Sullivan finishes his diet.”

Remember Nyan Cat, the ridiculous pixel art kitty meme from 2011? Digital artist Raven Kwok decided to revamp the Pop Tart cat by breaking up each part of its body and rainbow emissions into separate windows, resulting in a totally different Nyan experience. Raven, we need this running on our computer now. With music.

Artist Mike Pelletier’s experimental short film is an incredibly trippy visual created by tossing together a bunch of digital human models, removing their skeletal structures, and then dipping them in virtual paint. If it sounds weird, that’s because it is. We can’t help but think of the part of Terminator 2 where the T-1000 melts.

Adobe shows off a slick new feature coming soon to Photoshop. The Object Selection tool uses machine learning tech to automatically identify objects, people, and animals to quickly select and separate them from backgrounds. We can’t tell you how many hours this would have saved us over the years.

Game developer Dennis Gustafsson is working on a voxel-based engine that features incredible environmental destruction physics. While the video posted by Bluedrake42 is lacking in gameplay, to see how the world reacts to damage is one of the holy grails of gaming we’ve been promised and has yet to be delivered.

While implying that the mClassic is a graphics card upgrade is a reach, Marseille’s HDMI dongle does an impressive job smoothing out the jaggies of last-gen gaming systems, upscaling them better than most TVs can, and giving images a crisper look overall. It even improves the image quality on some newer games.

This amazing software uses deep learning tech to create photorealistic nature scenes by sketching fields of color which represent objects and materials. The results are impressively convincing, complete with reflections. Learn more on Nvidia’s blog.

Researchers from NVIDIA demonstrate “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks,” which is a fancy way of describing artificial intelligence that’s capable of creating human face variants and other objects that never actually existed in real life.

A look at Universal Everything’s latest interactive visual experiment, in which you control a character standing in the midst of thousands, each of whom reacts to your movements while you remain an individual. We’re dying to try a real-time version of this.

Two Minute Papers presents a look at an amazing bit of image enhancement tech from Nvidia, Aalto University, and MIT which uses machine learning algorithms to identify noise in an image, and dramatically reduce it, recovering details that were thought to be lost.