Author Archives: Jeroen

Volume Rendering : An Overview

Posted on by
2

I made a presentation which outlines the different methods for Volume Rendering, going into detail about Sparse Voxel Octrees ray casting. It gives a good overview on how to tackle the problem of rendering huge datasets.

Keywords: Direct volume rendering, texture mapping, splatting, ray marching, octree, kd-tree, memory management, GPU.

There’s also a PDF version available.

I’m providing this material because I think this is useful for other people interested in the subject. You won’t find any PhD-critical info, of course ;)

Bye bye Coke & Code

Posted on by
2

During the last years (and certainly when I was still studying) I drank a lot of coca-cola, especially when I was up late night writing code or text. Ahhh … the golden days.

This week, I’m putting a stop to this. No more coke, and once I’m completely detoxed, we’ll see what my weekly intake should be. That is, if I don’t fail. I’m quitting because I consumed too much sugar, and my PhD research is mostly done sitting at a desk. In comes the fat! Also, lowering my cafeine dependency to actually be awake in the morning could be helpful. Mind you; a lot of criticism and health effects you believe are true about coca-cola, are not.

Unlocking / Rooting the Motorola Atrix 4G

Posted on by
3

Yesterday my new phone arrived: a Motorola Atrix 4G, which should be a real upgrade from my trusty old HTC Wildfire. I bought it for €239 in an iBood sale. Pros where the big screen, dual core and 4G support. A possible contra was the doubt that any official Ice Cream Sandwich Android distribution would be released for the phone, but I wasn’t planning on sticking with the official updates anyway.

I’ll say it again: the unnecessary customizations vendors are pushing onto Android phones is what really irritates me. Motorola came up with a network called MotoBlur. Sigh.

Vendors, I don’t want to create an account on your private cloud and link my phone to your little part of the web forever. It’s a good thing that Google’s now requiring the default Holo theme for vendor phones with ICS.

Anyhow, here’s how it went. My phone came with Gingerbread 2.3.4, and a carrier firmware version 2.3.4-4.5.2A-74_OLE-25. Instructions behind the cut!

Continue reading →

Interesting TOR talk

Posted on by
Reply

I spent the morning watching this hugely interesting talk about the TOR project and the censoring problems it had this year.It has been an important tool for dissidents and activists trying to get the truth out in an oppressive regime. The talk was given yesterday at the CCC’s crypto event by Roger Ingledine and Jacob Appelbaum (worth following on twitter).

Read up a bit on TOR (The Onion Router), adn then watch the video embedded below. Don’t stop there though – donate some money to the project, help out in the development and/or set up your own TOR relay!

Efficient rendering using Sparse Voxel Octrees

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been reading a lot lately about using voxels in CG. I’ve always been fascinated by ways of moving away from the traditional polygon-based pipeline, and things are really starting to look good for voxels.

Sampling all geometric and texture data on a regular grid allows for unique content, theoretically. No more repeating textures, pieces of scenery, … artists can basically create a scene and add little customizations to every object, without sacrificing rendering budget, as long as you’ve got a good way of streaming the right data to the GPU. Interesting work is done by Cyril Crassin on Gigavoxels, a paper which shows a working implementation of the Voxels-in-a-tree concept.

Continue reading →

Migrating from CakePHP 1.3 to 2.0

Posted on by
Reply

I love CakePHP. It’s a PHP framework with a clear and strict Model / View / Controller (MVC) separation and a great abstraction layer for reading, updating and saving objects to the database. Recently, the CakePHP team released CakePHP 2.0, and I started updating my projects to this new version. Since it was my first big version jump with the framework,  and a lot of substantial changes were made compared to the 1.3.x branch , I ran into some quibbles, which I thought would be nice to document here.
Continue reading →