What papers, demos, trailers, tools etc should we bring for Farsthary?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

We are bringing a USB key of information for Farsthary that he is not able to download in Cuba due to expensive and slow internet.

If people could please share information on relevant topics that would be great.

Some ideas from the other thread:

“A thing he also deeply appreciated when a friend of mine went to Cuba 6 months ago is to bring DVD filled with CG resources (I will post you a link with free papers in 7 hours, so you can look for papers related to his current issues and download many of them); he also told me a week ago that he wishes he had this book (adviced by Broken).”

“@Cambo: yeah, he told me one month ago that he was really interested in investigating parallal computation and gpgpu stuffs: I think it comes from all the numerous CG papers he reads, where the authors often propose gpu-versions of their algorithms with exciting speed-boosts.”

"Another idea: I sent him 3 months ago a dvd with Modo and 3dcoat trials (he was really interested in looking them, about UI, possibilities…), however it arrived only a week ago and the software keys had expired, so perhaps you can download the keys anew? (this requires a registration).

Another unrelated things: he likes Hans Zimmer’s movie soundtracks (whose listening eases his programming), so if you find a cheap compilation :slight_smile:
He also fond of CG trailers, so you can download as much as you can! (Blizzard, Final Fantasy, Blur, etc…) :slight_smile:

Finally, you can also put on the dvd the last blender sources if you’re familiar with subversion (trunk, 2.5, etch-a-ton, etc…), dvd filled with cool open source apps related to his field. (then I send him patches to keep him updated with the last commits)
Here is the link to look for CG papers: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
Here are keywords that interest him: dataset, fast kd-tree (or BVH or SAH trees), micropolygons, BRDF, fast global illumination… or wait for programmer’s advices here…"

I tried posting this as me (Wife of Blendiac) however it’s being held for moderation again… I only seem to be able to do one post a day and the rest disappear never to be seen again!!!

Cheers,
Wife of Blendiac

2

the Pixar papers are also nice:

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

(http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Lpics/paper.pdf will be sure to interest him)

3

Thanks Blaize… I just downloaded all the papers there and related files.

Wife of Blendiac

4

I don’t know if he has the pbrt download, it’s what Indigo and Luxrender are based off of,
although it needs a book to explain everything the source is open.
I think he mentioned he hadn’t seen it, and was just working on his own
montecarlo algorythm for learnings sake.
There are 2 versions , I guess after version 1.01 fireflies became more apparent,
they have versions 1.02 and 1.03 :smiley:
There’s probably a lot of stuff on there he could look through if someone .zips their forum also,
or donates the instruction book to him :D.
Edit I see it’s aleady been suggested.
http://www.pbrt.org/

Maybe a lot of different renders would be good though if he doesn’t have them,
I take it literally he can’t download things, also any pdf guides and export scripts would be good to go with them
http://www.povray.org/
http://www.indigorenderer.com
http://www.luxrender.net/
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/
http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/


Renderman renderers
http://www.renderpixie.com/
http://aqsis.org/
I almost forgot there’s Vray, but you’d need to create an account,
I don’t know if he can do this in Cuba :smiley:
Vray export scripts:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=118390
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/downloads.html?s=v-ray

5

This might help:
http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/

EDIT:
Real-Time Smoke Rendering Using Compensated Ray Marching

6

Hi :slight_smile:

don’t exhaust yourself: he already has 90% of ACM and Siggraph (2006-mid-2008 period), 100% of the Pixar and 100% of the papers published by Cornell universiy + all the papers on the authors blog up to mid-2008 that I downloaded for him last July through the site mentioned by kernond. (if only you could see instantly what I didn’t downloaded…)
but he doesn’t have pdf search engine to ease his searches among the 8 Gb of papers, so perhaps you can download recoll and xpdf for linux and required libraries?

For the rest, I would ask the devs, and search specifically to it interests, otherwise this is exponential (took me many days for that…): Hence, I didn’t download all the papers before 2006, perhaps 20% of those linked on the site (moreover, many of them were too specific to other CG-fields (ex: optimal grid generation, photographic pictures analysis) or outdated, so only useful as references), so still some room…

You can simply tell people to send them on your gmail account to avoid tiedious download alone? the best would be a ftp folder (blender foundation?), where everybody can temporary put the stuffs they like (provided the licence/copyright allows it!), then download all the mess on your usb key? With enough rights so that people can create folders, put some orders, remove doublon (crossing fingers so that nobody erases everything), to avoid headaches to Farsthary or consuming too much of your time (“oups, I was so busy with the usb key stuffs that I forgot the book…”)
@Cambo: how realistic is this last option?

For other downloads, perhaps trials versions of Maya/Lightwave as references in his work in physical simulations/volumetrics?

By the way, do you have the PBRT book, or are you waiting for its delivery?

Good preparation for your trip,

regards

7

I think the book just arrived… just got a call from the front desk. Going down to check now!

Thanks for the tips Lapinou. We’ll make sure to bring him some PDF search tools.

Cheers,
Wife of Blendiac

8

I’m doing pretty good with downloading and organizing… and am taking copies of the website to put the downloaded files into context… and putting things in named folders too. Blendiac might have some ideas about ftp though… will leave that to him!

9

I got this from the TLR cam post
(he’s also developing an unbiased renderer which I think he released the source?)
Farthesy might already have this, but I’ve seen this .pdf also before
in the indigo forums, and looks really good.
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~matthias/Papers/mdas.pdf

10

I know Farsthary has worked on a photon mapper, but maybe he should be on the cutting edge of photonmapping.
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/progressive_photon_mapping/
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/progressive_photon_mapping/progressive_photon_mapping.pdf

This is regular photonmapping on powerful steroids, a must give to him.

11

the pbrt book is the bible of raytracing right now. send him the book.

12

he might find these interesting too:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Feldman-2003-ASP/index.html
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Bargteil-2006-ATS/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Klingner-2006-FAD/

13

he’s allreday getting the PBRT book…

14

Does anyone know what distro / architecture he’s on? I’m downloading software for him now, and would like to make it as easy for him as possible.

15

I recall him using Ubuntu at home.

But I don’t know if its 32 or 64 bit’s.

16

Thanks felix. Know at least I know that 32 bit Ubuntu debs should be fine. :slight_smile:

17

make sure to download the source to, it’s probably more usful for him than the aplication itself…

18

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the ideas in this thread and via pm… together Blendiac and I downloaded over 10gb of assorted data, programs, papers, trial versions of software etc, and it was much appreciate by Farsthary!! He joked it might take him years to get through it all!!!

I can say after visiting Cuba I understand even more the challenges of internet access there. The whole country runs on satellite internet (for those of you that have never been on it… trust me it’s SLOW) because Cuba has been blocked from linking in to the under sea internet/communications cables. In one hour period Blendiac only managed to do one forum post and do two emails… at times it took 5 minutes just for the main page of gmail to load so you could try to log in!! And given that one hour of internet costs about 1/3 of an average cubans MONTHLY salary that’s pretty expensive internet time (for someone earning 40K a year that would mean your internet cost per hour was over $1300). Luckily Farsthary has free access at school until he finishes his degree this year. After that it will get much more complicated for him to stay in touch.

Someone else suggested that we should mail him dvd’s with the latest papers, programs etc a couple of times a year… I think that’s a magnificent idea and am willing to champion it. Stay tuned!!

Cheers,
Wife of Blendiac

19

I can see how it would be hard for Farsthary to make contact with the Blender community, maybe someone should get him a paid developer position at the Blender Institute, at least he’d have fast internet, and be in the company of Ton and Brecht.

But for now we’d have to find a way for him to have contact with the community after he leaves college.

20

Wife of Blendiac,

Great news indeed :slight_smile:

I think it would be a great show of appreciation to set up some kind of scheduled mailing - I find it so sad that in this day and age, there are still spots of darkness in the internet (yes, I know there are a lot of others). The least we could do is to send him some data in a bottle, to keep his studies alive.

Maybe he can give us a list of stuff he needs (as far as papers & such) periodically.

I believe there is enough time for us to take out of our daily postings, to put forward some time to such an earnest student like him. If you want to head this up, I’ll contribute what time I can - and also, a very PRE-thank you!