Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸I am excited to finally share our recent paper "Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture Filtering" (with @mattpharr @marcosalvi and Marcos Fajardo), published at ACM I3D'24 / PACM CGIT, where we won the best paper award! 1/N
Aras Pranckevičius@BartWronski ah, I remember a year or two ago you were asking around about Unreal jittered sampling and other “strange” texture filtering approaches. Now we know where all that went! Really nice!
@aras yes, we had a tech report with our initial findings and a ton of folks reported some great precedents in old games. We knew of all the academic literature, but game developers just use them and often not even report. :)
The coolest example was this old Star Trek game and the first Unreal, we had no idea! This helped us a lot to contextualize our research. :)
Game developers, please report your findings and even "hacks"! :)
@aras Even if writing a full paper might seem intimidating and a ton of work (plus sometimes dealing with gatekeeping reviewers), GDC or Siggraph "Advances" presentations, blog posts, JCGT articles or arXiv tech reports are good enough to find and reference and much easier to write. :)
@BartWronski there’s at least 10x effort (and prestige?) difference between a blog post and a GDC/Siggraph talk, but yes even a blog post is 1000x better than nothing. From personal experience though, “hey I found a gross hack!” the first instinct is to *not* write about it :) But of course you have no idea if your “gross hack” is actually a sensible application of a theory that has not been formulated yet.
@aras reminds me of one talks at Stephen's and Steve's course where someone from the film industry explained how in the first Toy Story, artists requested a "hack" for diffuse power remapping to make lighting look more natural. Later it turned out that artists intuitively compensated for the lack of gamma correction. :) @self_shadow do you remember which talk it was?
@aras also, I don't think most gamedevs find a "real" paper in some journal or a more "academic" conference any more prestigious than a GDC talk, from my anecdotal experience - it's the other way around. :)
@BartWronski true from gamedev side, but feels like complete opposite from “science” side. Like half a year ago, I toyed with Gaussian Splats wrt data compression, but these were not “papers”. How many of the 100+ new 3DGS papers mentioned it? About one, out of like 20 that were about data compression ;)
@aras yeah and some of them had even worse compression ratios than yours :( visibility of blog posts is close to zero for non-academics. And I even had one academic explicitly refusing to cite my blog post about a similar method as their paper "because it's not peer reviewed". :(
FWIW, I think if you wrote a LaTeX version of your post, just put it on arXiv with references - you'd get a ton of citations. And at many conferences, chance of a "best paper" award. :)
@aras arXiv (even not peer reviewed, just a "preprint") is better than a blog post, as it will show in Google Scholar, including back-references from citations. Academics often look at some paper, look who cited it, and read and cite those.
@BartWronski oh yeah I’m very aware of how and why that happens. My wife’s a professor, and “citation indexes” are a real thing there that can determine your employment status etc. Citing blog posts is not incentivized in any way, and because you get what you incentivize… well that’s what you get. It’s just funny from the outside :)
demofox@aras @BartWronski it sure is. I've tried to cite posts in both STBN and now FAST noise papers, and got a lot of push back on both papers. It's interesting cause the "real competitors" we ought to compare against live in blog posts IMO. (not as much push back at i3d btw Bart! that was nice.)
@aras @BartWronski like i have it on my personal blog todo list that i need to compare FAST vs these 2 types of noise.
https://tellusim.com/improved-blue-noise/
https://acko.net/blog/stable-fiddusion/
https://tellusim.com/improved-blue-noise/
https://acko.net/blog/stable-fiddusion/
@aras sonetimes it's incentives (your reviewers will be academics, so you better cite them all to not offend any potential one 😅), but discoverability is a real issue as well...
Tom Finnigan@BartWronski @aras Yeah, a lot of people’s literature search is just crawling up and down the citations tree, which blog posts typically aren’t a part of
@tomfinnigan @aras yeah, and putting something on arXiv makes you part of this citation tree. 90% of new CS/CV/ML papers submit there before final publication and already get cited.
Putting something together in LaTeX and submitting there is not much work (if you need "vouching" before submission to the arXiv CS.GS group, I am happy to recommend you! :) ), especially since Overleaf got really good recently (including some WYSIWYG editing!) and it's free for a single user and small projects.
Putting something together in LaTeX and submitting there is not much work (if you need "vouching" before submission to the arXiv CS.GS group, I am happy to recommend you! :) ), especially since Overleaf got really good recently (including some WYSIWYG editing!) and it's free for a single user and small projects.