Here's an awesome new blog post by Maxime Heckel on rendering realistic skies and atmospheres. There's a ton of really cool interactive widgets illustrating each of the steps; I highly recommend giving it a read and giving the interactive widgets a try!

https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/on-rendering-the-sky-sunsets-and-planets/

There's a neat short paper from Eurographics this year that evaluates how well microfacet shading models actually predict measured reflectance. The answer is: not nearly as well as one would hope!

(1/3)

https://ssteinberg.xyz/2026_surface_scattering_accuracy/2026_surface_scattering_accuracy.pdf

I've just wrote a new blog post: "A History of IDEs at Google".

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google

I worked at Google for 12 years on developer tools, including 3 years on the internal IDE. I'm sharing here some notes about it.

DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay 2.40 Introduces New GUI, Light Path Visualizer

Back in 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced they were open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer and was then published in early 2023 for this renderer that has been used in a variety of featured animated films. Since then they have continued advancing this MoonRay code via the open-source OpenMoonRay project and this week published their newest feature update...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/DreamWorks-OpenMoonRay-2.40

#PhysicsFactlet
Scattering VS Extinction
In #Optics, the concepts of scattering and extinction are closely related. So closely related that many people tend to confuse them.
Imagine to illuminate a small object with a beam of light. If the object is small the scattered field will be essentially a spherical wave, and the total field will be the incident one plus the scattered field.
If we were able to measure directly the field (as we can do in the microwave regime) we could happily stop here, but in optics we can only measure intensities, and the intensity is defined as the time average of the modulus of the Pointing vector. In most cases of interest, the modulus of the Poynting vector is proportional to the modulus squared of the electric field (which explains why we often that a shortcut and just talk about |E|²).
So the quantity we measure is proportional to |Eᵢₙ +Eₛ|², which is the sum of the Poynting vector of the incident field, the Poynting vector of the scattered field, plus the cross terms. These cross terms are what we usually call "extinction" and are the result of the interference between the incident and scattering fields(and the reason why you get a "shadow" behind the scatterer).

#Scattering #Electrodynamics

GPU Tracing Participating Media
https://alextardif.com/ParticipatingMedia.html

Just some HLSL this time :-) Not a long form post, I've been reading PBR and maybe this will be helpful to share!

I just spent the last 24 hours building... a free tool to create your very own handwriting font quickly within the browser (no logins, all local processing):

https://arcade.pirillo.com/fontcrafter.html

Having tested it extensively on my own manuscript, I can definitely say that it works. ;) Download the OTF and/or TTF when done!

#fonts #typography #web #app #ai #vibecoding #free