Hello! I am Marries van de Hoef, a game development student at the Utrecht University. This is the place for me to show who I am, what I do, and to share my discoveries.
Check out my personal blog below, or one of the other pages. Subscribe to the RSS-feed and stay up-to-date!
This time, the lecture was on Advanced Computer Graphics and I presented it together with Bas Zalmstra.
The two-hour lecture gave a high-level overview of important techniques we learned at the GDC San Francisco 2011. The goal was to create some intuition on approaches for graphics techniques. We did not include implementation details or mathematical details to keep it accessible for everyone.
The room was too small!
The topics of the lecture were:
I presented the parts on inferred lighting, subsurface scattering and GPU particle physics.
All slides can be downloaded here.
The lecture was not directly attached to any course, so the students which attended did so in their spare time. And quite a lot of students showed up! Much more than we expected, so the room we reserved was a bit too small. About 60 students attended the lecture (both Bachelor and Master students).
We got a lot of positive reactions on the lecture. I think the students understood the concepts quite well, because they asked a lot of detailed and advanced questions. Cool!
Nearly 100 students!
Today, I gave a lecture for the Bachelor students following the Graphics course! The course has been changed this year to focus more on shader programming instead of ray tracing. I decided to become a teacher assistant in Graphics because I really like shader programming, and because I could help with changing the focus to shader programming. The reason I could help is because I’ve got more practical experience in shader programming than the teacher. This is also the reason I gave a lecture today. The content was mainly about shader programming and how shaders work in the graphics pipeline.
The lecture was a (nearly) full two-hour lecture, which was actually more tiring than I had expected. There were a little bit less than 100 students present! Quite impressive for a lecture at 9:00 am. This was mainly due to the good advertisement the teacher had done in advance for my lecture.
I’ve received a lot of positive reactions, so I’m very happy about it. If you’re interested in the slides, they can be downloaded here.
Anaglyph images!
Bas and I have finally finished our research project. It started out as small project to investigate quick rendering of stereoscopic images, but it grew to a large project. I’m very happy with the result. We’ve developed a very fast technique to generate high quality stereoscopic image, as explained here. We also created an introduction for game developers who are exploring stereoscopic rendering.
The research project was done as optional research project in my Game and Media Technology master. However, in the end we’ve put much more time in the project than the intention of the research project is. I think it was worth it, because I now thoroughly understand every detail of reprojecting images, and we developed and documented a technique which can be used professionally!
Now I can finally work on other things again!
I’ve arrived in San Francisco!
I will be enjoying the GDC (and the city) in the coming 10 days. Check out my experiences at my dedicated GDC blog.
The skyline of San Francisco from my plane.
Wooohooo! I’ve been granted a scholarship to go to the Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Fransisco!
Last summer, I went to the GDC Europe 2010 in Cologne with Bas Zalmstra and Emiel Bon. We had a really good time, and we learned a lot from the speakers sessions. The ‘real’ GDC in San Francisco is waaaay bigger, so that will be even more awesome!
You can keep track of my trip through this separate blog: GDC San Fransisco 2011
As you can see my website is online. Finally!
My first attempt on this website started around 2008, but due to my educational activities I didn’t have much time to work on it. My original idea was to make a custom CMS with a highly customizable object-oriented design, with a flashy javascript-based front. I started making the front-end, using jQuery which I had recently discovered back then. I finished it (it turned out later that I was just halfway there…), and after a while I started working on the CMS backside. But it didn’t take very long until I realized that it was waaay too much work.
Then I discovered my new love: WordPress. It has more features than I would ever make, it is highly customizable and has loads of plugins. Because finishing my website suddenly became feasible, I already registered my domainname and started using it for my e-mail (which looks way more professional than a hotmail or gmail address!). Because I already finished my javascript front-end, I started transforming it into a custom theme for wordpress. However, my front-end is ajax-based, and wordpress is not. That gave a little friction, but I managed to solve it with just 2 hacks into wordpress itself. The rest is nicely separated in my own theme. Hurrah for the flexibility of wordpress! This whole conversion process took quite some time, and along the way I found out that the front-end wasn’t as finished as I thought it was. So in the end it cost me much more time than anticipated. But I’m happy that I finished it, because now I have a truly unique website!
My Shuttle XS35 server
That’s not the full story, because I also wanted my own server. This would give me more possibilities and it would cost much less than renting something. But this costs a lot of time, because the server has to be selected, configured and maintained. After testing the software configuration in VMware, I decided to buy a Shuttle XS35 together with a blazing fast WD Scorpio Black. The response-time of wordpress hosted through VMware was a bit slow. Because I ran the virtualization on a very fast CPU, I was worried the Atom D510 in the Shuttle might not be powerful enough. But I was totally wrong. It runs like a breeze. The D510 would laugh at me if it knew I underestimated it this much. The Shuttle XS35 is passively cooled, so there is no annoying noise of a fan (but still hard-drive noise…). And the Atom processor makes it very energy efficient. The entire server runs at just 15W idle and 20W under load, which is about as much as an energy-saving light bulb. I’m very happy with my new little friend!