Gabe Rosa, preparing for his NVidia Cg talk before the meeting begins.
Before the meeting, he showed some of us a demo of Cg pixel shading.
It's the famous "Stanford Bunny" 3D model, NVidia's headquarters in the
background, and the bunny is made to look like glass.
More pixel-shaded Stanford Bunny.
Stanford Bunny from another angle. Notice the slight rainbow artifact.
The Stanford Bunny as a wireframe.
Just under 25 people showed up for the talk...
...The low turnout was probably because UC Davis school year just ended.
Gabe Rosa starting his talk!
Starting out with some basics...
An example of 3D graphics. A foot, rendered from medical data.
The first Cg shader demo. Spheres, lit by a floating ligthsource.
To the CPU, they're just a set of quadrilaterals. It's the pixel shader
code, written in Cg, that makes them look like spheres, and appear to be
lit.
Here is a sphere. It's being altered to wobble randomly by Cg
"vector shader" code. All of the alteration is done inside the GPU on the
graphics card, within the graphics pipeline!
Perfectly straight blades of grass... or so the CPU thinks. Cg code inside
the GPU is running to make them wave in the wind.
Another shot of Gabe.
A screenshot of NVidia's famous "Dawn" character. Pixel- and vector-shading
Cg code give her realistic hair, skin, translucent fairy wings, etc.
All in realtime!
A simple example of shader code from before Cg: it's a form of assembly,
and not very portable between GPUs (viedo cards)!
Phong shading (specular reflection) via Cg pixel shader code.
... from another angle.
Cg code, not suprisingly, looks like C. It's more human-readable, and
more importantly, portable.
Gabe demo'd the Stanford Bunny for all to see.
More transparent Stanford Bunny.
More Stanford Bunny!
A UFO with a soap-like transparent film.
More soapy UFO.
More soapy UFO!
Another example of vector-shading. A flat polygon wobbles like water.
... like drips falling on water.
More water-waving.
