Beginning this week we'll be releasing the full text of GPU Gems 3 on the NVIDIA website -- Seven chapters to start, and then three chapters per week between now and GDC 2009.
Click here to begin reading the first section of GPU Gems 3,
Geometry.
Chapters this week:
We are proud to announce the release of the NVIDIA PhysX Plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya.
These plug-ins allow users to easily create, manipulate and export physics simulations directly in the content creation tool of their choice.
The plug-ins support a wide range of features such as:
- Rigid bodies
- Constraint specification
- Cloth
- Fluids
- Soft bodies
- Force fields
- Exporting
- Numerous sample projects
Download them today from the PhysX DCC Plug-ins page.
Autodesk 3D Studio Max
Autodesk Maya
We've collected many of NVIDIA's key presentations, code samples, demo programs, and whitepapers on the topic of shadowing under one page, giving developers a broad resource covering everything from the latest on cascaded shadow maps and real-time ambient occlusion to the basic priciples of stencil shadowing and hardware-accelerated percentage-closer filtering. See them all at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/doc_shadows.html
The "Amazing Creations" competition celebrates the very essence of the creativity that
defines digital art – the ability to create artistically and
technically excellent images of things that are impossible in the real
world. Digital artists don’t have any barriers to realizing their
wildest ideas. They can build whole virtual worlds and render them in a
way that makes them almost tangible and embodied with life.
This breakthrough competition runs from 7 January 2008. For more details, click here.
GameDev.net, in conjunction with NVIDIA and SoftImage, are celebrating the release of NVIDIA FX Composer 2 by asking you to get your shade on!
The challenge is simple: Use FX Composer 2 to create an amazing shader. Show us scenes that sparkle, surfaces that shock, materials that are out of this world – or maybe so close to it you can’t tell the difference. And while you’re at it, see if you can make it artist-friendly, too...
Your shader could win you a big prize, and it could be immortalized (with clear credit to you) in our Shader Library.
Shade Your World Contest
FX Composer 2 is a powerful integrated development environment for shader authoring. With support for DirectX and OpenGL, HLSL, COLLADA FX, and CgFX, as well as .fbx, .x, .3ds, .obj, and .dae formats, FX Composer provides true cross-platform functionality.
We strongly recommend that you read through the Quick Tutorial (linked from FX Composer's new Start Page), as well as the User Guide (also linked from FX Composer's Start Page) to get a good understanding of FX Composer's extensive capabilities. These include Shader Library integration, ShaderPerf analysis, animation support, COLLADA support, scripting, effect and project wizards, customizable toolbars and layouts, and much more.
More on the FX Composer 2 page.
This release candidate of FX Composer 2 includes various bug fixes and minor improvements, including better support for older Shader Model 2.0 GPUs. Please note that the shader templates generated by the shader authoring wizard use the ps_3_0 profile, but you can modify them to use ps_2_a if you have older hardware.
We encourage you to visit our public developer forums, where you can discuss FX Composer 2 with other users, as well as the development team. We look forward to seeing you there
This release includes a number of important improvements:
- 22% faster CUDA compressor (now 12.5x faster than the CPU implementation)
- Compiled/compatible with release NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 1.0
- Added support for input DDS files, including cube maps
- Added support for input PSD files
- Added nvdecompress tool
- Added nvimgdiff tool
- Added nvddsinfo tool
- DXT3 & DXT5 CUDA compressors
- Faster DXT5n CPU compressor
- Several bug fixes
Please visit our new developer forums to share and discuss any suggestions or problems you may have.
Texture Tools 2 Alpha page.
We are delighted to finally share our latest beta of FX Composer 2 with you. This release includes numerous better support for foreign languages, Vista x64 fixes, and bug fixes. Make sure to check out our new FX Composer 2 overview slide deck.
We are pleased to unveil the cover of the upcoming “GPU Gems 3” book. This image has been rendered in NVIDIA’s “Human Head” demo, which features Doug Jones, who recently starred as the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
The book will be in full color, hard cover, and will contain 41 chapters, including “Advanced Skin Rendering”, which explains how to render ultra-realistic characters. GPU Gems 3 will be released at SIGGRAPH 2007 but can already be pre-ordered.
We will release more information about this project as we get closer to SIGGRAPH.
