Hi guys, I created on my website a new knowledge section about Rendering Techniques. I listed there 10 awesome in-depth articles about some of the greatest games like Half Life 2, Battlefield 3 or Left 4 Dead 2 - and how they are rendered! You'll find everything on my website, but for your convenience I put also in the following the links to the pdf's and a small summary. It would be cool if you could add some other papers, too, in order to increase the quality and quantity of this list.

Stable SSAO in Battlefield 3 with Selective Temporal Filtering
In this paper, a selective temporal filtering approach is introduced for reducing SSAO flickering on thin objects such as alpha-tested foliage, using a reverse reprojection and a stability classifier. The final SSAO image is smoothed with an approximate cross-bilateral filter. The techniques are used in the PC version of Battlefield 3 (DICE).

"MAXIS-mizing" Darkspore: A Ca...ferred Renderer
In this article, it is shown how Maxis implemented a light pre-pass renderer to decouple lighting from the scene geometry for their game Darkspore. It is also shown how the team discovered and fixed certain bottlenecks in their graphics pipeline concerning trees, terrain, character details and the render system.

Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and Shading
In this paper, it is shown how skin, hair and cloth are rendered in Naughty Dogs' game Uncharted 2. The main subject is the improvement of a Subsurface Scattering technique by NVidia. The paper concludes with several sidenotes about hacks, wise shader usage, lighting models and details in normal maps.

Toy Story 3: The Video Game - Rendering Techniques
This paper explains 3 novel rendering techniques used in Toy Story 3: The Video Game (Avalanche Software), including: SSAO (using Line Integrals & random rotated paired sampling), Ambient Lighting (using volume-based Irradiance Light Rigs) & a combinatorial Soft Shadow Mapping solution, which exploits simple technqiues.

Rendering Wounds in Left 4 Dead 2
In Left 4 Dead there were 5 static wound models built into each Zombie. In this paper it is explained, how Valve created a dynamic wound system for their Zombies in Left 4 Dead 2. The wounds are generated by mixing seperated wound models with projected textures and a pose-space ellipsoid culling method, to cut holes into bodies.

Covering New Ground: Foliage Rendering in Pure
In this paper a fast multi-pass technique is demonstrated, that uses a screen space alphamask to render alpha textured geometry for large scale foliage, avoiding some alpha-blending and -testing related problems. The technique is used in the game Pure (Blackrock Studio).

Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2
This paper explains how the game Killzone 2 (Guerilla) is rendered and how it was optimized for the PS3. Using a forward & deferred renderer, it is shown, how the game is lighted, how weapons & decals are treated, how soft shadowmaps are generated and what post-processing effects are added afterwards.

Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2
The paper explains how the unique rendering style of the game Team Fortress 2 (Valve) has been achieved. A set of artistic choices and novel real-time shading techniques are presented, which support each other and are designed to achieve the look of early 20th century commercial illustrations.

Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects
In this paper, a simple and yet efficient method is shown, which allows to render high-resolution shapes by alpha-testing a low-resolution distance field texture. With additional pixel shaders, high quality soft edges, outlining and drop shadows can be rendered, too. This technique has been used in Team Fortress 2 (Valve).

Efficient Self-Shadowed Radiosity Normal Mapping
In this paper it is shown, how to precompute and use directional ambient occlusion textures together with regular bump mapping, to enhance the self-shadowing of surfaces, illuminated from directional lights. This technique has been used in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (Valve).

Enjoy!
-Christian

Super-Awesome-Somewhat-Random-Papers-Collection [1/2]

A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube]

Learn Computer Graphics Programming From Scratch

General Stuffs:
Deferred Rendering for Current and Future Rendering Pipelines
Art and Technology of Whiteout
Real-time Atmospheric Effects in Games
Natural Light Phenomena
Shading in Valve’s Source Engine + [slides]
Five Rendering Ideas from BF3 and NFS:TR [separable hexagonal bokeh]
Making Of "Shadow of the Colossus"
Compact Normal Storage
Calibrating Lighting and Materials in Far Cry 3
Nightsky
The Technology Behind the DirectX 11 Unreal Engine 3 Samaritan Demo
Ureal Engine 4 Technology
Tiled Forward Shading Links
Intersecting Lights with Pixels [Reasoning about Forward and Deferred Rendering]
Applications of Temporal Coherence in Real-Time Rendering
Consistent Normal Interpolation
Ambient Aperture Lighting
On Depth Recovery from Gradient Vector Fields
Starcraft 2 : Effects & Techniques
Terrain Rendering Using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps
SSLPV: Subsurface Light Propagation Volumes
A Reconstruction Filter for Plausible Motion Blur
Lighting and Material of Halo 3
Rendering from Compressed HDR Textures
Clustered Deferred and Forward Shading
Photographic Tone Reproduction for Digital Images
Alpha Blending: To Pre or Not To Pre
Sparse Voxel Octree Ray Tracing on the GPU
GigaVoxels [voxel cone tracing concept]
Resolution Independent Curve Rendering
Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects
Terrain in Battlefield 3: A modern, complete and scalable system
Covering New Ground: Foliage Rendering Rendering in Pure
Everything about Particle Effects
Graphics Gems for Games - Findings from Avalanche Studios
Local Image-based Lighting with Parallax-corrected Cubemaps
Interactive Smooth and Curved Shell Mapping [Crysis3's alternative to tessellation]
Fast And Accurate Visibility Preprocessing
University of Utah - NPRR papers (f.i. The Lit Sphere)
]Killzone: Shadow Fall - Postmortem
An Image-space Technique for Real-time Caustics [Website]
Order-Independent Transparency in DirectX11
Order Independent Transparency with Per-Pixel Linked Lists
Practical Clustered Shading
Shadows Decals: D3D10 techniques from Frostbite
Lighting Research at Bungie
Regressions in RT Rendering: LittleBigPlanet Post Mortem
Sparse Low-degree IMplicits (SLIM)
A Laplacian Based Approach for Free-Form Deformation of SLIM Surfaces
Virtual Texture Terrain
Deferred Shading Optimizations
k+-buffer: Fragment Synchronized k-buffer
Image-Space Hardware-Based Rendering of Constructive Solid Geometry
Maximizing Depth Buffer Range and Precision
Multi-Hit Ray Traversal
Estimating Curvatures and Their Derivatives on Triangle Meshes
Realtime texture quilting
Assassin’s Creed 4: Road to Next-gen Graphics, GDC 2014
Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees
The Technology Behind the “Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo”
Circle-of-Confusion Stuff
A Fast and Stable Feature-Aware Motion Blur Filter
PracticalPhotorealistic Skin Rendering and Antialiasing
Dynamic Sand Simulation and Rendering in Journey [.pptx]
Deformable Snow Rendering in Batman: Arkham Origins
High Quality Elliptical Texture Filtering on GPU
Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling
Controllable Magic Frost Simulations for 'Rise of the Guardians'
Texts Rasterization Exposures
Conservative and Tiled Rasterization Using a Modified Triangle Setup
Physically Based Camera Rendering
BF3: Culling the Battlefield
Rendering Fields of Grass
Antialiased 2D Grid, Marker, and Arrow Shaders
A Survey of Volumetric Illumination Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering
Light probe interpolation using tetrahedral tessellations
Combatting Rendering Latency
CryEngine3 Graphic Gems [.pptx]
Rasterization: A Practical Implementation
How to draw a Black Hole
Jump Flooding in GPU with Applications to Voronoi Diagram and Distance Transform
Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis
A Survey of Efficient Representations for Independent Unit Vectors
Implementing Median Filters in XC4000E FPGAs
Tightening the Precision of Perspective Rendering
[infinite projection matrix]
Ray Reordering Techniques for GPU Ray-Cast Ambient Occlusion
State of the Art in Artistic Editing of Appearance, Lighting, and Material
Next-gen Mobile Rendering [interesting Unreal pp-pipe tricks]
Space-filling curves for spatial data structures
Historically Significant Papers for Computer Graphics
A Phenomenological Scattering Model for Order-Independent Transparency
software renderer in 500 lines of code
Computational Photography
Deferred and Forward Rendering Approaces Overview
How Kalman Filters Work
Tightening the Precision of Perspective Rendering
Realistic Real-Time Rendering of Eyes and Teeth
High-Quality Capture of Eyes
Peering Through a Glass, Darkly at the Future of Real-Time Transparency

The Path to Path-Traced Movies
Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling
The Visual Effects of Infamous: Second Son
AA Patterns for Point Sets with Controlled Spectral Properties
Drawing Ellipses Using Filled Rectangles
The Order 1886: used PP-Effects

VR:
Advanced VR Rendering [Valve]
Interaction Design in VR: Valve's Lessons
Mike Alger [youtube-channel]
Learning from Other Disciplines, Industries, and Art Forms

Procedural stuffs and related:
Improving Noise
Simplex noise
Simplex noise demystified
Graphical Interface Models for Procedural Mesh Growing
Improving Gabor Noise
ProceduralNoise using Sparse Gabor Convolution
Gabor Noise by Example
The Importance of Being Noisy: Fast, High Quality Noise
Gettin’ Procedural
Enhanced Sphere Tracing
Procedural Content Generation in Games
Modeling Trees with a Space Colonization Algorithm
Implicit Surfaces Course Siggraph 96
Distance Aware Ray Tracing for Curves
Simplex Noise, keeping it simple
3D Distance Fields: A Survey of Techniques and Applications
Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields: A General Representation of Shape for Computer Graphics
Vector-to-Closest-Point Octree for Surface Ray-Casting
Modeling Real-World Terrain with Exponentially Distributed Noise [Comments by Sean Barrett]
Distance Transforms of Sampled Functions
Closest Point Coordinate Fields
Fast Intersection-free Offset Surface Generation [simplified dual-contouring]
Guided Ecological Simulation for Artistic Editing of Plant Distributions in Natural Scenes
A glsl library for building signed distance functions
Spherical Fibonacci Mapping
Fast Ray Tracing of Arbitrary Implicit Surfaces with Interval and Affine Arithmetic
Pseudo Lens Flare [!]
Fitting Procedural Yarn Models for Realistic Cloth Rendering


Water:
Animating Sand, Mud, and Snow [water column model]
Simulating Ocean Water [state of the art]
Ocean simulation part two: using the FFT [software implementation of "Simulating Ocean Water"]
A unified directional spectrum for long and short wind-driven waves
Real-time Realistic Ocean Lighting [Seamless Transitions from Geometry to BRDF]
Ocean Surface Simulation
Ocean-Wave Spectra
Beaufort scale
Assassin’s Creed III: Water-Tech [coarse overview]
Water Technology of Uncharted
Ocean Optics Web Book
Dynamic Simulation of Splashing Fluids

Physics:
Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games
Curl-Noise for Procedural Fluid Flow
Position Based Fluids
Advanced Volumetric Effects for Games
Real time fluid simulation and control using the Navier-Stokes equations
Codimensional Non-Newtonian Fluids

Air Meshes for Robust Collision Handling
Physically-Based Realistic Fire Rendering
Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation

Ron Fedkiw - Research

Image Processing:
Image and Video Abstraction by Anisotropic Kuwahara Filtering
Anisotropic Kuwahara Filtering with Polynomial Weighting Functions
Image and Video Abstraction by Multi-scale Anisotropic Kuwahara Filtering
Image and Video Abstraction by Coherence-Enhancing Filtering
Image and Video Based Painterly Animation
Fast O(1) bilateral Filtering using trigonometric range kernels
Adaptive bilateral Filtering using local phase characteristics
A Fast, Small-Radius GPU Median Filter
An Edge Detection Method in DCT Domain
Interactive watercolor rendering with temporal coherence and abstraction
RealBrush: Painting with Examples of Physical Media
Super-Resolution From a Single Image
Real-time noise-aware tone mapping
Optimized Quasi-Interpolators for Image Reconstruction
Low-resolution effects with depth-aware upsampling
Some details on Crytek's DoF [forum thread]
Preparing for Real HDR

Color:
The rehabilitation of gamma
How To Avoid Equidistant HSV Colors
HCL : A New Perceptually Uniform Color Space
HSP Color Model - Alternative to HSV (HSB) and HSL
Escaping RGBland: Selecting Colors for Statistical Graphics
Generating Color Palettes using Intuitive Parameters
Colour Space Conversions
The CIE XYZ and xyY Color Spaces
Colour spaces - perceptual, historical and applicational background
Color conversion math and formulas
Human eye sensitivity and photometric quantities
Gamma error in picture scaling
Banding in Games: A Noisy Rant [!]
Color Banding Removal [shadertoy]
Tone Mapping High Dynamic Range Videos using Wavelets
Computer Color is Broken [gamma correctness explained by MinutePhysics][youtube]
Colour Rendering of Spectra
Retinex Poisson Equation: a Model for Color Perception
The Importance of Terminology and sRGB Uncertainty

XYZ- and RGB-color matching functions

Geometry:
Building an Edge List for an Arbitrary Mesh
Computing Tangent Space Basis for an Arbitrary Mesh
Dual Marching Cubes: Primal Contouring of Dual Grids [slides]
Dual Marching Cubes
Fast generation of pointerless octree duals
Triangulation by Ear Clipping
GPU-accelerated Path Rendering
Interior Distance Using Barycentric Coordinates
Marching Diamonds for Unstructured Meshes
Efficient and High Quality Contouring of Isosurfaces on Uniform Grids
paniq's gists [World's Tiniest* Marching Tetrahedron]
Dual Contouring of Hermite Data

Analysis and Acceleration of High Quality Isosurface Contouring
Tetrahedra-based Volumetric Meshes [papers list]
Trivial Connections on Discrete Surfaces
Dual Marching Tetrahedra: Contouring in the Tetrahedronal Environment
Regularised marching tetrahedra
Calculation of Reference Frames along a Space Curve

Animation|Skinning|Deformation:
A Beginners Guide to Dual-Quaternions
Dual Quaternions for Rigid Transformation Blending
Spherical Skinning with Dual-Quaternions and QTangents
Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures
An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation [!]
Accurate and Efficient Lighting for Skinned Models
Key Frame Interpolation via Splines and Quaternions [Kochanek-Bartels Splines for Quaternions]
Animating Rotation with Quaternion Curves [pretty accessible]
A General Construction Scheme for Unit Quaternion Curves
Dual-Quaternions [sample dq-class]
Destiny Character-Animation
Approximating Slerp
The Starfish Rig - Humanoid rig with 6 bones
Quaternion Double-cover and the Rest Pose Neighborhood - 2006 [youtube]

Tessellation:
Curved PN Triangles
Scalar Tagged PN Triangles
Approximating Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces with Bicubic Patches
Semi-Smooth Creases in Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces
Feature Adaptive GPU Rendering of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces
Rendering Very Large, Very Detailed Terrains
D3D11 Tessellation [PN-Triangles]
Real-time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation

Volumetric Lighting
Prefiltered Single Scattering [fast]
A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight
Deferred Rendering of Planetary Terrains with Accurate Atmospheres
Rendering Outdoor Light Scattering in Real Time [GDC Presentation]
Real-Time Volumetric Shadows using 1D Min-Max Mipmaps
Practical Implementation of Light Scattering Effects [Using Epipolar Sampling and 1D Min/Max Binary Trees]
A Practical Analytic Single Scattering Model for Real Time Rendering
Practical Implementation of Light Scattering Effects
Real-time Volumetric Lighting in Participating Media
Sky/Atmospheric Rendering [lots of links and papers]
Screen-Space Perceptual Rendering of Human Skin
Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering [physically based bloom]
Real-Time Dynamic Simulation of the Scattering in the Human Eye [physically based bloom][the equivalent to lens flares for the human eye]
Physically-Based Glare Effects for Digital Images
Real-Time Screen-Space Scattering in Homogeneous Environments
Efficient Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport in Scattering Media [Covers a lot of related fundamental topics like radiometry, spherical hamonics, etc.]
Subsurface Texture Mapping
Image-Space SSS for Deformable Translucent Objects
Interactive Cloud Rendering Using Temporally-Coherent Photon Mapping
Planetary Atmospheres with Multiple Scattering in Real-Time
Volumetric Lighting for Many Lights in Lords of the Fallen
Volumetric Fog in AC4
Optical Models for Direct Volume Rendering [basics of absorption, emission and scattering; the physics of alpha-compositing]
Practical Real-Time Lens-Flare Rendering
Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media shadertoy illustration
Henyey-Greenstein and Rayleigh phase functions
Physically-based & Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite [ShaderToy]

Oskar Elek - Research

Indirect Illumination:
Screen Space Directional Occlusion
The Alchemy Screen-Space Ambient Obscurance Algorithm
Cascaded Light Propagation Volumes for Real-Time Indirect Illumination
Approximate Global Illumination in Real-Time
Ambient occlusion using cone tracing with scene voxelization
Ambient Occlusion Fields and Decals in Infamous 2
Multi-view Ambient Occlusion with Importance Sampling
Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing [more info in GigaVoxels]
Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient Computation of Indirect Illumination
Indirekte Beleuchtung mit Antiradiance-Splatting im Bildraum [German]
Fast Generation of Directional Occlusion Volumes
Deferred Radiance Transfer Volumes
summary of some basic techniques for pre-baked GI
Image-Based Proxy Accumulation for Real-Time Soft Global Illumination
Radiosity overview
Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping
Toward Practical Real-Time Photon Mapping: Efficient GPU Density Estimation
Fast Global Illumination Approximations on Deep G-Buffers
Realtime Global Illumination techniques collection
Cascaded Voxel Cone Tracing in The Tomorrow Children
Interactive Diffuse Global Illumination Discretization Methods For Dynamic Environments
Octree-Based Sparse Voxelization Using the GPU Hardware Rasterizer
Global Illumination Compendium
WebGL Deferred Irradiance Volumes
Scalable Ambient Obscurance [state of the art SSAO]
Point-Based Global Illumination for Movie Production
The Technology Of The Tomorrow Children
A Gentle Introduction to Precomputed Radiance Transfer
Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding SSAO
Computing Skylight for 2D Height Fields
A Comparative Study of Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion Methods


Basis Functions:
Spherical Harmonics
Stupid Spherical Harmonics (SH) Tricks
Spherical Harmonic Lighting: The Gritty Details
An Efficient Representation for Irradiance Environment Maps
Spherical Radial Basis Function
Precomputed radiance transfer using spherical radial basis functions
Cosine Lobes for Interactive Direct Lighting in Dynamic Scenes
Efficient Spherical Harmonic Evaluation
Reconstructing Diffuse Lighting from SH-Data
On the relationship between radiance and irradiance [SH cosine lobe code]

Shadows:
Shadow Mapping: GPU-based Tips and Techniques
Dual paraboloid shadow mapping
Sample Distribution Shadow Maps + [slides]
A Survey of Real-time Soft Shadows Algorithms
Advanced Soft Shadow Mapping Techniques
Variance Shadow Maps
Exponential Shadow Maps
Rendering Antialiased Shadows using Warped Variance Shadow Maps [includes a section about Exponential Variance Shadow Maps]
Camera Space Shadow Maps
Rectilinear Texture Warping for Fast Adaptive Shadow Mapping
Real-time soft shadow mapping by backprojection [not really real-time, but interactive at least]
CSM Scrolling
Multi-View Soft Shadows
Sub-Pixel Shadow Mapping
Per-Triangle Shadow Volumes Using a View-Sample Cluster Hierarchy
Efficient Virtual Shadow Maps for Many Lights
Rendering Antialiased Shadows with Depth Maps [original PCF introduction]
Compact precomputed voxelized shadows
Soft Shadow Mapping [WebGL Demos of various techniques]
Moment Shadow Mapping

Super-Awesome-Somewhat-Random-Papers-Collection [2/2]

General Lighting|Radiometry|BRDFs:
SIGGRAPH 2014 Course: Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice
SIGGRAPH 2013 Course: Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice
SIGGRAPH 2012 Course: Practical Physically Based Shading in Film and Game Production
Basic Theory of Physically-Based Rendering [high-level overview]
Fundamentals of Lighting and Perception
How to understand photo- and radiometry using only gnomes with basketballs
Geometrical Considerations and Nomenclature for Reflectance
Theory for Off-Specular Reflection From Roughened Surfaces [Torrance/Sparrow]
Investigation on the Torrance-Sparrow Specular BRDF Model
Generalization of Lambert’s Reflectance Model [Oren/Nayar]
A tiny improvement of Oren-Nayar reflectance model
An Anisotropic Phong BRDF Model [Ashikhmin/Shirley]
A Microfacet Based Coupled Specular-Matte BRDF Model with Importance Sampling [Kelemen/Szirmay-Kalos]
A Reflectance Model for Computer Graphics [Cook/Torrance]
Non-Linear Approximation of Reflectance Functions [Lafortune]
Phong/Blinn-Phong Normalization Factor derivation
Experimental Validation of Analytical BRDF Models
State of the art of Material Rendering Techniques
Crafting Physically Motivated Shading Models for Game Development
Microfacet Models for Refraction through Rough Surfaces [GGX distribution]
A Microfacet-based BRDF Generator
Distribution-based BRDFs
LEAN-Mapping
Split off-specular reflection and surface scattering from woven materials
Frequency Domain Normal Map Filtering
Light Reflection Functions for Simulation of Clouds and dusty Surfaces [Blinn, July 1982]
The Blinn-Phong Normalization Zoo
Adopting a physically based shading model
Simon's Tech Blog - Microfacet BRDF
Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production
Physically-Based Reflectance for Games
Beyond a Simple Physically Based Blinn-Phong Model in Real-Time
Lighting: The Rendering Equation
Energy Conservation In Games
Physically Based Shading - Siggraph 2013 Course
Einige BRDF Modelle [German]
Lighting of Killzone: Shadow Fall
Next Generation Character Rendering [!]
Area Light Sources for Real-Time Graphics
Radiative View Factors
Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4
Compact Metallic Reflectance Models
Optimized Phong and Blinn-Phong Glossy Highlights
Analysis of Human Faces using a Measurement-Based Skin Reflectance Model
Simulation Of Wrinkeled Surfaces [original bumpmapping introduction by Blinn]
Physically-Based Shading at Disney
The Comprehensive PBR Guide
readings on physically based rendering [all the stuffs]
An Overview of BRDF Models
Basic radiometric quantities
Colour Rendering of Spectra
Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4
Real-Time Refraction Through Deformable Objects
Simple Alternative to Clustered Shading for Thousands of Lights
Cosine Lobes for Interactive Direct Lighting in Dynamic Scenes
Understanding the Masking-Shadowing Function in Microfacet-Based BRDFs
Introduction to Shading
The Lighting Handbook [slideshare]
Illumination Fundamentals [Luminances of common light sources]
A Survey of Non-linear Pre-filtering Methods for Efficient and Accurate Surface Shading
Linear Efficient Antialiased Displacement and Reflectance Mapping
Estimating Specular Roughness and Anisotropy from Second Order Spherical Gradient Illumination
The SGGX Microflake Distribution
Analytic Tangent Irradiance Environment Maps for Anisotropic Surfaces
On Physically Based Hair Rendering
Efficient Implementation of the Dual Scattering Model in RenderMan
Fake Fur Rendering
Practical Shading of Height Fields and Meshes using Spherical Harmonic Exponentiation
An Intuitive Introduction to Global Illumination and Path Tracing
Global Illumination in a Nutshell
The Secret Life of Photons - Simulating 2D Light Transport
Implementing a Physically Based Camera
Multiple-Scattering Microfacet BSDFs with the Smith Model
Lighting Mirror's Edge: Catalyst [youtube]
Additional Progress Towards the Unification of Microfacet and Microflake Theories


Glitter stuffs:
Discrete Stochastic Microfacet Models
Rendering Glints on High-Resolution Normal-Mapped Specular Surfaces
Simulation of sparkles in metallic paints
Photo-realistic Rendering of Metallic Car Paint from Image-Based Measurements
Real-time Rendering of Procedural Multiscale Materials

Offline stuffs:
The Path-Tracing Revolution in the Movie Industry [Siggraph 2015]
Monte Carlo Evaluation Of Non-Linear Scattering Equations For Subsurface Reflection
Physically-Accurate Fur Reflectance: Modeling, Measurement and Rendering

MERL BRDF Database
BRDF Explorer
BRDFLab
RefractiveIndex [refraction and absorbtion coeffcients]
AMD Cubemapgen for physically based rendering

Anti-Aliasing:
Filtering Approaches for Real-Time Anti-Aliasing [Siggraph2011 course]
Morphological Antialiasing
SMAA-Enhanced-Subpixel-Morphological-Antialiasing
FXAA
Multisampled Antialiasing of Per-pixel Geometry
Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing for Deferred Shading
Adaptive Supersampling for Deferred Anti-Aliasing
Temporal subpixel reconstruction antialiasing (Temporal SRAA)
Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing
Optimized Reversible Tonemapper for Resolve

GPU-Programming and Architecture:
Low-Level GPU Documentation
Floating Point and IEEE 754 Compliance for NVIDIA GPUs
Low-Level Thinking in High-Level Shading Languages [must-read]
Low-level Shader Optimization for Next-Gen and DX11
Don’t Throw it all Away: Efficient Buffer Management
High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs
Real-Time Rendering Architectures
Porting Source to Linux - Valve’s Lessons Learned
DX 10 Performance and DX 11 Preview [General GPU Performance Tips [D3D]]
How bad are small triangles on GPU and why?
'Rasterization patterns' of Haswell GPUs
Vertex Shader Tricks [live presentation]
GPU Profiling 101
How GPU Shader Cores Work
GPU Rasterizer Pattern
A Closer Look at GPUs
Uniform buffers vs texture buffers: The 2015 edition
Depth In-depth
101 Uses for Raster Ordered Views using DirectX 12
Efficient Rendering with DirectX 12 on Intel Graphics
AMD GCN presentation
GCN Architecture whitepaper
GCN – two ways of latency hiding and wave occupancy
Mantle whitepaper
Mantle API Programming Guide
Life of a triangle - NVIDIA's logical pipeline
Tools and Techniques for Debugging and Optimization
Approaching Zero Driver Overhead
Optimizations and New DirectX Features in Just Cause 3
D3D11 Texture Update Costs

Benchmarking floating-point precision in mobile GPUs
Benchmarking floating-point precision in mobile GPUs - Part II
Benchmarking floating point precision in mobile GPUs - Part III

Math:
List of trigonometric identities
List of integrals of trigonometric functions
Differential operator
Differential (infinitesimal)
Animated Bezier Curves
Singular Value Decomposition Tutorial
distance functions for common primitives
Regular-Grid Traversal along Lines
Isosurface Formulas
A Survey of Efficient Representations for Independent Unit Vectors
Elegant solutions to various problems.
Understanding Quaternions
Fundamentals of Grassmann Algebra
Recursive Wang Tiles for Real-Time Blue Noise
Fast Computation of General Fourier Transforms on GPUs
OpenCL Fast Fourier Transform [radix2/4/8/16 implementations]
Computing the inverse normal cumulative distribution function
Reaction-Diffusion by the Gray-Scott Model: Pearson's Parameterization
Interpolation and Splines [ppt]
Trigonometry: Laws And Identities
Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet
Cheap analytic curva [shadertoy]
Hammersley Points on the Hemisphere
Smoothen your functions
Approximating the erfinv function
Spreading points on a disc and on a sphere
Fast Poisson Disk Sampling in Arbitrary Dimensions

Implementing FFTs in Practice [direct download]
Algebraic Surfaces
Phase Plots of Complex Functions: A Journey in Illustration
Polynomials and the Fast Fourier Transform [elegant FFT]
Interpolating Splines: Which is the fairest of them all?
Adaptive Subdivision of Bezier Curves
Approximation of cubic Bezier Curves by circular Arcs and vice versa
Articulating Space: Geometric Algebra for Parametric Design
Bayesian and Quasi Monte Carlo Spherical Integration for Illumination Integrals [Spherical Fibonacci point sets (slide 49)]
Generating random variables
Frames, Quadratures and Global Illumination: New Math for Games [spherical needlets]

Blogs:
Wolfgang Engel - Diary of a Graphics Programmer
Game Art Tricks [interesting hints]
Ray Tracey's blog [real-time path tracing]
Nathan Reed's blog
The ryg blog
Self Shadow - An online shadow of myself
I'm doing it wrong - more often than not.
CodeItNow
The Tenth Planet
Random thoughts about graphics in game [series about wet surfaces and rain rendering]
Lol Engine blog [RGB<->HSV conversion, picking an orthogonal vector, quaternion from two vectors]
Filmic Games
Outerra blog
Chilliant - The Personal blog of Ian Taylor [some color space coversions in HLSL]
Humus 3D
ginsweater's blog
Graphics Rendering Blog
Eric Bruneton
ScrawkBlog
Tom Forsyth's Blog
Íñigo Quílez's Blog Articles
Alexandre Pestana's blog
The Devil In The Details: A graphics programmer's blog
3D Game Engine Programming
Sebh's blog
g-truc
Procedural World
Uniblock Dev Blog [OpenSimplex noise]
code4k [Advanced HLSL using closures and function pointers]
Extremeistan
erleuchtet.org
briansharpe [proc stuff]
Cyril Crassin's blog
Shinji Ogaki's Blog
Kayvon Fatahalian's Blog
Filmic Worlds - John Hables's blog [pbr stuffs]
C0DE517E
Essential Math Weblog
Nick's Voxel Blog [Dual Contouring]
direct to video
bitsquid
catlikecoding
0 FPS [lots of smartness]
Topology Guides
Adam Sawicki's blog
Experilous [distance field stuff]
The Little Grasshopper [DF and proc stuff]
Nothings - Sean Barrett's blog
Placeholder Art [PBR stuff (camera/tonemapping, lens flares, IBL)]
Rich Geldreich's Tech Blog [compression stuff]
Krzysztof Narkowicz's blog [pbr stuff]
Brian Karis's blog [pbr stuff]
optimiserly - I like to optimise things

Publications:
Guerrilla Games [The Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon Zero Dawn[!]]
Ready at Dawn

University Publications:
University of Central Florida
University of Athens
Williams College
Princeton University
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

Other Stuffs:
ShaderX series
Programming Vertex, Geometry and Pixel Shaders
The Orange Book, 2nd Edition
Siggraph 2011 papers
Siggraph 2012 papers
Siggraph 2012 Mesh Parameterization Course
Chris Wyman's Web Page - Publications
Ke-Sen Huang's Home Page [all papers from SIGGRAPH, EG, I3D, EGSR, ...]
The Inner Product [Graphics/Math/Animation/AI/...]
OpenGL SuperBible blog
direct to video [awesome particle stuff]
tri-Ace Inc. - Research and Development Department
Crytek Presentations
IceFall Games
Real-Time Rendering Resources
Peter Shirley's papers and CV
Khan-Academy
OpenGL capabilities database
Graphics and Imaging Architectures [course]
Rendering Text with DirectWrite/Direct2D and Direct3D11
More Text Rendering with DirectWrite/Direct2D and Direct3D11
Principles of Digital Image Synthesis [!][book]
Lighting design theory for 3D games
Consideration with regard to sound propagation [Twitter]
libraries to start a rendering engine project
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
TU Wien Rendering Course SS2015
DX12 Do's And Don'ts
DX12 Do’s and Don’ts, a couple remarks
Sci-Hub - public access to tens of millions of research papers

Resources:
The Wikihuman Project [high-res head model]
ImGUI - Bloat-free Immediate Mode GUI
3D Graphics-oriented Spherical Harmonics Library
Introducing HLSL Tools for Visual Studio
Markdeep
Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting
Gratin - A programmable node-based system for GPU-friendly applications.
GPU Open
GPUView
Detecting Video-Memory Overcommitment using GPUView

[misc]
Less is More: Designing Awesome AI
A Documentary Series About Japanese Video Game Music
3 steps to improve your game’s graphics
C++ Core Guidelines
The Art of Journey
libraries with minimal dependencies
Two Minute Papers [youtube channel]
The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers
PCG, A Family of Better Random Number Generators
Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown
Tearing-free drawing with GDI
How to C in 2016
The Ultimate Question of Programming, Refactoring, and Everything
http://joeduffyblog.com/Joe Duffy's Blog [Mirdori]

http://brofiler.com/
http://ambientocclusion.hatenablog.com/

Thanks for sharing. Again interesting stuff!

enough new stuff added to justify bumping

A lot of interesting papers, thanks you.
( very interested in some more details about the UE4 lighting system )

Ok ... Now brings us some indie engine that can do 3 or 4 types of these renderings ??

Do you think we are posting these papers because we only like the pictures inside?

You're probably right but it still is possible and would be nice to see some of these techniques in an Acknex game.

You're probably right but it still is possible and would be nice to see some of these techniques in an Acknex game.

It is years i don't stay on words IF or WOULD.
Caus i could wait all my life wiating for features.
I just use 3DGS as it is , and try to incorporate or use features when they appear.

If you dream of top notch rendering and scene management , some times you'll have to use another 3D engine, or reduce what you want with 3DGS.

SuperCan game use clever fullscreen effects, and shaders, and it's great
3DGS can already produce good games, forget all super papers

yeah, I agree with that.

Improvements like a better lighting system or direct x 11 implementation would be great - but again,
there's the word 'would' and I don't think I can expect features like this in the next time.

this is rendered with a technique from the papers above


Also i'm using them to get some new inspiration of what is needed in my own shader framework

SuperCan just uses techniques that you can find anywhere on paper. They also needed to create them, this has nothing to do with Acknex...

You opened my eyes, I'll immediately stop posting links.

No your papers are very interesting, specially for programmers and shader programmers

Ok , instead of paper here is a video on killZone 3 on PS3, it shows the graphic tehniques, the optimisation keys (LOD, culling etc ... ) they use :

killzone 3 (Siggraph 2011)

Ratchet, 3DGS is that engine. And it can do a LOT more than 3 or 4 of those.

Yes, but you have to create it yourself which makes it not very stable and efficient.
and I don't think it is possible to get a lighting system anything similar to UE4 with the Acknex engine (at it's current state)...

You have to create it yourself in other engines too - unless you buy middleware - surprise.

thanks a lot christian and hummel for these articles. I'm constantly searching for that kind of knowledge.

Of course, but as I already said some stuff like DX11 support or a better lighting system would be great.

Thanks Hummel!!!

Btw, I have just a rough idea what spherical harmonics are and why and for what they are used for -- but can YOU recommend a paper/article/whatelse, that describes how to sample e.g. from an illuminated sphere a SH and how to calculate the lighting terms in a shader?

I want to try out two applications:

1.) placing small dummy-spheres as lightprobes in a level, so that they bake the (radiosity) lighting at that world position into a texture - which I in return convert into a leightweight SH, to be used ingame

2.) editing a SH for the whole ambient lighting in realtime by adjusting 6 directional lights on a virtual sphere by their intensity and color... question is then how to translate that into a SH. Realtime baking would be possible, too, so that I could simply apply the technique for case 1.)

Regards,
-Christian

I added some papers related to SHs just now, but I would strongly recommend you to check the section about SHs in "Real-Time Rendering" (always check this one if you come up with questions about fundamental real-time cg stuff) and "Physically Based Rendering" (if you got this one too in the meantime). Badly I need to get productive regarding our Uni software project so I've not time to give you a personal explanation atm.

Does someone knows a good paper about the advantages and disadvantaes about post-processing distance fog?

Isn't distance fog always pp? or is there another technique to render it?

Distance fog is relatively cheap. You just calculate a blending factor based on the distance between the camera and the pixel and two distance thresholds (no fog and total fog). That is so cheap that it has virtually no impact on any framerate on the planet.

Well you can combine it with the object shader to improve fps.
If the pixel is "deeper" than fog_far - so it's fully covered in fog - then only the fog color has to be returned without calculating all the lighting / normalmapping.

For very complex object shaders this CAN be good but in this case I suggest to combine the shaders with the LOD-system and "turn off" the fancy shading for objects that are far away.

Besides that total-fog doesn't look good at all for 'normal conditions'.

Clipping away pixels if they are beyond the far-fog plane is a must for object shaders; besides, it makes sense to equalize the far-clip plane with the far-fog plane. --- When I think about it, there are actually some disadvantages with PP-based distance fog in some cases.

1) you need a depthmap
2) if you have alpha-objects, you are screwed

Well, if you have other distance-based PP effects (like DOF) running, 1) might be no problem at all, but if you do distance fog only for the sake of "doing it PP", it makes no sense.

2) is of a general concern and can be overcome if you are treating alpha transparency in general with mechanics like alpha-to-coverage.

Well, if you have large amounts of serious alpha-objects onscreen it might be wise to calculate the fogging on a per-pixel basis because it might look better in the end. But if you have mostly solid or cutout objects onscreen (and another effect that uses a depthmap, like DOF), do it PP.

The other technique would be the technique Acknex uses nativly.

I have the feeling that with post-processing distance fog you can get better looking results (if I compare with AAA engines) than with the current Acknex technique. But I didn't find any good papers about it yet.

but it should work if the fog is calculated in the object shader?

Technically there is no distinction between "post-processing shaders" and "object shaders". And even on a conceptual base this distinction can be obstructive.

Hmm, with object-shaders I mean shaders which are run for each pixel drawn of an object, like a common normalmapping shader. For this case, it could be that the same pixel gets attribution from more than one object, if the objects cover that very pixel, but have different depths. With post-processing shaders I meant shaders that work on a G-Buffer or general screen-space bitmaps (like the already rendered image) and are not driven by the actual scene geometry.

But that's the point: shaders always work with geometry ("run[s] for each pixel drawn of an object") and never directly on a bitmap buffer. How would you f.i. categorize the light accumulation pass of a light pre-pass/deferred renderer, where you render bounding geometry (probably low-poly spheres) for your lights and project your G-Buffer content on it to do the lighting calculations in screen-space?
What you call a "post-processing effect" is not more than rendering a full-screen quad and projecting some buffer content and it. But you can achieve the very same effect with arbitrary geometry f.i. bounding geometry to mask certain parts of the scene.
I don't say that it is essentially wrong to speak of "pp-effects", but as a not-so-experienced graphics programmer this distinction can easily lead to wrong assumptions about how a described multi-pass technique actually works.

Just stumbled over this

http://www.dissidentlogic.com/images/NormalOffsetShadows/GDC_Poster_NormalOffset.png
main site: http://www.dissidentlogic.com/#Normal Offset GDC Materials

Pretty awesome technique to get rid of shadow acne!
Needs a little extra work for a deferred environment though, as you can't really use the "high quality" normalmapped normals from the gbuffer

Works out of the box in forward shading though and is a nice improvement to A8's PSSM shadows.

would be fine for A8 as its pssm shadows are so ugly in several cases, especially when camera is used freely... and in anther engine I got so smooth and fast ones together with deferred rendering...

Argh, there you are you nasty litte poster! :\
Anyway, thx for posting. Btw, I've updated my post too in the meantime.

more stuff

thanks!

update time

Thank you. This list is awesome!

amazing list!!! Thank you!

About 20% more awesome papers now!

I'm not sure if this was already posted before but Crytek has a lot of interesting presentations.

Edit: oops, I linked page 2... here's the first page.

I didn't even post the "Reaching the Speed of Light" paper yet. Shame on me. :\

http://bps12.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/03_lauritzenIntersectingLights_bps2012.pdf - Paper about tiled lighting and how to optimize it for many lights
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.de/2011/02/shadows-thoughts-on-ellipsoid-light.html - Some general information about ellipsoid light shadows, which also pretty much applies to point lights
https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/defau...0to%20Linux.pdf - Some very nice general information about porting from directx to opengl with lots of usefull information

Sounds pretty intelligent, doesn't it?

The documentation about DX->GL is really good!

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/papers/trilight/trilight.html something nearly every commercial game does, but no one ever mentions

Thanks for sharing, but I don't get it. What is this third color? Sure, it is the color, that fills the gap in bi-directional lighting and can be used in an artistic way.

For an outdoor environment it is also clear that the color 1 is the sun and color 2 the ambient, but what is color 3 then???

And: how does this relate to multiple light sources in indoor scenes?

Although it is simple, it slightly confuses me

I was actually more thinking about the different lighting types on just one page, like hemispherical for ambient and bidirectional for some kind of fake, but cheap indirect illumination and so on, I also don´t completely get his final term, but at the moment, I don´t really care, I just stumbled over it searching for information on shadow filtering and slope scaled depth bias for removing surface acne.
The only information I found about glPolygonOffset that was a paper from 2001 and the OpenGL specs... Finally I am using some pretty strange values and it looks good, as long as I don´t choose big filter kernels.
There are however these two really usefull sites on cascaded shadow mapping and general approaches to improve shadow mapping quality:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee416307(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee416324(VS.85).aspx

I am thinking about giving Exponential shadow maps a try, as for some reason jittered sampling is extremly slow, even with just 4 samples and everything else is also slow when using more than 9 samples. Probably an issue with my 2048*1536 resolution I am testing with, but still I would like it to be faster...

Jittering decreases the amount of cache-hits, afaik. That's the reason it is slower than regular sampling.

Interesting slides about decal rendering and more: http://dice.se/publications/title-shadows-decals-d3d10-techniques-from-frostbite/

Stuff-stuff-stuff, new stuff.

As I didn´t find it in the list, here is THE article about premultiplied alpha: https://developer.nvidia.com/content/alpha-blending-pre-or-not-pre

It's actually there.

Another paper which is probably there but I couldn´t find...:
https://graphics.stanford.edu/wikis/cs44...s-10-11-oit.pdf
About order independent alpha blending in dx11 and here is a post about implementing something like it in OpenGL: http://blog.icare3d.org/2010/07/opengl-40-abuffer-v20-linked-lists-of.html
One could probably get such an approach working for DirectX 9 as well, but of course with lots of overhead, but it could still be a solution for some cases as it could still perform better than doing the whole sorting on the CPU.

A very nice article on clustered shading: http://www.humus.name/Articles/PracticalClusteredShading.pdf

Büg Update

Thank you very much, the new AO papers are very interesting!

Improve batching using texture atlases
http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/Atlas_Tools/Texture_Atlas_Whitepaper.pdf

@oliver2s: have you used it? it sounds practical to avoid mipmap border blendings of compound textures...

Yes, works quite good.

Found a nice little collection of test scenes: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml (there are also commonly used images for postprocessing effects and such)

And I think the Global Illumination using radiance hints paper is missing in the GI links. The technique seems to create good (although quite low res) results, is fully dynamic and I have hopes that it could actually be used for games: http://graphics.cs.aueb.gr/graphics/docs/papers/RadianceHintsPreprint.pdf
There is also the presentation: http://www.highperformancegraphics.org/previous/www_2011/media/Papers/HPG2011_Papers_Papaioannou.pdf

The only real alternative seems to be voxel cone tracing, with the big disadvantage, that it needs the precomputed voxel data (which one can update in realtime, but preferably only for dynamic things close to the camera, at least that is what unreal engine 4 does according to some paper, which is probably already in hummels post).

To support many lights I am currently quite a fan of clustered shading, which splits the viewfrustum in tiles and adds the depth also. The disadvantage is, that you get many small frustums for which has to be checked which light is visible, but there are some approaches to make it fast (my current brute force approach isn´t with about 25ms :P). The big advantage over tiled shading (the same without the depth part, but instead restricted to the actual visible lights) is, that the min max check is not needed for a good performance in complex scenes. The problem with it is, that it needs the scenes depth before the final rendering with lights AND it has to read the data on the cpu for the same frame, which is a serious cpu stall, especially with multithreaded opengl and double buffering, as it not only renders the depth there but also finishes rendering the lighting of the previous frame.
There is some nice presentation on clustered lighting on this page called "Practical clustered deffered and forward shading": http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2013/

Thanks for the model repository!

That's sweet, thanks!

This update took me over 2 hours 35 minutes and 58 seconds. :\

Thanks! Awesome list is awesome!

This is genius: http://jcgt.org/published/0002/02/09/paper.pdf
An extremely simple approach on order independent transparency with good quality.
This is a blog post about it with some videos: http://casual-effects.blogspot.de/2014/03/weighted-blended-order-independent.html

This one is from 2007 when the unified shader pipeline was still new, graphics cards switched from vector processors to scalar processors and geometry shaders had been introduced (seriously, this was 7 years ago and here people are still behaving as if shaders were some crazy new stuff...). However, the article is about optimizing shaders for that hardware, offers some really interesting insights and while most things aren´t as critical anymore, most are still relevant.
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/ATI_Radeon_HD_2000_programming_guide.pdf

Update.

Thanks for the update, Hummel! I am looking for an easy/fast refraction/glass shaders, have you any papers on that? If possible, DX9/SM3

Well, if you're not looking for some kind of realistic refraction it's really easy. Otherwise I don't think that it's possible without approximations or cheap fakes.

I don't know about a paper which describes just the very basics but basically what you want to do is:
1. Render your Scene without the transparent object to a RT
2. Render you transparent object and project the scene's RT on it + apply distortions based on the object's normals

This is of course a crude approximation and does not work well with multiple overlapping transparent objects (+ several other limitations) but it's still pretty popular in the real-time realm.
It also looks a lot better if you vary the distortion strength for the different color channels which gives you chromatic aberration (stronger offset for blue, weaker offset for red, green in between).
Depending on your use case you could also use a cubemap which gives you more information of the environment. There should be a shader on the wiki which does this.

Update. I'm not going to color the updates blue anymore; too much work to uncolor them later again. Instead, I'll additionally attache my cached stuff to the update posts in the future; like so:


Super-Awesome-Somewhat-Random-Papers-Collection

A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube]


General Stuffs:
Texts Rasterization Exposures
Conservative and Tiled Rasterization Using a Modified Triangle Setup
Physically Based Camera Rendering
Improving Noise
BF3: Culling the Battlefield
Rendering Fields of Grass
Antialiased 2D Grid, Marker, and Arrow Shaders
A Survey of Volumetric Illumination Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering
Light probe interpolation using tetrahedral tessellations
Combatting Rendering Latency
CryEngine3 Graphic Gems [.pptx]

VR:
Advanced VR Rendering
[Valve]

Procedural Stuffs:
Enhanced Sphere Tracing

Simplex noise
Simplex noise demystified
Graphical Interface Models for Procedural Mesh Growing

Improving Gabor Noise
ProceduralNoise using Sparse Gabor Convolution
Gabor Noise by Example


Water:
Water Technology of Uncharted
Ocean Optics Web Book


Physics:
Advanced Volumetric Effects for Games


Image Processing:
Super-Resolution From a Single Image


Color:
Gamma error in picture scaling
Banding in Games: A Noisy Rant [!]

Color Banding Removal
Tone Mapping High Dynamic Range Videos using Wavelets


Geometry:
Interior Distance Using Barycentric Coordinates
Marching Diamonds for Unstructured Meshes

Efficient and High Quality Contouring of Isosurfaces on Uniform Grids


Animation|Skinning|Deformation:
Key Frame Interpolation via Splines and Quaternions
[Kochanek-Bartels Splines for Quaternions]
Animating Rotation with Quaternion Curves [pretty accessible]
A General Construction Scheme for Unit Quaternion Curves
Dual-Quaternions
[sample dq-class]
Destiny Character-Animation

Tessellation:


Light Scattering
Optical Models for Direct Volume Rendering [basics of absorption, emission and scattering]
Practical Real-Time Lens-Flare Rendering

Indirect Illumination:
Interactive Diffuse Global Illumination Discretization Methods For Dynamic Environments
Octree-Based Sparse Voxelization Using the GPU Hardware Rasterizer

Global Illumination Compendium
WebGL Deferred Irradiance Volumes
Scalable Ambient Obscurance [state of the art SSAO]
Point-Based Global Illumination for Movie Production
The Technology Of The Tomorrow Children

Basis Functions:


Shadows:
Soft Shadow Mapping [WebGL Demos of various techniques]
Moment Shadow Mapping

Lighting|Radiometry|BRDFs:
Physically-Based Shading at Disney

The Comprehensive PBR Guide
readings on physically based rendering [ALL the stuffs]
An Overview of BRDF Models

Basic radiometric quantities
Colour Rendering of Spectra
Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4
Real-Time Refraction Through Deformable Objects
Simple Alternative to Clustered Shading for Thousands of Lights
Cosine Lobes for Interactive Direct Lighting in Dynamic Scenes
Understanding the Masking-Shadowing Function in Microfacet-Based BRDFs

Glitter stuffs:
Simulation of sparkles in metallic paints
Photo-realistic Rendering of Metallic Car Paint from Image-Based Measurements


Anti-Aliasing:
Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing


GPU-Programming and Architecture:
How bad are small triangles on GPU and why?
'Rasterization patterns' of Haswell GPU
Vertex Shader Tricks [live presentation]
Low-level Shader Optimization for Next-Gen and DX11
GPU Profiling 101
How GPU Shader Cores Work
GPU Rasterizer Pattern
A Closer Look at GPUs
Uniform buffers vs texture buffers: The 2015 edition
Depth In-depth
101 Uses for Raster Ordered Views using DirectX 12
Efficient Rendering with DirectX 12 on Intel Graphics
Sea Islands Series Instruction Set Architecture
AMD GCN presentation
GCN Architecture whitepaper
GCN – two ways of latency hiding and wave occupancy


Math:
Interpolation and Splines [ppt]
Trigonometry: Laws And Identities
Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet

Cheap analytic curva... [shadertoy]
Hammersley Points on the Hemisphere
Smoothen your functions
Approximating the erfinv function


Blogs:
Sebh's blog
g-truc
Procedural World
Uniblock Dev Blog [OpenSimplex noise]
code4k [Advanced HLSL using closures and function pointers]
Extremeistan
erleuchtet.org
briansharpe [proc stuff]
Cyril Crassin's blog
Shinji Ogaki's Blog
Kayvon Fatahalian's Blog
Filmic Worlds - John Hables's blog [pbr stuffs]
C0DE517E


University Publications:
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie


Other Stuffs:
ProceduralContent Generation in Games
Peter Shirley's papers and CV
Khan-Academy
OpenGL capabilities database
Graphics and Imaging Architectures [course]
Rendering Text with DirectWrite/Direct2D and Direct3D11
More Text Rendering with DirectWrite/Direct2D and Direct3D11
Principles of Digital Image Synthesis [book]



(Also, I apparently reached the post length maximum with the main post.)

might be interesting:
DOOM (2016) - Graphics Study
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/

That DOOM article is definitely worth the read!

Super-Awesome-Somewhat-Random-Papers-Collection



General Stuffs:
Next-gen Mobile Rendering [interesting Unreal pp-pipe tricks]
Space-filling curves for spatial data structures
Historically Significant Papers for Computer Graphics
A Phenomenological Scattering Model for Order-Independent Transparency
software renderer in 500 lines of code
Computational Photography
Deferred and Forward Rendering Approaces Overview
How Kalman Filters Work
Tightening the Precision of Perspective Rendering
Realistic Real-Time Rendering of Eyes and Teeth
High-Quality Capture of Eyes
Peering Through a Glass, Darkly at the Future of Real-Time Transparency
The Path to Path-Traced Movies

VR:
Interaction Design in VR: Valve's Lessons
Mike Alger [youtube-channel]
Learning from Other Disciplines, Industries, and Art Forms


Procedural Stuffs:
Fast Intersection-free Offset Surface Generation [simplified dual-contouring]
Guided Ecological Simulation for Artistic Editing of Plant Distributions in Natural Scenes
A glsl library for building signed distance functions
Spherical Fibonacci Mapping
Fast Ray Tracing of Arbitrary Implicit Surfaces with Interval and Affine Arithmetic
Pseudo Lens Flare [!]
Fitting Procedural Yarn Models for Realistic Cloth Rendering


Water:
Animating Sand, Mud, and Snow [column model]


Physics:



Image Processing:
Low-resolution effects with depth-aware upsampling
Some details on Crytek's DoF [forum thread]
Preparing for Real HDR


Color:
The Importance of Terminology and sRGB Uncertainty

Geometry:
Calculation of Reference Frames along a Space Curve


Animation|Skinning|Deformation:
Quaternion Double-cover and the Rest Pose Neighborhood - 2006 [youtube]


Tessellation:
Real-time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation

Volumetric Lighting
Physically-based & Unified Volumetric Rendering in Frostbite [ShaderToy]


Indirect Illumination:
A Comparative Study of Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion Methods


Basis Functions:

Shadows:


Lighting|Radiometry|BRDFs:
An Intuitive Introduction to Global Illumination and Path Tracing
Global Illumination in a Nutshell
The Secret Life of Photons - Simulating 2D Light Transport
Implementing a Physically Based Camera
Multiple-Scattering Microfacet BSDFs with the Smith Model
Lighting Mirror's Edge: Catalyst [youtube]
Additional Progress Towards the Unification of Microfacet and Microflake Theories

Glitter stuffs:
Real-time Rendering of Procedural Multiscale Materials

Offline stuffs:

Anti-Aliasing:
Optimized Reversible Tonemapper for Resolve

GPU-Programming and Architecture:
Tools and Techniques for Debugging and Optimization
Approaching Zero Driver Overhead
Optimizations and New DirectX Features in Just Cause 3
D3D11 Texture Update Costs

Math:
Phase Plots of Complex Functions: A Journey in Illustration
Polynomials and the Fast Fourier Transform [elegant FFT]
Interpolating Splines: Which is the fairest of them all?
Adaptive Subdivision of Bezier Curves
Approximation of cubic Bezier Curves by circular Arcs and vice versa
Articulating Space: Geometric Algebra for Parametric Design
Bayesian and Quasi Monte Carlo Spherical Integration for Illumination Integrals [Spherical Fibonacci point sets (slide 49)]
Generating random variables
Frames, Quadratures and Global Illumination: New Math for Games [spherical needlets]


Blogs:
Placeholder Art [PBR stuff (camera/tonemapping, lens flares, IBL)]
Rich Geldreich's Tech Blog [compression stuff]
Krzysztof Narkowicz's blog [pbr stuff]
Brian Karis's blog [pbr stuff]
optimiserly - I like to optimise things


Publications:


University Publications:


Other Stuffs:
Sci-Hub - public access to tens of millions of research papers



Resources:
3D Graphics-oriented Spherical Harmonics Library
Introducing HLSL Tools for Visual Studio
Markdeep
Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting
Gratin - A programmable node-based system for GPU-friendly applications.
GPU Open
GPUView
Detecting Video-Memory Overcommitment using GPUView

[misc]
Two Minute Papers [youtube channel]
The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers
PCG, A Family of Better Random Number Generators
Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown
Tearing-free drawing with GDI
How to C in 2016
The Ultimate Question of Programming, Refactoring, and Everything
http://joeduffyblog.com/Joe Duffy's Blog [Mirdori]

http://brofiler.com/
http://ambientocclusion.hatenablog.com/