Visual Effects

A collection of a wide area of specific PDF's. Most are tutorials or in depth explanations of a given topic. I'll try list article subjects as I can. If you have a useful article, please leave a comment with a link to it.

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2010/index.html

Covers the following topics -

Caustics Mapping: An Image-space Technique for Real-time Caustics

http://graphics.cs.ucf.edu/caustics/

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/papers/causticvolume.pdf

http://graphics.di.uoa.gr/Downloads/papers/journals/

Various random graphics articles

Parthenon Demo

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Sander-Parthenon.pdf

A Survey and Classification of Real Time Rendering Methods

http://www.merl.com/papers/docs/TR2000-09.pdf

A Practical Analytic Single Scattering Model for Real Time Rendering.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravir/papers/singlescat/scattering.pdf

ATI PDF database search

http://search.amd.com/us/_layouts/search/search.aspx?collection=all-us&csquery=Ati&filter=doctype%3aAdobe+Acrobat+PDF&sortby=$score&hits=10&offset=0

Real-Time Realistic Rendering of Nature Scenes with Dynamic Lighting

http://www.kevinboulanger.net/publications/thesisKevinBoulanger.pdf

Gives a good read into real-time rendering of grass and trees with advanced lighting techniques and LOD implementation. Includes some psuedo- code

http://courses.essex.ac.uk/ce/ce318/www/documents/references/3dGraphics.pdf

A huge article with tons of graphics information including -

Alpha mapping

Ambient occlusion

Anisotropic filtering

Back-face culling

Beam tracing

Bidirectional texture function

Bilinear filtering

Binary space partitioning

Bounding interval hierarchy

Bounding volume

Bump mapping

Catmull–Clark subdivision surface

Conversion between quaternions and Euler angles

Cube mapping

Diffuse reflection

Displacement mapping

Doo–Sabin subdivision surface

Edge loop

Euler operator

False radiosity

Fragment

Geometry pipelines

Geometry processing

Global illumination

Gouraud shading

Graphics pipeline

Hidden line removal

Hidden surface determination

High dynamic range rendering

Image-based lighting

Image plane

Irregular Z-buffer

Isosurface

Lambert's cosine law

Lambertian reflectance

Level of detail

Mipmap

Newell's algorithm

Non-uniform rational B-spline

Normal mapping

Oren–Nayar reflectance model

Painter's algorithm

Parallax mapping

Particle system

Path tracing

Per-pixel lighting

Phong reflection model

Phong shading

Photon mapping

Photon tracing

Polygon

Potentially visible set

Precomputed Radiance Transfer

Procedural generation

Procedural texture

3D projection

Quaternions and spatial rotation

Radiosity

Ray casting

Ray tracing

Reflection

Reflection mapping

Relief mapping

Render Output unit

Rendering

Retained mode

Scanline rendering

Schlick's approximation

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

Self-shadowing

Shadow mapping

Shadow volume

Silhouette edge

Spectral rendering

Specular highlight

Specularity

Sphere mapping

Stencil buffer

Stencil codes

Subdivision surface

Subsurface scattering

Surface caching

Surface normal

Texel

Texture atlas

Texture filtering

Texture mapping

Texture synthesis

Tiled rendering

UV mapping

UVW mapping

Vertex

Vertex Buffer Object

Vertex normal

Viewing frustum

Virtual actor

Volume rendering

Volumetric lighting

Voxel

Z-buffering

Z-fighting

Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces Revisited

http://image.diku.dk/projects/media/morten.mikkelsen.08.pdf

A general method for preserving attribute values on simplified meshes

http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/publications/papers/rocchini.pdf

Appearance-Preserving Simplification

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~geom/APS/APS.pdf

Shader Performance Analysis on a Modern GPU Architecture

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~oguns/ps3/vmoya.pdf

Contemporary GPU system architecture

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.compsci.hunter.cuny.edu%2F~sweiss%2Fcourse_materials%2Fcsci360%2Flecture_notes%2Fgpus.pdf

CUDA and OpenCL --- Development Interfaces for Multicore Programming

http://lime.weeg.uiowa.edu/mihpclab/presentations/staffPresentations/2009_12_23_CUDA%20and%20OpenCL%20Development%20Interface%20for%20Multicore%20Programming.pdf

Interactive Horizon Mapping

http://research.microsoft.com/~cohen/bs.pdf

Automatic Shader Level of Detail

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~olano/papers/aslod.pdf

http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial07_AlexEvans_Final.pdf

Crafting Physically Motivated Shading Models for Game Development

http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/hoffman/s2010_physically_based_shading_hoffman_b.pdf

Point Based Color Bleeding

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedColorBleeding/paper.pdf

Stupid Spherical Harmonics (SH) Tricks

http://www.ppsloan.org/publications/StupidSH36.pdf

Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming

http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09/Pitfalls_of_Object_Oriented_Programming_GCAP_09.pdf

Multi-core is Here! But How Do You Resolve Data Bottlenecks in PC Games?

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/AMD_GDC_2008_MW.pdf

The Technology Behind the 3D Graphics and Games Course “Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo”

http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind_the_Elemental_Demo_16x9_(2).pdf

CPU Caches and Why You Care

http://www.aristeia.com/TalkNotes/ACCU2011_CPUCaches.pdf

paulbourke.net/geometry/p­olygonise/index.html

http://www.realtimerendering.com/

Many free resources to graphics programming

http://jcgt.org/issues.html

http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/624752-glossy-screen-space-reflections/

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1323/entry-2254101-real-time-local-reflections/

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/surfacefitting/

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html

http://www.realtimerendering.com/

Gives an excellent amount of resources on many areas of computer graphics.

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_part01.html

Nice resource for many different areas of programming a GPU, a must read

http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/index-and-vertex-buffers

Index and vertex buffers explained.

http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/index.html

Toward Photorealism in Virtual Botany

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter01.html

Terrain Rendering Using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter02.html

Inside Geometry Instancing

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter03.html

Segment Buffering

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter04.html

Optimizing Resource Management with Multistreaming

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter05.html

Hardware Occlusion Queries Made Useful

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter06.html

Deferred Shading in S.T.A.L.K.E.R

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter09.html

http://macton.posterous.com/roundup-recent-sketches-on-concurrency-data-d#

http://assemblyrequired.crashworks.org/2009/01/04/fcmp-conditional-moves-for-branchless-math/

http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency-elephant.html

http://osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/papers/Expression-Templates/exprtmpl.html

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/envmap/