In a previous post, I wrote about Vkrunner, and how I used it to play with fragment shaders. While I was writing the shaders for it, I had to save them, generate a PPM image and display it to see the changes. This render to image/display repetition gave me the idea to write a minimal tool that automatically displays my changes every time I save the file with the shader code and use it when the complexity of the scene is increasing. And so, I’ve written sdrviewer, the minimal OpenGL viewer for pixel shaders of the video below:
Vkrunner allows specifying the required Vulkan version
The required Vulkan implementation version for a Vkrunner shader test can now be specified in its [require] section. Tests that are targeting Vulkan versions that aren’t supported by the device driver will be skipped.
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Having fun with Vkrunner!
Vkrunner is a Vulkan shader testing tool similar to Piglit, written by Neil Roberts. It is mostly used by graphics drivers developers, and was also part of the official Khronos conformance tests suite repository (VK-GL-CTS) for some time [1]. There are already posts [2] about its use but they are all written from a driver developer’s perspective and focus on vkrunner’s debugging capabilities. In this post, I’m going to show you an alternative use I’ve found for it, in order to have fun with pixel shaders during my holidays! 🙂
A system to reject phone calls from my laptop
This post is about a system we devised and set up at home for me to be able to reject all the annoying phone calls I receive during the day from my laptop, without having to go pick up the phone. If you are also working from home like I do you might find this hack useful. 😀
Demo:
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i965: Improved support for the ETC/EAC formats on Intel Gen 7 and previous GPUs
This post is about a recent contribution I’ve done to the i965 mesa driver to improve the emulation of the ETC/EAC texture formats on the Intel Gen 7 and older GPUs, as part of my work for the Igalia‘s graphics team.
Demo:
The video mostly shows the behavior of some GL calls and operations with and without the patches that improve the emulation of the ETC/EAC formats on Gen7 GPUs. The same programs run first with the previous ETC/EAC emulation (upper terminal) and then with the new one (lower terminal).
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Hair simulation with a mass-spring system (punk’s not dead!)
Hair rendering and simulation can be challenging, especially in real-time. There are many sophisticated algorithms for it (based on particle systems, hair mesh simulation, mass-spring systems and more) that can give very good results. But in this post, I will try to explain a simple and somehow hacky approach I followed in my first attempt to simulate hair (the mohawk hair of the video below) using a mass-spring system.
The code can be found here: https://github.com/hikiko/mohawk
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XDC2018
SIGGRAPH2018
About 2 weeks ago, I attended SIGGRAPH 2018. I am still very excited about the whole event, and I am very thankful that Igalia (the consultancy company I work for) and specifically the Graphics Team selected me to go, despite this being my first year at the company! 😀
Claws-mail: a trick to view the patches as side-by-side diffs
One thing that I find very tiring when I read the Mesa3D mailing list for my work at Igalia , is to read the patches that arrive as emails: they are too many and the mail clients do not highlight them. So far, I was using the thunderbird mail-client with the colored-diffs plugin that made them more readable, but it was quite slow and was breaking the appearance of the e-mails that were replies to a patch. Since, I never was a big fan of thunderbird (the list of the things I disliked about it was always longer than the list of the features I liked) I wanted to find a way to have the colored-diffs and the lightning plugins functionalities to a more lightweight gui-mail-client: the claws-mail.
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Claws-mail + vdirsyncer (sync contacts)
The steps I followed to sync my remote contacts with the claws-mail mail client: