Freek Hoekstra at the IGAD Never Ending Conference 3

At the conference I try to encourage students to give talks, so they can gain experience and share ideas. At IGAD NEC 3, Freek (a 3rd year visual arts student) was the only student brave enough to give it a go. And here is his talk on level design.

Yet to come: Stefano Gualeni and the second talk from Joel Dinolt.

Real Time Path Tracing: Jacco Bikker at the IGAD Never Ending Conference

At IGAD we have some pretty impressive people, and Jacco is one of them. He is known for his work in real time ray tracing (Arauna), but now he is going to the next level: real time path tracing, which promises to solve the problem of rendering for ever. Soft shadows, area lights, depth of field, ambient occlusion… path tracing can give us everything we ever wanted and we are likely to ever need. Just as long as we can make it run fast enough. Well, the grail of computer graphics is not actually that far off anymore…

Joel Dinolt (Bethesda) at the IGAD Never Ending Conference 3

It was a real pleasure to meet Joel again after all these years, and he gave two talks to students and teachers in part 3 of our Never Ending Conference, so called to represent the idea that everything is basically one long conference.

Here Joel talks about Architecture…

Nils Desle at the IGAD Never Ending Conference part 3

Let me introduce a colleague of mine, NIls Desle, who is a really cool guy. Not only is he a great programmer, he is one of the nicest people I know. Sometimes I wish I could be more like him. If there is anyone who could make an omelette without breaking eggs, it would be Nils.

Anyway here he is with a really cool talk and demo of a genetic algorithm for image processing, with a twist.

The IGAD Never Ending Conference is something that I started here in IGAD to invite lecturers and students to give talks on anything connected with video games and graphic technology. Each event is treated as part of a Never Ending Conference, with 4 parts a year. Part 4 will take place in the new academic year. It is currently an internal conference, but I am working with my contacts to try to make one part each year an international event.

Part 3 included a guest speaker, Joel Dinolt, from Bethesda Softworks. His talks and the talks of the other speakers (Jacco Bikker, Stefano Gualeni and art track student Freek Hoekstra) will be online as soon as I can make it happen.

If you would like to speak at IGAD, please get in touch, we are always on the look out for interesting guest speakers.

GDC Europe 2009 – Design, Constraints and Integrity

Here is the talk I gave at GDC Europe this year, I hope you enjoy it.