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Alex Tardif

@longbool.bsky.social

Senior Graphics Programmer @ Digital Extremes. Previously ZeniMax Online, WB Blog: https://alextardif.com/eden.html

78 Posts436 Follower310 Folgt
Erin Catto@erincatto.bsky.social · last mo.

I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: box2d.org/posts/2026/0...

Announcing Box3D

I’m happy to announce the release of Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine. It is now available on GitHub. Box3D repository You can think of Box3D as a fork of Box2D, extended with many features nee...

box2d.org

Scuff3D Rook@scuff3drook.bsky.social · last mo.

OK so I've seen a couple questions/comments related to whether or not this technique supports *rotation*, which tells me I perhaps didn't do a good job explaining a couple key points. The technique explains how to do an unweighted glyph box filters in a shader...

Scuff3D Rook@scuff3drook.bsky.social · last mo.

*tap tap* Is this thing on? www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9bz... rookandpossum.com/posts/scanli... I made a thing! I suspect I'll be posting to an empty room like a madman, but for now, I'm going to make a habit to start posting things here when I post videos/blogs/papers.

Alex Tardif@longbool.bsky.social · last mo.

If you've been watching recent engine-related news from the industry and are feeling disenchanted with that trajectory, I'd like to share some non-mainstream projects that might brighten your day:

Romain Guy@romainguy.dev · 2mo ago

I've been working on a Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform to interpolate sRGB colors as mixtures of paints/pigments. It can produce results that are more appealing than the traditional sRGB interpolation that Composes uses (see screenshot). Not quite ready for release yet. github.com/romainguy/vi...

A screenshot of an Android application comparing gradients rendered with paint mixtures vs traditional sRGB gradients. There are four rows: the first row shows an orange to red vertical gradient, with the paint mixture version on the left, sRGB on the right. The second and third rows show a horizontal yellow to blue gradient: the top one is a paint mixture, the bottom one is traditional sRGB. The paint mixture version shows that the gradient becomes green in the middle. The last row compares a white to blue vertical gradient, with a paint mixture on left, and tradition sRGB on the right. The paint mixture version show a blue becoming brighter/lighter, whereas the traditional version becomes purple.
Max Liani@maxliani.bsky.social · 3mo ago

About 3.5 years ago I did some experiment to improve the behavior of microfacet normals at glancing angles. Many surfaces become highly reflective even though having high roughness. Check the discussion in the thread. Here is my implementation reusing equations you already have:

Bild
Yining Karl Li@yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There's a neat short paper from Eurographics this year that evaluates how well microfacet shading models actually predict measured reflectance. The answer is: not nearly as well as one would hope! (1/3) ssteinberg.xyz/2026_surface...

Screenshot of the first page of a computer graphics research paper titled “On the Accuracy of Surface Scattering Theories,” by Matthew Avolio, Eugene D’Eon, and Shlomi Steinberg from the University of Waterloo and Nvidia. The page uses a standard academic layout with a large centered title, author names below, and a wide comparison figure occupying most of the page. The main figure compares real photographs of reflective metal surfaces with rendered predictions from two surface scattering models. Five vertical panels, labeled 1 through 5, each show checkerboard reflections on glossy metal viewed at grazing angles. Within each panel are image strips labeled “photo,” “GGX,” and “SSA,” allowing direct comparison between measured appearance and rendered results. The surfaces range from blurry and diffuse on the left to sharper and more mirror-like on the right. Above each panel are colored line graphs representing measured surface profile data, and along the right edge are small blue-green 3D visualizations of microscopic surface geometry. The figure caption explains that the paper compares photographs to GGX microfacet and smooth-surface generalized Harvey-Shack predictions derived from measured surface geometry using AFM and profilometer scans. Below the figure is the abstract, which states that the paper evaluates how accurately surface scattering theories predict appearance directly from measured geometry instead of fitting reflectance data. The authors conclude that existing models fail at some viewing angles, especially grazing angles, and suggest that the characteristic “GGX look” may result from wave-optical effects on Gaussian surfaces rather than non-Gaussian geometry.
Alex Tardif@longbool.bsky.social · 5mo ago

A generation of artists tossed away as valueless while consumer hardware becomes unavailable and unaffordable and your $500+ electricity bill all for the privilege of subsidizing the Gooner Lipstick Filter Pro while technologists expect you to clap that the glorious future of video games has arrived