I've always had an interest in computer generated plants so I was pleased to read Self-organising tree models for image synthesis from Siggraph this year.
The paper basically pulls together a bunch of techniques that have been around for a while and uses them to generate some really good looking tree models.
Seeing as I've had a bit of time on my hands between Batman and before I start at LucasArts I decided to put together an implementation in OpenGL (being a games programmer I want realtime feedback).
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This link was going round our office, a discussion over at Lambda the Ultimate regarding Tim Sweeney's HPG talk.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3560
Tim chimes in a bit further down in the comments.
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Code517E recently reminded me of a site I've used before when looking up form factors for various geometric configurations.
One I had missed the first time though is the differential element on ceiling, floor or wall to cow.
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~howell/sectionb/B-68.html
Very handy if you're writing a farmyard simulator I'm sure.
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I put together an implementation of the particle shadowing technique NVIDIA showed off a while ago. My original intention was to do a survey of particle lighting techniques, in the end I just tried out two different methods that I thought sounded promising.
The first was the one ATI used in the Ruby White Out demo, the best take away from it is that they write out the min distance, max distance and density in one pass.
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A small update on my global illumination renderer, I've ported the radiance transfer to the GPU. It was fairly straight forward as my CPU tree structure was already set up for easy GPU traversal, basically just a matter of converting array offsets into texture coordinates and packing into an indices texture.
The hardest part is of course wrangling OpenGL to do what you want and give you a proper error message.
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