Des milliards de tapis de cheveux est un roman de science-fiction composé de dix-sept histoires courtes (plus un épilogue) prenant toutes place dans le même univers, un peu à la façon des séries classiques de SF comme Les Robots d’Asimov, par exemple.
Le concept original des tapis en cheveux, mis en évidence dans le titre, est ce qui m’a donné envie de lire ce livre.
Continuer la lecture de Rediff’ – « Des milliards de tapis de cheveux » d’Andreas Eschbach
« Are you my mother? » (en VO) est la suite du premier tome (Fun Home) de l’autobiographie d’Alison Bechdel dans lequel, après avoir analysé sa relation avec son père, elle s’attaque à la figure de sa mère, un chantier d’une nature tout autre étant donné que cette fois, elle s’y attelle alors que cette dernière est toujours vivante.
Continuer la lecture de Rediff’ – « Are you my mother? » d’Alison Bechdel« Rediffusion » : J’écris des critiques à plusieurs endroits sur le Web, mais dans une volonté de re-centraliser mes écrits, et de rester indépendant de diverses plate-formes tierces (car le jour où elles ferment, on perd tout ce qui y a été écrit…), je vais recommencer à dupliquer mes contributions sur mon blog.
Fun Home est un de ces ouvrages exigeants, où la prose est souvent en langage soutenu et les références littéraires abondent. C’est inhabituel dans le monde de la bande dessinée.
Continuer la lecture de Rediff’ – « Fun Home » d’Alison BechdelSerial Experiments Lain est un dessin animé japonais produit en 1998 par Yoshitoshi Abe et Ryutaro Nakamura.
Ce conte cyberpunk fait désormais partie des classiques du genre et possède une communauté grandissante de fans l’élevant au rang d’œuvre culte, c’est pourquoi j’ai voulu y jeter un œil.
Malheureusement, il y a deux choses que je ne puis garantir ici : la première, que j’ai bien compris l’œuvre, et la seconde, que cette critique sera libre de tout divulgâchage (spoilers !), car je devrai mentionner certains moments de l’intrigue pour les analyser, bien que j’essaierai de les garder au minimum.
Continuer la lecture de Serial Experiments LainWhile working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.
I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.
Today’s topic : some tips on how to migrate a project from an older version of the engine to a newer one (and what were the encountered issues).
Continuer la lecture de Unreal Engine Tips – Engine Migration troubleshootingWhile working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.
I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.
Today’s topic : how to integrate SVN over SSH in an Unreal Engine 4 project, and ultimately why we walked away from SSH.
Continuer la lecture de Unreal Engine Tips – Understanding svn+ssh, then not using itReSharper is an extension for Visual Studio that provides a lot of quality-of-life improvements over the initial VS user experience. It was initially made for C# (hence the name), but also exists in C++ ! If you never used it, but know competing products like VAX (Visual Assist X) for example, you basically know what ReSharper is.
It happens pretty often that, working on a C++ project, I want to make a new class (separated in two files : a header file and a source file) based on a kind of template, like they should all follow the same basic structure, have the same copyright disclaimers at the beginning, then start implementation surrounded in a specific namespace, etc…
Visual Studio in itself is pretty limited in that respect. And to be honest it’s very possible to just copy-paste existing files and make the necessary arrangements each time, but it becomes kind of tedious and boring over time. Turns out, ReSharper happens to know how to do this kind of thing : behold the ReSharper File Templates ! Unfortunately, it’s pretty complicated to use at first and documentation is scarce (at the time I’m writing this).
So here’s a quick guide on how to do it. It assumes you have ReSharper up and running (for brevity, I skip the part about installing it).
Continuer la lecture de How to make your own Resharper C++ file template
Edit January, 4th 2022 : The Assimp maintainers merged just a few days ago a pull request that enables PBR support by Assimp’s OBJ importer. If you are able to use a recent version of Assimp, I would advise you to go get it and work with it the way Assimp expects it. See the pull request here.
These days, I’m trying to import 3D models exported as Wavefront OBJ files in my Vulkan renderer. In order to achieve that effortlessly (kinda), I’m using the very good Assimp (pun not intended) library.
It kinda works well if you stick to a « traditional Blinn-Phong » lighting pipeline (also known as « prehistoric lighting » 😉 ), with ambient/diffuse/specular components and so on. Everything is there. Things become trickier if you try to bring PBR into the mix, with roughness, metallic and ambient occlusion maps for example.
What parameters should you use in Assimp to read those values ? What texture type should be used in order to import those maps ? Turns out it’s not as easy as one would think, because support on both the Wavefront OBJ specification and Assimp is just not there.
So I had to cheat a little, let me explain how !
Continuer la lecture de Coercing Assimp into reading OBJ PBR materialsWhile working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.
I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.
Today’s topic : how to create an utility that draws the result of a material into a render target asset in the Unreal editor.
Continuer la lecture de Unreal Engine Tips – Bake a Material to Render Target
I was tinkering with Vulkan the other day because I wanted to achieve multisampling in my Vulkan-based 3D application.
And I was reading the Vulkan Tutorial’s page on Multisampling to refresh my mind, when I saw something a bit « ugly » that caught my eye.
Continuer la lecture de VULKAN: Some bit twiddling for the hell of it