How do I choose a text rendering algorithm between SDF, MSDF, Slug, Texture Atlas or Rive? Text looks simple until you have to draw it yourself. A letter is not a picture, it is a set of outlines: closed loops of straight lines and Bezier curves, filled according to a winding rule. Drawing that on[…]
Top 10 Technical Papers From SIGGRAPH 2026 Los Angeles (with paper links) We keep a close eye on the cutting edge of graphics research so we can bring the freshest ideas into our projects and keep our clients informed. The annual Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2026 conference took place
In Part 1 we took the term apart. We covered what "splat" means, what "Gaussian" means, where the technique came from (radiance fields, then NeRFs in 2020, then the INRIA 3D Gaussian Splatting paper at SIGGRAPH 2023), and why anyone bothered to invent it in the first place. The one-word answer was speed. A NeRF[…]
A few days ago the mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, of NYU’s Courant Institute, published a statement about a result he and Levent Alpöge had spent roughly a year chasing: finite-time blowup for several equations in fluid dynamics, the kind of problem that sits next to a Clay Millennium Prize. Through the whole project they state they[…]
Slughorn: Applying Slug-Style GPU Curve Rendering Beyond Text On March 17th 2026, Eric Lengyel made his Slug technique completely patent-unencumbered ( https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html ) . As long-time graphics programmers and open source contributors, especially around OpenSceneGraph, VulkanSceneGraph, and related visualization work, we were not going to let that sit untouched for long. On March[…]
Eric Graham’s 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer (Part 2): Porting to SDL In Part 1 of this blog series, we recovered the disk image, extracted the source files, and received permission to publish Eric Graham’s 1987 Juggler raytracer source. At that point, we have a snapshot of history that can be viewed from afar, like a[…]
Recovering Eric Graham’s 1987 Juggler raytracer source code AlphaPixel often gets involved with modernizing and updating old performance and graphics code. Sometimes that means client work under NDA. But sometimes it means a fun side quest in the mystical realms of curiosity, preservation, and the practical problem of getting old data into a form that[…]
How Have AI/LLM Coding Tools Impacted Software Development? The emergence of AI systems (as we will also refer to as Large Language Model/LLM tools) in the 2020s is one of the biggest, unanticipated, game changers in software development (and virtually every field). For decades AI research plodded along, making incremental progress with occasional practical breakthroughs,[…]
LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1) An exercise in reconstructing (and maybe modernizing) history. AlphaPixel often gets called upon to work on legacy codebases, sometimes VERY legacy. We have contact with code from the 80s and 90s on a regular basis, in a variety of dialects and languages, and[…]
Mercenary Programming: the AlphaPixel way Most software shops call themselves consultants. We call ourselves Mercenary Programmers. We are a rapid-response, air-dropped strike team. We show up when things are on fire, fix what’s broken, and leave without creating a dependency on us. No politics, ramp-up theater or six-week discovery phase. We are senior developers who[…]
