Nope, I’m not talking about the nice town of Reading in the UK. I’m talking about the act of mentally absorbing pieces of text. That’s what I’ve been doing mostly during the last few weeks. And I’m ashamed to say that most of it was scientific literature. (I haven’t forgotten about you Borges. I will get back to you asap.) Mostly on physics simulation, level sets, partial differential equations, computational geometry, rendering and what not.

My scientific reading has been going all over the place. But one of the most interesting reads has been the 2006 Siggraph course on fluid simulation. For those of you who are interested, you can find it here. I wish that this course would have been available some time ago, because it is really good. It would have saved me a lot of time in understanding the theory behind fluid simulation. It’s a must read.

As some of you know, I have been working on a physics engine a while ago (together with Ebor Folkertsma). If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, you should really visit Erin Catto’s site for his GDC2006 tutorial. After being totally frustrated for a while when we finished our project, I have to say that this tutorial got me quite interested again. And I’m actually coding up a new engine for my own fun. But please don’t tell Ebor.

A last thing I would like to mention is that my interest in rendering and ray tracing has also come to life again. Mostly thanks to the guys at ompf.org. A really interesting forum on (real-time) ray tracing. I have too little time, but I would really like to get into building a ray-tracer again as well. Sigh… so much interesting stuff out there.

I could keep on going for quite a while on all the other papers I have been reading and subjects I’ve taken an interest in, but I’ll save it for a later time. Right now it’s back to some coding.