Crossing the Ludicon
I’m excited to announce that I’m starting my own business to research and develop graphics and game technologies, with a focus on the texture and me...
Author: Ignacio Castaño
BC1 Compression Revisited
The NVIDIA Texture Tools (NVTT) had the highest quality BC1 encoder that was openly available, but the rest of the code was mediocre: The remaining encoders had...
My DMV Experience
A few years ago I renewed my driver’s license and when the new one arrived I was sad to find it had an error. The first half of my last name had been remo...
“Climbing a big mountain is hard”
That was my son’s conclusion after today’s climb. At 9000 feet his head was aching with that uncomfortable combination of altitude, sun exposure, fa...
Ladybugs
The ladybug, ladybird beetle, or simply lady beetle, has a special place in our culture: A children’s favorite, loved by gardeners, enemy of aphids, bring...
Castle Peak 2015 – 2019
Nacho and I climbed Castle Peak together for the first time nearly 4 years ago. He had been asking me to take him camping in the snow and had been saying he wan...
2018 Recap
One of my goals for this year is to write more about our trips and adventures. I’ve been thinking I could write a guide book with all the material that I ...
Lightmap optimizations for iOS
One of the main challenges of porting The Witness to iOS was reducing the app memory footprint. The lightmaps that we used in the PC version simply did not fit ...
Lightmap Compression in The Witness
In my initial implementation of our lightmapping technology I simply stored lightmap textures in RGBA16F format. This produced excellent results, but at a very ...
D3DX UVAtlas released
I think it’s really awesome that Microsoft and Xin Huang released the source code of their D3DX mesh parameterization library. Chuck announced it on his b...