Research

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I am a Ph.D. student in the EE department at Stanford. I work in the Computer Graphics Lab, and my advisor is Pat Hanrahan. I am currently in the process of writing my dissertation. My working title is A System for Real-Time Procedural Shading on Programmable Graphics Hardware.

Real-Time Programmable Shading

My latest research has been on real-time programmable shading. The basic problem is that graphics hardware is becoming more programmable, but also more difficult to use. Amazing effects are possible, but they take a long time to create. Our solution is to provide a shading language to hide most of the difficulties of programming the hardware, making the hardware much easier to use. One of the unique features of our system is that we virtualize programmable graphics hardware by splitting large computations into multiple passes. Here are two images captured from interactive demos we created with our system:

Textbook strike

Fish

See also:

paper about system, video about system, paper about compiling to register combiners, paper about compiling to multiple rendering passes.

Graphics Architectures

Before programmable shading, I worked with a group studying parallel graphics architectures. My main contribution was the development of a system for tracing scenes and analyzing graphics architectures. The latest version of our tracing software was placed into the public domain and can be downloaded. I also wrote an ubër-rasterizer for Argus, the group's parallel software renderer.

See also:

texture caching paper, bucket rendering paper.

Papers

• Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Multipass Rendering on Programmable Graphics Hardware
  Eric Chan, Ren Ng, Pradeep Sen, Kekoa Proudfoot, and Pat Hanrahan, in 2002 SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware. Received Best Paper Award.
• A Real-Time Procedural Shading System for Programmable Graphics Hardware
  Kekoa Proudfoot, William R. Mark, Svetoslav Tzvetkov, and Pat Hanrahan, in SIGGRAPH 2001.
• Compiling to a VLIW Fragment Pipeline
  William R. Mark and Kekoa Proudfoot, in 2001 SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware.
• The F-Buffer: A Rasterization-Order FIFO Buffer for Multi-Pass Rendering
  William R. Mark and Kekoa Proudfoot, in 2001 SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware.
• Prefetching in a Texture Cache Architecture
  Homan Igehy, Matthew Eldridge, and Kekoa Proudfoot, in 1998 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware.
• Simple Models of the Impact of Overlap in Bucket Rendering
  Milton Chen, Gordon Stoll, Homan Igehy, Kekoa Proudfoot, and Pat Hanrahan, in 1998 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware.

• An Autostereogram Decoder
  Kekoa Proudfoot, Graphics Cafe, April 17, 2003.
• A Real-Time Procedural Shading System for Programmable Graphics Hardware
  Kekoa Proudfoot, SIGGRAPH 2001.
• Stanford Real-Time Shading Project
  Kekoa Proudfoot, SIGGRAPH 2000, Course 27.
• Reverse Engineering the LEGO RCX
  Kekoa Proudfoot, EE380 Seminar, October 7, 1998.