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Meshlet Rendering using D3D12 Mesh Shading Pipeline
No full textModern video games must render scenes with increasingly complex geometry. Technologies like Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 enable the handling of scenes with significantly higher object and triangle counts than ever before. This project draws inspiration from Nanite by operating on triangle clusters, allowing artists to focus solely on creating high-poly meshes. The primary objective is to implement fine-grained culling techniques on meshlets, combined with efficient meshlet instancing, to reduce render time and memory usage.
Meshlet instancing plays a crucial role in optimizing rendering performance by allowing multiple objects sharing the same geometry to be rendered efficiently. Instead of duplicating geometry data for every instance, meshlet instancing reuses meshlet data while applying different transformations, significantly reducing memory overhead and draw calls. This approach is particularly beneficial in scenes with a high number of repeated objects, such as forests or urban environments.
Unlike mesh-level culling, which requires the entire mesh to be out of view, these techniques can discard clusters even when parts of the mesh remain visible. While triangle-level culling offers the finest granularity, it involves a trade-off between the time spent on additional culling computations and the actual performance gains. Meshlet culling strikes a balance between the coarser granularity of meshes and the finer detail of triangle-level culling, while meshlet instancing ensures that shared geometry can be rendered efficiently at scale
GPU-Based Visual Effects System
No full textThe objective of my thesis is to create a robust and efficient VFX system that can be used to edit and add particle effects to games. This system utilizes a compute shading pipeline to simulate millions of particles in real time. The behavior of particles is widely customizable through many different properties which can be manipulated changed over the lifetime of particles and introduce procedural randomness. There are many ways to customize the motion of the particles with various forces and collision. Additionally, particles can be rendered as billboarded quads, full meshes or partial meshes with different settings to further customize appearance. The behavior of particles is entirely driven by the particle emitter they are spawned from. A collection of one or more of these particle emitters make up particle effects, which is what the end user will control. All particles are simulated entirely on the GPU allowing for all particles to be updated in parallel with minimal data copied from the CPU to GPU
Constraints and Conservatism: The Effect of Presidential Choices on Voting Patterns of Supreme Court Justices
Get PDFThe decisions of the Supreme Court are constantly featured in news headlines with the accusation that the core institution of the judicial branch is completely politicized. In fact, justices are directly chosen by presidents who have clear political and constitutional agendas. But what about justices whose voting behavior and opinions seem less politically motivated than others? One major answer to that query may lie in the difference between constrained and unconstrained choices. When a president chooses a nominee based on political promises made or limitations imposed by other branches of government, that choice is constrained because those nominees must appeal to a broader political constituency and thus the selection pool is smaller. Among historical examples of constrained choices are Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, all three of whom were instrumental in moderating the Court with their swing votes for the decades they were on the Court. In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that being a constrained choice makes a justice less faithful to their appointing president’s constitutional agenda by quantitatively assessing voting records across their tenures on three main issues: abortion, affirmative action, and the Establishment Clause. Ultimately, my research shows that constrained choices do tend to follow their appointing presidents’ agendas less faithfully and aggressively
Race to Robustness: Adaptation to Globalization in Authoritarian Regimes of the Middle East
Get PDFThe Middle East has been notably absent from the wave of democratization and failed to adapt to globalization since the 1990s. In the Middle Eastern countries, the economy has largely stagnated and the political system has remained authoritarian despite popular revolts during the Arab Spring. Earlier literature often emphasized the cultural and religious differences between the Middle East and the rest of the world. However, the Arab Spring proved that the Middle East could be a part of the democratization wave. More recent literature attempts to explain this surge of public response to the regime and explores how the authoritarian regime resists and/ or adapts to the push of globalization. It highlights weak private sectors, intra-state regional fragmentation, and trade protectionism. Authoritarian leaders use concentrated political power, economic control, and cultural rhetoric to implement policies. We explore how to explain the different responses of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to globalization by comparing past explanations in the literature. We illustrate patterns of adaptation to globalization by focusing on institutionalized vested interests involving military and civil society. We primarily compare Egypt and Tunisia, but also discuss Saudi Arabia to explore the implications of oil endowment and Lebanon to explore the implications of fractured democracy
Re-Imagine Paradise: The Impacts of the Illegal Annexation of Hawai\u27i & Tourism on Native Hawaiians
Get PDFThis literature review presents a vital exploration of colonialism, the illegal annexation of Hawai’i, and the subsequent emergence of the tourism industry as a neocolonial enterprise. Neocolonialism is the process of colonial dominance through modern exploitation, which is masked through economic opportunities and has left territories and their native people dependent on it. By tracing the major historical events in Hawai’i highlights how education was a vital aspect of Native Hawaiian culture, empowering its people - a stark contrast to the current education system where the education system perpetuates the commodification of Native Hawaiian culture. Education has played a pivotal role in reshaping narratives and contributing to the exploitation of Native Hawaiian culture for economic gains. In addition, this study employs a theoretical framework approach, drawing upon theories of settler colonialist ideologies embedded in the tourism industry. This examination highlights how the tourism industry functions as a neocolonial enterprise as it echoes historical power imbalances. Native Hawaiians have been marginalized within their own lands and make up a significant proportion of workers within the tourism industry, which demonstrates economic dependency and racialization. The analysis conducted displays the consequences of these interconnected and historical elements. The project not only highlights the exploitation of cultural heritage but also the multifaceted ways in which the tourism industry serves as a neocolonial enterprise, further alienating and disempowering Native Hawaiians. By addressing historical empowerment and modern-day exploitation, the study offers a critical perspective on how neocolonialism is interconnected within major institutions such as education and economics, while also offering a dialogue on indigenous rights and ethical tourism
\u3cem\u3eRahimi \u3c/em\u3e and the Future of (the Rest of) the Protection Order Prohibition
No full textIn the summer of 2024, the Supreme Court considered United States v. Rahimi. Scholars and lawyers watched with bated breath to see how the court would interpret and apply the foundation-shifting Second Amendment test it established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen two years earlier. Ultimately, the Court upheld the federal law which temporarily bans some protection order respondents from possessing firearms. But the Court provided little in the way of additional guidance that lower courts desperately needed as evidenced by the disparate outcomes on gun cases nationwide following Bruen. Rather, the Court opted for a narrow approach, failing to even rule on the entirety of the statute at issue in Rahimi. This article explores the unexamined portion of that federal statute—18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)(c)(ii)—
and how it is critical that this subsection of the law also remain constitutional to provide safety to victims of domestic violence who seek protection from the courts. The article then describes how a careful reading of Bruen and Rahimi demonstrates that lower courts should uphold this subsection moving forward, as it has historically
Evaluating the Implementation and Impact of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act
No full textOn September 18, 2023, Illinois implemented the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA). This landmark reform eliminated cash bail and introduced sweeping changes to the state’s pretrial system. The PFA establishes new release and detention factors, restricts pretrial detention, and limits post-release modification of release conditions. Professors David Olson and Don Stemen of Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice will share findings from their ongoing, long-term evaluation of the PFA’s implementation. They will also highlight variations in the PFA’s implementation and impact across urban and rural Illinois jurisdictions
Data Encoding, Compilation, and Algorithms for Quantum Machine Learning
Get PDFQuantum computing enables new approaches to data processing, especially in quantum machine learning. Unlike classical systems, quantum data must be synthesized through operations and can exist in superposition. Encoding choices affect efficiency, noise resilience, and trainability—key factors in quantum machine learning models. This dissertation enhances quantum data encodings by extending quantum read-only memory (QROM) beyond binary representations, improving efficiency and parallelism. It introduces new compilation methods for quantum random number generators (QRNGs), supporting non-parametric distributions for post-quantum cryptography. Additionally, it explores Cayley graph-based encodings to extract spectral features for quantum machine learning
Corporate Director and Officer Liability: Discretionaries Not Fiduciaries
No full textThe principal theme of this book is that corporate directors and officers are not, in actuality, fiduciaries and that the use of this term should be abandoned. As the book highlights, the liability standards that often apply to directors and officers are so lenient that they are devoid of fiduciary status. Accordingly, to continue to identify these individuals as fiduciaries perpetuates a fiction that should be remedied. Rather, a new substantive term should be recognized that accurately and objectively portrays this situation: the corporate director or officer is a “discretionary.” The degree of discretion allowed before liability arises may be strict or expansive depending on the surrounding facts and circumstances. This distinction is important as legal terms and concepts have impact. They are relied upon for what they claim to represent. Directors and officers accordingly should be accurately characterized as “discretionaries.”https://scholar.smu.edu/facbooks/1072/thumbnail.jp
Schwerin Castle: Historical Recreation with Dynamic Materials in Sebastian Luca’s Style
Get PDFI created a scene in Unreal Engine 5, using in-depth research on Schwerin Castle to faithfully recreate its architecture. The goal was to analyze and replicate Sebastian Luca’s art style within the UE5. Finally, I presented three dynamic material variations of the scene in UE to illustrate seasonal changes through material adjustments