Meh. This trip is making me feel old. Each day I feel
more and more exhausted. This morning I woke up in plenty time to get
to the 8:30 session, but I just didn't feel like going...and slept for
another hour-and-a-half instead. After getting to the convention
center, I took a long lunch and a walk down
Figueroa
Street.
El Pollo Loco is the only fast food restaurant I have ever been to
that had horchatta. Too bad it was horrible horchatta.
The painting and sketching session was great. It is the only
session that I have attended that I think keithp or cworth would have
enjoyed. Both
"Diffusion
Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth-Shaded Images"
and
"Real-Time
Gradient-Domain Painting"
seemed right up cworth's alley. I think the presenter of the second
paper, Jim McCann, may be a long-lost cousin of anholt. Their sample
application is also available on-line.
"Feedback
Control of Cumuliform Cloud Formation Based on Computational Fluid
Dynamics"
wasn't exactly what I was expecting. (What's the deal with crazy-long
names of papers?!?) The presented algorithm was able to generate
plausible clouds constrained to a 2D contour. The problem that I had
with it was that the sequence of cloud generation was not
plausible. I don't think that was a goal of their algorithm, but it
does seem like a useful feature. Anyway...I don't want to bash their
work because it was good work.
"Shading-Based
Surface Editing"
presented a really interesting tool. Basically, the artist paints
shading (darker areas) on a lit 3D model. The algorithm then rotates
surfaces under the stroke to match the shading. The presenter pointed
out that this tool is really useful for artists that are already
familiar with shading in 2D drawing. He mentioned in passing that it
could be useful to teach shading. I think that particular
point should be explored further. I can envision a sort of feed-back
based expert system to teach shading.The first half of the last session wasn't too interesting to
me...and I didn't pay that much attention.
"Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture"
did catch my interest. Though, it wasn't so much with the topic of
the paper. I hadn't realized that grammar based generation of
geometry had gotten so sophisticated. It has come a long way since
Logo! (heh...maybe I am as old as this trip is making me feel).I'm such a trooper! I stayed for
"Interactive Procedural Street Modeling"...the last technical
paper of SIGGRAPH 2008. The idea is really simple, but it produces
very effective results. The user draws some guiding structures on the
blank map. A tensor field is generated from those guiding structures.
The user can edit that tensor field by adding noise, creating or
moving guiding structures, etc. Once the user is satisfied, streets
are generated at semi-random positions within the tensor field.It was cool to see a paper about designing procedural buildings
immediately followed by a paper about designing procedural
cities...where those buildings might be.I'll probably do an update about the poster sessions after
..
I get back. A couple of them were really cool, so they deserve some
comment.
Complete Story
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