Eurographics Digital Library
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Recent Submissions
Computational Design of Deployable Gridshells with Curved Elastic Beams
(EPFL, 2025) Becker, Quentin
Deployable gridshells are lightweight structures made of interconnected elastic beams. They can be actuated from a compact state to a freeform and volume-enclosing deployed shape. This thesis introduces C-shells, a novel class of deployable gridshells, which employs curved elastic rods connected at single-axis rotational joints. As opposed to their straight counterparts, C-shells are guaranteed to be assembled in a planar and stress-free configuration while showing a wide diversity in their deployed shapes. They may serve as temporary shelters, pavilions, or on a smaller scale, as deployable furniture or decorative elements.
This thesis presents a comprehensive framework for the forward exploration of C-shell designs, enabling designers to interactively search the shape space and generate deployable structures with diverse appearances and topologies. The framework combines human-interpretable manipulations of a reference linkage with an efÏcient physics-based simulation to predict the deployed shape and mechanical behavior of the structure. Preservation of the linkage deployability and smoothness of the edits are ensured through the use of conformal maps as design handles. The framework is implemented as a Rhino-Grasshopper plugin, providing visual and quantitative realtime feedback on the deployed state.
The inverse design of C-shells is also addressed, where the deployed shape is given, and the flat state of the structure is computed. This thesis introduces a two-step pipeline composed of a flattening method and a design optimization algorithm. The flattening algorithm is based on kinetic considerations underlying the deployment of C-shells. The method harmonizes a flat and a hypothetical deployed state constrained on a user-prescribed target surface. The flat beam layout is further adjusted to minimize the deviation of the deployed shape to the target surface while ensuring a low elastic energy deployed state, under some beam smoothness regularization. The proposed method is validated through scanned small-scale prototypes.
C-shells are made of curved rods, which entails additional material waste compared to straight beams. To address this issue, this thesis presents a rationalization method that splits the curved beams into smaller straight elements which can be grouped into a sparse kit of parts, while preserving user-provided designs. The original combinatorial problem of jointly assigning parts to elements and adapting the parts’ geometry is relaxed into a two-step optimization process incorporating our physics-based simulation, making it tractable using continuous optimization techniques. The proposed method applies more generally to bending-active structures and is further demonstrated on orthogonal gridshells and umbrella meshes. Part reuse is assessed in a study of the trade-off between the number of parts and fidelity to the input designs.
1UP Placements Scheme: Simmersive Education for Games Development Professional Skills
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Headleand, Christopher; James, David; Ward, Davin; Hicks, Kieran; Salinas, Carolina; Nawaz, Raheel; Sheng, Yun; Slingsby, Aidan
This education paper presents the 1UP scheme, an award winning industry simulation. The 1UP scheme provides students with structured studio-style experience within an academic context. Students are directly employed (and paid) by the university in-house games studio for a 6-week summer placement. 1UP facilitates interdisciplinary student teams to develop commercialquality games under professional supervision. This paper outlines the scheme's structure, the design philosophy of the studio, and the educational impact. We detail some case studies of the games we have produced, including 'Disc-Go!', 'StaffsVerse', and the award winning 'MechHead'. These success projects and the student outcomes demonstrate the value of this approach in supporting skill development, portfolio enhancement, and employability. The 1UP model represents a scalable, award-winning approach to bridging the gap between education and industry within games development education.
Run-time Performance Comparison of Sparse-set and Archetype Entity-Component Systems
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Cox, Louis; Williams, Benjamin; Vickers, James; Ward, Davin; Headleand, Christopher; Sheng, Yun; Slingsby, Aidan
Entity-Component System (ECS) architectures have emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional object-oriented solutions in video games and real-time simulations. However, different ECS implementations present distinct trade-offs between iteration speed and modification costs. Despite its growing adoption, a comparative analysis on the performance characteristics of ECS implementation types has yet to be conducted. This study compares the performance of two widely-used ECS implementations: sparse-set and archetype-based. To facilitate this, an implementation of each architecture was developed in C++20 and their performance was examined in terms of iteration speed and entity modification costs. The results show sparse-set ECSes enable cheaper entity modifications but scale poorly during iteration, while archetypes excel at large-scale iteration through cache efficiency but incur higher composition change costs. These findings provide valuable and actionable guidance for developers selecting ECS architectures for their specific applications.
Social Dimensions in Content Creation for Games: A Systematic Review of Fairness, Social Bias, and Diversity in Computational Character and Environment Generation
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Horst, Robin; Dörner, Ralf; Sheng, Yun; Slingsby, Aidan
Computational content generation increasingly shapes digital games, visual computing, and interactive environments, automating the creation of characters and environments. However, these systems also raise complex challenges related to fairness, social bias, and representational diversity. We present a systematic literature review of 37 recent studies addressing fairness-aware computational content generation across character creation, face modeling, and procedural environments. We analyze both algorithmic strategies - including deep learning, reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks, and optimization - as well as design-oriented frameworks such as behavioral, participatory, and cultural methods. Our review reveals substantial conceptual fragmentation in how fairness, social bias, and diversity are defined, measured, and operationalized across domains. While several metrics (e.g., statistical parity, balanced accuracy, generative diversity scores) are applied, standardized computational frameworks and large-scale auditing tools remain largely absent. We conclude by outlining key research challenges, including metric standardization, scalable fairness, social bias, and diversity auditing, cross-cultural dataset development, and interdisciplinary collaboration, to advance aware content generation in games.
GPU-accelerated Cartoon Representation for Interactive Flexible Docking
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Holdsworth, Katerina R.; Iakovou, Georgios; Hayward, Steven; Laycock, Stephen D.; Sheng, Yun; Slingsby, Aidan
Molecular docking involves simulating the binding of two biomolecules, a receptor and ligand, and is widely used for structurebased drug design. There are two main types of docking tools: automated and interactive. While automated tools are useful for reducing the search space of ligands and identifying potential binding sites, interactive tools allow the user to guide the docking process and observe what happens during docking. High computation speeds are required for interactive docking to handle both protein deformation and user interaction in real time. The cartoon representation, not to be confused with cartoon style rendering, is a protein representation that shows an abstracted view and is frequently used by structural biologists to not only identify a protein, but also to identify key regions within a protein of interest. There are examples of GPU-accelerated methods to construct the cartoon representation in real time. However, none of these methods achieve real-time assignment of secondary structure and construction of the cartoon representation for a flexible molecule. This paper presents our method to achieve this, integrated into an interactive docking tool with receptor flexibility. The methods outlined in this paper produced some promising results, with proteins of up to 3,300 amino acid residues being constructed and rendered at 70 fps.