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Now showing 1 - 10 of 67
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    Environment-aware Real-Time Crowd Control
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Henry, Joseph; Shum, Hubert P. H.; Komura, Taku; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    Real-time crowd control has become an important research topic due to the recent advancement in console game quality and hardware processing capability. The degrees of freedom of a crowd is much higher than that provided by a standard user input device. As a result most crowd control systems require the user to design the crowd move- ments through multiple passes, such as first specifying the crowd's start and goal points, then providing the agent trajectories with streamlines. Such a multi-pass control would spoil the responsiveness and excitement of real- time games. In this paper, we propose a new, single-pass algorithm to control crowds using a deformable mesh. When controlling crowds, we observe that most of the low level details are related to passive interactions between the crowd and the environment, such as obstacle avoidance and diverging/merging at cross points. Therefore, we simplify the crowd control problem by representing the crowd with a deformable mesh that passively reacts to the environment. As a result, the user can focus on high level control that is more important for context delivery. Our algorithm provides an efficient crowd control framework while maintaining the quality of the simulation, which is useful for real-time applications such as strategy games.
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    High Resolution Medical 3D Data Sets on Mobile Devices and WebGL
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Jimenez, Juan-Roberto; Noguera, Jose Maria; Isabel Navazo and Gustavo Patow
    Nowadays, mobile devices and the web are being used to deliver 3D graphics to mass users. However, applications such as visualization of high resolution medical models are still impossible to handle in such platforms due to texture limitations, mainly the lack of 3D texture support. In this paper we propose a software architecture and a novel texture storage technique that overcome these limitations. In addition, our proposal allows us to adapt existing direct volume rendering techniques based on 3D textures to mobile devices and WebGL. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility and validity of our proposal to render high resolution volumetric models on both platforms.
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    Quaternion Space Sparse Decomposition for Motion Compression and Retrieval
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Zhu, Mingyang; Sun, Huaijiang; Deng, Zhigang; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    Quaternion has become one of the most widely used representations for rotational transformations in 3D graphics for decades. Due to the sparse nature of human motion in both the spatial domain and the temporal domain, an unexplored yet challenging research problem is how to directly represent intrinsically sparse human motion data in quaternion space. In this paper we propose a novel quaternion space sparse decomposition (QSSD) model that decomposes human rotational motion data into two meaningful parts (namely, the dictionary part and the weight part) with the sparseness constraint on the weight part. Specifically, a linear combination (addition) operation in Euclidean space is equivalently modeled as a quaternion multiplication operation, and the weight of linear combination is modeled as a power operation on quaternion. Besides validations of the robustness, convergence, and accuracy of the QSSD model, we also demonstrate its two selected applications: human motion data compression and content-based human motion retrieval. Through numerous experiments and quantitative comparisons, we demonstrate that the QSSD-based approaches can soundly outperform existing state-of-the-art human motion compression and retrieval approaches.
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    Linear-Time Smoke Animation with Vortex Sheet Meshes
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Brochu, Tyson; Keeler, Todd; Bridson, Robert; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    We present the first quality physics-based smoke animation method which runs in time approximately linear in the size of the rendered two-dimensional visual detail. Our fundamental representation is a closed triangle mesh surface dividing space between clear air and a uniformly smoky region, on which we compute vortex sheet dynamics to accurately solve inviscid buoyant flow. We handle arbitrary moving no-stick solid boundaries and by default handle an infinite domain. The simulation itself runs in time linear to the number of triangles thanks to the use of a well-conditioned integral equation treatment together with a Fast Multipole Method for linear-time summations, providing excellent performance. Basic zero-albedo smoke rendering, with embedded solids, is easy to implement for interactive rates, and the mesh output can also serve as an extremely compact and detailed input to more sophisticated volume rendering.
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    Smoke Sheets for Graph-Structured Vortex Filaments
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Barnat, Alfred; Pollard, Nancy S.; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    Smoke is one of the core phenomena which fluid simulation techniques in computer graphics have attempted to capture. It is both well understood mathematically and important in lending realism to computer generated effects. In an attempt to overcome the diffusion inherent to Eulerian grid-based simulators, a technique has recently been developed which represents velocity using a sparse set of vortex filaments. This has the advantage of providing an easily understandable and controllable model for fluid velocity, but is computationally expensive because each filament affects the fluid velocity over an unbounded region of the simulation space. We present an alternative to existing techniques which merge adjacent filament rings, instead allowing filaments to form arbitrary structures, and we develop a new set of reconnection criteria to take advantage of this filament graph. To complement this technique, we also introduce a method for smoke surface tracking and rendering designed to minimize the number of sample points without introducing excessive diffusion or blurring. Though this representation lends itself to straightforward real-time rendering, we also present a method which renders the thin sheets and curls of smoke as diffuse volumes using any GPU capable of supporting geometry shaders.
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    Tessellation-Independent Smooth Shadow Boundaries
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012) Mattausch, Oliver; Scherzer, Daniel; Wimmer, Michael; Igarashi, Takeo; Fredo Durand and Diego Gutierrez
    We propose an efficient and light-weight solution for rendering smooth shadow boundaries that do not reveal the tessellation of the shadow-casting geometry. Our algorithm reconstructs the smooth contours of the underlying mesh and then extrudes shadow volumes from the smooth silhouettes to render the shadows. For this purpose we propose an improved silhouette reconstruction using the vertex normals of the underlying smooth mesh. Then our method subdivides the silhouette loops until the contours are sufficiently smooth and project to smooth shadow boundaries. This approach decouples the shadow smoothness from the tessellation of the geometry and can be used to maintain equally high shadow quality for multiple LOD levels. It causes only a minimal change to the fill rate, which is the well-known bottleneck of shadow volumes, and hence has only small overhead.
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    Contact-Invariant Optimization for Hand Manipulation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Mordatch, Igor; Popovic, Zoran; Todorov, Emanuel; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    We present a method for automatic synthesis of dexterous hand movements, given only high-level goals specifying what should happen to the object being manipulated. Results are presented on a wide range of tasks including grasping and picking up objects, twirling them between the fingers, tossing and catching, drawing. This work is an extension of the recent contact-invariant optimization (CIO) method, which introduced auxiliary decision variables directly specifying when and where contacts should occur, and optimized these variables together with the movement trajectory. Our contribution here is extending the unique contact model used in CIO which was specific to locomotion tasks, as well as applying the extended method systematically to hand manipulation.
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    The Intersection Contour Minimization Method for Untangling Oriented Deformable Surfaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Ye, Juntao; Zhao, Jing; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    The Intersection Contour Minimization (ICM) method [VM06] has been proven to be an effective history-free algorithm for resolving collisions between non-oriented deformable surfaces. In many circumstances, however, surface orientation information are often implied in the context. Being completely blind to such information in the ICM method often leads to unexpected result: either failure or slow convergence in certain intersection config- urations. By introducing the concept of ''repulsive normal'' into ICM, many of those once-failure configurations can be resolved successfully. Even for those once-successful configurations, repulsive normals usually speed-up the convergence. Moreover, the ICM method that was originally designed for polygonal meshes can actually be adapted to resolve collisions between a polygon mesh and an analytical surface. This paper presents one such extension collisions between a polygon mesh and a capsule.
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    Visual Language Generalization for Procedural Modeling of Buildings
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Barroso, Santiago; Patow, Gustavo; Isabel Navazo and Gustavo Patow
    Procedural modeling has become the accepted standard for the creation of detailed large scenes, in particular urban landscapes. With the introduction of visual languages there has been a huge leap forward in terms of usability, but there is still need of more sophisticated tools to simplify the development process. In this paper we present extensions to the visual modeling of procedural buildings, which adapt concepts from general purpose programming languages, with the objective of providing higher descriptive power. In particular, we present the concepts of visual modules, parameter linking and the possibility to seamlessly add abstract parameter templates to the designer visual toolbox. We base our demonstrations on a new visual language created for volume-based models like historic architectonic structures (aqueducts, churches, cathedrals, etc.), which cannot be modeled as 2D facades because of the intrinsic volumetric structure of these construction (e.g. vaults or arches).
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    Interactive Steering of Mesh Animations
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Vögele, Anna; Hermann, Max; Krüger, Björn; Klein, Reinhard; Jehee Lee and Paul Kry
    Creating geometrically detailed mesh animations is an involved and resource-intensive process in digital content creation. In this work we present a method to rapidly combine available sparse motion capture data with existing mesh sequences to produce a large variety of new animations. The key idea is to model shape changes correlated to the pose of the animated object via a part-based statistical shape model. We observe that compact linear models suffice for a segmentation into nearly rigid parts. The same segmentation further guides the parameterization of the pose which is learned in conjunction with the marker movement. Besides the inherent high geometric detail, further benefits of the presented method arise from its robustness against errors in segmentation and pose parameterization. Due to efficiency of both learning and synthesis phase, our model allows to interactively steer virtual avatars based on few markers extracted from video data or input devices like the Kinect sensor.