3D graphics

The nature of warfare requires military tacticians to know the lay of the land in advance to protect troops, a capability increasingly enabled by 3D printing technology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Army Corps has obtained the ability to produce durable solid 3D models quickly, easily and inexpensively from digital geospatial information. The Corps purchased the Z Corporation Z810 3D Printer to create color models of cities, mountainous areas and other complex terrain around the world in support of military operations and related applications. The new printing technology cuts weeks of labor from the construction of topographic models and displays details that other technologies cannot match.

Source: BoardsMag.com

HijackGL is a system in development by Alex Mohr and Christopher Herrman under the direction of Michael Gleicher at the University of Wisconsin. The goal of this work is to develop a system that allows us to explore what can be done by intercepting, interpreting, and transforming the calls an application makes to the OpenGL graphics library. Preliminary work on this system led to research presented at the 2001 Interactive 3D Graphics Symposium. This work focused on generating non-photorealistic renderers for existing applications. For example, we demonstrated a pencil-sketch-style renderer running on id Software's Quake III Arena, as shown at the top of this page. We did not modify the source code of Quake III Arena at all. In fact, we do not even have access to the Quake III Arena source code. Current work involves developing a more general system to allow us to experiment with other kinds of non-invasive extensions.

Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support, mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation, also using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support, hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details.

Researchers from UB's Virtual Reality Lab have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

"This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures," says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Graphics Breakthrough Can Benefit Cartoon and Game Creators, Web Marketers, Virtual Museums and Others

A University of Southern California computer scientist has created a powerful and elegant algorithm to compress the large and ungainly files that represent 3-D shapes used in animations, video games and other computer graphics applications.

Mathieu Desbrun, assistant professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering says that digital sound, pictures and video are relatively easy to compress today but that the complex files of 3-D objects present a much greater challenge.

Graphics Breakthrough Can Benefit Cartoon and Game Creators, Web Marketers, Virtual Museums and Others

A University of Southern California computer scientist has created a powerful and elegant algorithm to compress the large and ungainly files that represent 3-D shapes used in animations, video games and other computer graphics applications.

Mathieu Desbrun, assistant professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering says that digital sound, pictures and video are relatively easy to compress today but that the complex files of 3-D objects present a much greater challenge.

In January 2001, CBS spiced up its coverage of the Super Bowl with a special effect that allowed the broadcaster to freeze a replay, arbitrarily change the viewpoint and continue the replay. Researchers around the world are looking to take this technology further by enabling viewpoint changes as the action, including live-action, unfolds, and by letting viewers controlled viewpoint.

The formidable technical challenge in presenting real-time, free-viewpoint three-dimensional video is the enormous amount of information contained in the stream of video information.

Researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich have devised a way to process three-dimensional video in real-time that reduces the amount of data to the manageable level of 3 megabits per second.

It you get a close look at some of the creatures of the night in the Van Helsing movie, you might notice how realistic their skin looks.

The reason is a program that works out how light affects surfaces like skin to make computer-generated characters look more believable. The software was first used on Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and is now a staple of blockbusters packed with visual effects.

The man behind the technique, Dr Henrik Jensen of the University of California at San Diego, was recently rewarded for his contribution to Hollywood. In February he received a Technical Achievement Award from the people who hand out the Oscars.

From laggard to leader, game graphics are taking us in new directions.

It has been a long journey from the days of multicolored sprites on tiled block backgrounds to the immersive 3D environments of modern games. What used to be a job for a single game creator is now a multifaceted production involving staff from every creative discipline. The next generation of console and home computer hardware is going to bring a revolutionary leap in available computing power; a teraflop (trillion floating-point operations per second) or more will be on tap from commodity hardware. This leap in power will bring with it a leap in expectations, both on the part of the consumer and the creative professional.

Intel, Adobe, Microsoft and more than 30 other companies are to co-operate in conjuring up a standard for 3D graphics, called the Universal 3D (U3D) format.

Engineers at Purdue University are developing a system that will enable people to search huge industry databases by sketching a part from memory, penciling in modifications to an existing part or selecting a part that has a similar shape.
first step in the search process.

Ever fancied taking your favourite possessions with you into the virtual world? Spiral Scratch, a start-up company in Liverpool, UK, has come up with a cheap device that generates three-dimensional computer representation of any object it scans.