Animating ultra-complex voxel scenes through shell deformation

version draft du mémoireInternational audienceVoxel representations have many advantages, such as ordered traversal during rendering and trivial very decent LOD through MIPmap. Special effect companies such Digital Domain or Rhythm&Hues now ex- tensively use voxels engines, for semi-transparent objects such as clouds, avalanches, tornado or explosions, but also for complex solid objects. Several gaming companies are also looking into voxel engines to deal with ever more complex scenes but the main problem when dealing with voxel representations is the amount of data that has to be manipulated. This amount usually prevents animating in real time. To solve these is- sues, ARTIS team developed the Gigavoxels framework: a very powerful voxel engine based on GPU ray-casting, with advanced memory man- agement, so that very complex scenes can be rendered in real-time. The purpose of the TER was to develop a solution for animating voxel objects in real-time, implement it and eventually integrate it to the Gigavoxels framework

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationPhysical simulation has become an essential tool in computer animation. As the use of visual effects increases, the need for simulating real-world materials increases. In this dissertation, we consider three problems in physics-based animation: large-scale splashing liquids, elastoplastic material simulation, and dimensionality reduction techniques for fluid simulation. Fluid simulation has been one of the greatest successes of physics-based animation, generating hundreds of research papers and a great many special effects over the last fifteen years. However, the animation of large-scale, splashing liquids remains challenging. We show that a novel combination of unilateral incompressibility, mass-full FLIP, and blurred boundaries is extremely well-suited to the animation of large-scale, violent, splashing liquids. Materials that incorporate both plastic and elastic deformations, also referred to as elastioplastic materials, are frequently encountered in everyday life. Methods for animating such common real-world materials are useful for effects practitioners and have been successfully employed in films. We describe a point-based method for animating elastoplastic materials. Our primary contribution is a simple method for computing the deformation gradient for each particle in the simulation. Given the deformation gradient, we can apply arbitrary constitutive models and compute the resulting elastic forces. Our method has two primary advantages: we do not store or compare to an initial rest configuration and we work directly with the deformation gradient. The first advantage avoids poor numerical conditioning and the second naturally leads to a multiplicative model of deformation appropriate for finite deformations. One of the most significant drawbacks of physics-based animation is that ever-higher fidelity leads to an explosion in the number of degrees of freedom

Development of an online multiplayer game with augmented reality capabilities for android devices

Treball final de Grau en Disseny i Desenvolupament de Videojocs. Codi: VJ1241. Curs acadèmic: 2017/2018This End-of-Degree project consists of the development of an Online Multiplayer game using Augmented Reality technology. The objective of the project was to develop a multiplayer online game that used the camera device to place a digital environment on a flat surface using Augmented Reality technology where the players would have played. There is no need for the players to be together in the same room as the scenario is shared across all the players. The game is a “Bomberman” like type of game with fully network capabilities developed using Unity3D and is played on Android devices. The users will play on a predefined arena in which they can move and drop bombs using a virtual joystick and a virtual button. The bombs explode after three seconds and have a certain blast radius. The objective is to eliminate the other players using the bombs. There are crates around the arena that can be destroyed by the explosions and have a chance to drop different power-ups

A Vortex Method for Bi-phasic Fluids Interacting with Rigid Bodies

We present an accurate Lagrangian method based on vortex particles, level-sets, and immersed boundary methods, for animating the interplay between two fluids and rigid solids. We show that a vortex method is a good choice for simulating bi-phase flow, such as liquid and gas, with a good level of realism. Vortex particles are localized at the interfaces between the two fluids and within the regions of high turbulence. We gain local precision and efficiency from the stable advection permitted by the vorticity formulation. Moreover, our numerical method straightforwardly solves the two-way coupling problem between the fluids and animated rigid solids. This new approach is validated through numerical comparisons with reference experiments from the computational fluid community. We also show that the visually appealing results obtained in the CG community can be reproduced with increased efficiency and an easier implementation

Production Pipelines for Creating a Cinematic Digital Matte Painting

This writing covers concepts in the creation of a cinematic scene in digital matte painting. Digital matte painting is a visual effects process of the modern version of traditional matte painting, in which the artist paints several backgrounds to add to a scene. The digital artist uses software to paint, apply photo-bashing techniques, and/or utilize 3D models to create an exterior or interior environment. This scene incorporates 3D geometry in Autodesk Maya, brought to life through texturing and in-software lighting and animated cameras. The finalized scene includes color correction and additional visual effects

Physically based simulation of explosions

This thesis describes a method for using physically based techniques to model an explosion and the resulting side effects. Explosions are some of the most visually exciting phenomena known to humankind and have become nearly ubiquitous in action films. A realistic computer simulation of this powerful event would be cheaper, quicker, and much less complicated than safely creating the real thing. The immense energy released by a detonation creates a discontinuous localized increase in pressure and temperature. Physicists and engineers have shown that the dissipation of this concentration of energy, which creates all the visible effects, adheres closely to the compressible Navier-Stokes equation. This program models the most noticeable of these results. In order to simulate the pressure and temperature changes in the environment, a three dimensional grid is placed throughout the area around the detonation and a discretized version of the Navier-Stokes equation is applied to the resulting voxels. Objects in the scene are represented as rigid bodies that are animated by the forces created by varying pressure on their hulls. Fireballs, perhaps the most awe-inspiring side effects of an explosion, are simulated using massless particles that flow out from the center of the blast and follow the currents created by the dissipating pressure. The results can then be brought into Maya for evaluation and tweaking

Becoming Angels: women writing cyberspace

As virtual technology evolves and its uses become more widespread, particularly in western communities, women are moving from the virtual spaces of their cultural bodies to the virtual habitats of their cyber-bodies. What makes this migration interesting is the familiarity with which women begin to inhabit their virtual bodies. What seems to be occurring here is the recognition of a virtual existence and of women's learned capacity to inhabit absence. In virtual spaces virtual bodies are downloaded, mirrored, uplinked, morphed and mutated. Their existence as information strings makes them amenable to all kinds of virtual manipulations and manifestations which, in the external/real world are impossible. Perhaps what makes this less confronting for female subjects is their learned capacity to inhabit culture - where their subjectivity has long been overwritten by the male subject - from a position which is not of their own devising. In a culture which renders them as objects women have long since learned many and varied ways of subverting their liminal cultural positions. While male users often express a fear of the dissolution of the body/self, women have known all along what it means to be only virtually real (Wise). We know, furthermore, how to participate in a culture which is the site of our negation