29 research outputs found
Environmental FX for Multiple Productions
This thesis presents methods for creating visually interesting environmental visual eļ¬ects using Houdini. Four diļ¬erent types of environmental eļ¬ects are shown: Dust trails, Waterfall mist, Snow, and Underwater dust. Each of these eļ¬ects emulate real world phenomena, but also have the ability to be artistically driven to ļ¬t the visual artistās need
Critters in the Classroom: A 3D Computer-Game-Like Tool for Teaching Programming to Computer Animation Students
The brewing crisis threatening computer science education is a well documented fact. To counter this and to increase enrolment and retention in computer science related degrees, it has been suggested to make programming "more fun" and to offer "multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary programs" [Carter 2006]. The Computer Visualisation and Animation undergraduate degree at the National Centre for Computer Animation (Bournemouth University) is such a programme. Computer programming forms an integral part of the curriculum of this technical arts degree, and as educators we constantly face the challenge of having to encourage our students to engage with the subject.
We intend to address this with our C-Sheep system, a reimagination of the "Karel the Robot" teaching tool [Pattis 1981], using modern 3D computer game graphics that today's students are familiar with. This provides a game-like setting for writing computer programs, using a task-specific set of instructions which allow users to take control of virtual entities acting within a micro world, effectively providing a graphical representation of the algorithms used. Whereas two decades ago, students would be intrigued by a 2D top-down representation of the micro world, the lack of the visual gimmickry found in modern computer games for representing the virtual world now makes it extremely difficult to maintain the interest of students from today's "Plug&Play generation". It is therefore especially important to aim for a 3D game-like representation which is "attractive and highly motivating to today's generation of media-conscious students" [Moskal et al. 2004].
Our system uses a modern, platform independent games engine, capable of presenting a visually rich virtual environment using a state of the art rendering engine of a type usually found in entertainment systems. Our aim is to entice students to spend more time programming, by providing them with an enjoyable experience.
This paper provides a discussion of the 3D computer game technology employed in our system and presents examples of how this can be exploited to provide engaging exercises to create a rewarding learning experience for our students
Real-time Realistic Rain Rendering
Artistic outdoor filming and rendering need to choose specific weather conditions in order to
properly trigger the audience reaction; for instance, rain, one of the most common conditions, is
usually employed to transmit a sense of unrest. Synthetic methods to recreate weather are an
important avenue to simplify and cheapen filming, but simulations are a challenging problem due
to the variety of different phenomena that need to be computed. Rain alone involves raindrops,
splashes on the ground, fog, clouds, lightnings, etc. We propose a new rain rendering algorithm
that uses and extends present state of the art approaches in this field. The scope of our method is
to achieve real-time renders of rain streaks and splashes on the ground, while considering complex
illumination effects and allowing an artistic direction for the drops placement.
Our algorithm takes as input an artist-defined rain distribution and density, and then creates
particles in the scene following these indications. No restrictions are imposed on the dimensions
of the rain area, thus direct rendering approaches could rapidly overwhelm current computational
capabilities with huge particle amounts. To solve this situation, we propose techniques that, in
rendering time, adaptively sample the particles generated in order to only select the ones in the
regions that really need to be simulated and rendered.
Particle simulation is executed entirely in the graphics hardware. The algorithm proceeds by
placing the particles in their updated coordinates. It then checks whether a particle is falling as a
rain streak, it has reached the ground and it is a splash or, finally, if it should be discarded because
it has entered a solid object of the scene. Different rendering techniques are used for each case.
Complex illumination parameters are computed for rain streaks to select textures matching them.
These textures are generated in a preprocess step and realistically simulate light when interacting
with the optical properties of the water drops
Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
Serious Games in Cultural Heritage
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
Using Visual Effects as a Means of Establishing or Reinforcing Scale in 3D Visual Works
In 3D animation, visual effects help to establish and reinforce the scale of different characters and objects that are otherwise unclear. In the Fall of 2022, I taught a class about visual effects to several students. At the time, I had difficulty explaining the importance of properly scaling your 3D effects in order to add realism. With physically based effects, we must respect the laws of physics to create a visually realistic and understandable visual effect. Going through several of my previous projects, I found that I had made mistakes with scaling several of my effects. With this paper, I set out to revise and improve several of my effects projects from the past by correcting scale and adding supplementary effects to help convey scale. I then used these projects to render animations that I use to teach the importance of scale in effects by using some of my mistakes in the past
Real-time Realistic Rain Rendering
Artistic outdoor filming and rendering need to choose specific weather conditions in order to
properly trigger the audience reaction; for instance, rain, one of the most common conditions, is
usually employed to transmit a sense of unrest. Synthetic methods to recreate weather are an
important avenue to simplify and cheapen filming, but simulations are a challenging problem due
to the variety of different phenomena that need to be computed. Rain alone involves raindrops,
splashes on the ground, fog, clouds, lightnings, etc. We propose a new rain rendering algorithm
that uses and extends present state of the art approaches in this field. The scope of our method is
to achieve real-time renders of rain streaks and splashes on the ground, while considering complex
illumination effects and allowing an artistic direction for the drops placement.
Our algorithm takes as input an artist-defined rain distribution and density, and then creates
particles in the scene following these indications. No restrictions are imposed on the dimensions
of the rain area, thus direct rendering approaches could rapidly overwhelm current computational
capabilities with huge particle amounts. To solve this situation, we propose techniques that, in
rendering time, adaptively sample the particles generated in order to only select the ones in the
regions that really need to be simulated and rendered.
Particle simulation is executed entirely in the graphics hardware. The algorithm proceeds by
placing the particles in their updated coordinates. It then checks whether a particle is falling as a
rain streak, it has reached the ground and it is a splash or, finally, if it should be discarded because
it has entered a solid object of the scene. Different rendering techniques are used for each case.
Complex illumination parameters are computed for rain streaks to select textures matching them.
These textures are generated in a preprocess step and realistically simulate light when interacting
with the optical properties of the water drops
Rain rendering for evaluating and improving robustness to bad weather
Rain fills the atmosphere with water particles, which breaks the common
assumption that light travels unaltered from the scene to the camera. While it
is well-known that rain affects computer vision algorithms, quantifying its
impact is difficult. In this context, we present a rain rendering pipeline that
enables the systematic evaluation of common computer vision algorithms to
controlled amounts of rain. We present three different ways to add synthetic
rain to existing images datasets: completely physic-based; completely
data-driven; and a combination of both. The physic-based rain augmentation
combines a physical particle simulator and accurate rain photometric modeling.
We validate our rendering methods with a user study, demonstrating our rain is
judged as much as 73% more realistic than the state-of-theart. Using our
generated rain-augmented KITTI, Cityscapes, and nuScenes datasets, we conduct a
thorough evaluation of object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth
estimation algorithms and show that their performance decreases in degraded
weather, on the order of 15% for object detection, 60% for semantic
segmentation, and 6-fold increase in depth estimation error. Finetuning on our
augmented synthetic data results in improvements of 21% on object detection,
37% on semantic segmentation, and 8% on depth estimation.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures, IJCV 2020 preprint. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1908.1033