Display of complex three dimensional finite element models

technical reportComplex three dimensional models can be displayed after an automatic generation of a finite element (panel) mapping. although this automatic generation algorithm fails at certain levels of model complexity, the elimination of these failures can be accomplished through user interaction. This report presents the algorithm solution to the problem of converting a contour definition of an arbitrary surface into a panel definition. The algorithm has been rigorously rested and experience with a highly complex data base lends credence to the claim of a general solution

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

The MASTERMIND User Interface Generation Project

Graphical user interfaces are difficult to construct and, consequently, suffer from high development and maintenance costs. Automatic generation from declarative descriptions can reduce costs and enforce design principles. MASTERMIND is a model based approach to user interface generation. Designers model different aspects of an interface using declarative modeling languages, and tools synthesize these models into run-time code. The design process begins with user task and application modeling. These models are then refined into dialogue, presentation, and interaction models and an application API. These latter models drive the synthesis of run-time code. A design tool called Dukas is employed to support the refinement of task models into dialogue models

Procedural tree mesh generator plugin for Blender

Treball final de Grau en Disseny i Desenvolupament de Videojocs. Codi: VJ1241. Curs acadèmic: 2020/2021The goal of this End-of-Degree project has been to create a useful tool that works on a procedural way in order to create unique vegetation tree models that adapts to the needs of each user. In the last decade, procedural and modular generation techniques have seen their use increased notably in the video game industry. These techniques allow the creation of different instances of almost every element that compose a game in an automatic way, making it possible to achieve single unique gameplay experiences for the users with less time spent by developers. Blender creation suite has been used for the development of the project. This work has two main parts: the procedural generation system of the optimized tree models and an integration of user input through an user interface added in Blender. On one side, the generation of the trees has been divided into four parts: generation of the roots, trunk, branches and leaves. On the other side, would be the interaction of the distinct user inputs parameters within the procedural scripted behavior allowing the user to control the final output. Finally, a fully working tree model generator plugin with a random behaviour driven by user inputs with the indicated characteristics in the Project Design Document has been acquired (see Chapter 2)

The automatic generation and execution of Lean Cuisine+ specifications : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Science in Computer Science at Massey University

Lean Cuisine+ (Phillips, 1995), a semi-formal graphical dialogue notation for describing the behaviour of event based direct manipulation GUIs, was developed at Massey University in the early 1990s. More recently, a software environment, SELCU (Scogings, 2003) has been built for Lean Cuisine+ which permits dialogue models to be manually constructed and edited using a drag and drop approach. The aim of the research presented in this thesis is to develop extensions to SELCU, which include the automatic generation of Lean Cuisine+ diagrams, and their execution. A shortcoming of current prototyping tools and user interface builders is that although they permit the designer to construct a mock up of the look and feel of the interface, they provide no model of the interaction. The Auto-Generation Software is a tool which can automatically generate a Lean Cuisine+ diagram for a graphical user interface developed using Delphi. The generated description is represented as a text file, and in a format compatible with the SELCU system. The Lean Cuisine+ Execution Environment is embedded in the SELCU application. It supports the execution of Lean Cuisine+ specifications, including meneme selection and task action sequence, and also takes account of triggers. The SELCU extensions successfully integrate a graphical dialogue notation (Lean Cuisine+), an object oriented development environment (Delphi), and an existing support environment (SELCU). This offers a more complete environment for the early stages of the design of graphical user interfaces

Automatic 3D model creation with velocity-based surface deformations

The virtual worlds of Computer Graphics are populated by geometric objects, called models. Researchers have addressed the problem of synthesizing models automatically. Traditional modeling approaches often require a user to guide the synthesis process and to look after the geometry being synthesized, but user attention is expensive, and reducing user interaction is therefore desirable. I present a scheme for the automatic creation of geometry by deforming surfaces. My scheme includes a novel surface representation; it is an explicit representation consisting of points and edges, but it is not a traditional polygonal mesh. The novel surface representation is paired with a resampling policy to control the surface density and its evolution during deformation. The surface deforms with velocities assigned to its points through a set of deformation operators. Deformation operators avoid the manual computation and assignment of velocities, the operators allow a user to interactively assign velocities with minimal effort. Additionally, Petri nets are used to automatically deform a surface by mimicking a user assigning deformation operators. Furthermore, I present an algorithm to translate from the novel surface representations to a polygonal mesh. I demonstrate the utility of my model generation scheme with a gallery of models created automatically. The scheme's surface representation and resampling policy enables a surface to deform without requiring a user to control the deformation; self-intersections and hole creation are automatically prevented. The generated models show that my scheme is well suited to create organic-like models, whose surfaces have smooth transitions between surface features, but can also produce other kinds of models. My scheme allows a user to automatically generate varied instances of richly detailed models with minimal user interaction

Automatic sizing functions for unstructured surface mesh generation

Accurate sizing functions are crucial for efficient generation of high-quality meshes, but to define the sizing function is often the bottleneck in complicated mesh generation tasks because of the tedious user interaction involved. We present a novel algorithm to automatically create high-quality sizing functions for surface mesh generation. First, the tessellation of a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model is taken as the background mesh, in which an initial sizing function is defined by considering geometrical factors and user-specified parameters. Then, a convex nonlinear programming problem is formulated and solved efficiently to obtain a smoothed sizing function that corresponds to a mesh satisfying necessary gradient constraint conditions and containing a significantly reduced element number. Finally, this sizing function is applied in an advancing front mesher. With the aid of a walk-through algorithm, an efficient sizing-value query scheme is developed. Meshing experiments of some very complicated geometry models are presented to demonstrate that the proposed sizing-function approach enables accurate and fully automatic surface mesh generation

Formal Verification of Probabilistic SystemC Models with Statistical Model Checking

Transaction-level modeling with SystemC has been very successful in describing the behavior of embedded systems by providing high-level executable models, in which many of them have inherent probabilistic behaviors, e.g., random data and unreliable components. It thus is crucial to have both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the probabilities of system properties. Such analysis can be conducted by constructing a formal model of the system under verification and using Probabilistic Model Checking (PMC). However, this method is infeasible for large systems, due to the state space explosion. In this article, we demonstrate the successful use of Statistical Model Checking (SMC) to carry out such analysis directly from large SystemC models and allow designers to express a wide range of useful properties. The first contribution of this work is a framework to verify properties expressed in Bounded Linear Temporal Logic (BLTL) for SystemC models with both timed and probabilistic characteristics. Second, the framework allows users to expose a rich set of user-code primitives as atomic propositions in BLTL. Moreover, users can define their own fine-grained time resolution rather than the boundary of clock cycles in the SystemC simulation. The third contribution is an implementation of a statistical model checker. It contains an automatic monitor generation for producing execution traces of the model-under-verification (MUV), the mechanism for automatically instrumenting the MUV, and the interaction with statistical model checking algorithms.Comment: Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. Wiley, 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1507.0818