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CG Class 18, Thu 2019-10-24

Source

1   My research

  1. RPI article about a completed project that I was part of:

    A Game-Changing Approach: Using the X-Box Kinect as a Sensor to Conduct Centrifuge Research. Team of Rensselaer Researchers Develop New Visualization Method to Evaluate Erosion Quantity and Pattern, November 8, 2016, by Jessica Otitigbe.

  2. Where I was last week:

    28th International Meshing Roundtable .

    I presented a paper Accelerating the exact evaluation of geometric predicates with GPUs, that was work by my Brazilian colleagues, Marcelo de Matos Menezes, Salles Viana Gomes Magalhães, Matheus Aguilar de Oliveira, and Rodrigo E. O. Bauer Chichorro at the Federal University of Vicosa.

    Talk slides.

    Paper.

  3. Much info is on my web site.

  4. Perhaps my most interesting problem is adapting my data structures and local geometry algorithms to GPUs, to intersect two 3D meshes.

2   Term project proposals

  1. See the syllabus.

  2. The proposal will be homework 6.

  3. Submit on LMS.

  4. If you want to remotely use a current GPU, parallel.ecse is available.

    It has a dual 14-core Xeon, 256GB DRAM, and Nvidia RTX 8000 and Pascal GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs.

3   Research paper for ECSE-6964

  1. If you are registered for the grad version of this class, then in addition to the term project, you must also write a research paper; see the syllabus.
  2. Simultaneously with the term project progress reports, please submit research paper progress reports.

4   Textures

Today's big new idea.

  1. Textures started as a way to paint images onto polygons to simulate surface details. They add per-pixel surface details without raising the geometric complexity of a scene.
  2. That morphed into a general array data format with fast I/O.
  3. If you read a texture with indices that are fractions, the hardware interpolates a value, using one of several algorithms. This is called sampling. E.g., reading T[1.1,2] returns something like .9*T[1,2]+.1*T[2,2].
  4. Textures involve many coordinate systems:
    1. (x,y,z,w) - world.
    2. (u,v) - parameters on one polygon
    3. (s,t) - location in a texture.
  5. Aliasing is also important.