Meh. This trip is making me feel old. Each day I feel more and more exhausted. This morning I woke up in plenty time to get to the 8:30 session, but I just didn't feel like going...and slept for another hour-and-a-half instead. After getting to the convention center, I took a long lunch and a walk down Figueroa Street. El Pollo Loco is the only fast food restaurant I have ever been to that had horchatta. Too bad it was horrible horchatta.
The painting and sketching session was great. It is the only session that I have attended that I think keithp or cworth would have enjoyed. Both "Diffusion Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth-Shaded Images" and "Real-Time Gradient-Domain Painting" seemed right up cworth's alley. I think the presenter of the second paper, Jim McCann, may be a long-lost cousin of anholt. Their sample application is also available on-line.
"Feedback Control of Cumuliform Cloud Formation Based on Computational Fluid Dynamics" wasn't exactly what I was expecting. (What's the deal with crazy-long names of papers?!?) The presented algorithm was able to generate plausible clouds constrained to a 2D contour. The problem that I had with it was that the sequence of cloud generation was not plausible. I don't think that was a goal of their algorithm, but it does seem like a useful feature. Anyway...I don't want to bash their work because it was good work.
"Shading-Based Surface Editing" presented a really interesting tool. Basically, the artist paints shading (darker areas) on a lit 3D model. The algorithm then rotates surfaces under the stroke to match the shading. The presenter pointed out that this tool is really useful for artists that are already familiar with shading in 2D drawing. He mentioned in passing that it could be useful to teach shading. I think that particular point should be explored further. I can envision a sort of feed-back based expert system to teach shading.
The first half of the last session wasn't too interesting to me...and I didn't pay that much attention.
"Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture" did catch my interest. Though, it wasn't so much with the topic of the paper. I hadn't realized that grammar based generation of geometry had gotten so sophisticated. It has come a long way since Logo! (heh...maybe I am as old as this trip is making me feel).
I'm such a trooper! I stayed for "Interactive Procedural Street Modeling"...the last technical paper of SIGGRAPH 2008. The idea is really simple, but it produces very effective results. The user draws some guiding structures on the blank map. A tensor field is generated from those guiding structures. The user can edit that tensor field by adding noise, creating or moving guiding structures, etc. Once the user is satisfied, streets are generated at semi-random positions within the tensor field.
It was cool to see a paper about designing procedural buildings immediately followed by a paper about designing procedural cities...where those buildings might be.
I'll probably do an update about the poster sessions after I get back. A couple of them were really cool, so they deserve some comment.