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Behind the Scenes
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NEXT TIME YOUR CHILD ASKS why he or she must learn some seemingly irrelevant mathematical concept or scientific principle, take them out to a movie featuring animated special effects.
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Behind the enchanting entertainment of the big screen is a lot of advanced math and science. Take the animations of a melting wax rabbit or the morphing of a cow into a horse created by Associate Professor of Computing Greg Turk and his collaborators.
Computing Ph.D. student Mark Carlson, Professor of Mathematics Peter Mucka and Turk are creating realistic animations of objects changing from solid to liquid. Mucka is contributing his expertise in computational fluid dynamics to the computer scientists' knowledge of graphics. Researchers simplify Navier Stokes equations to get the quicker, not-as-precise calculations they need for animated special effects for entertainment and educational applications.
In another project, Turk is exploring a technique called texture synthesis. It allows the user to take a small photo of some pattern such as wood grain and synthesize it across a larger area. Turk adapted other researchers' two-dimensional texture synthesis techniques to create texture on three-dimensional surfaces, such as a computer model of an elephant. Turk's technique allows the user to place textures on a surface in a controlled way like a special effects animator would do.
"This is a hot area in computer graphics right now," Turk says. ".... If someone is producing a graphical representation of a model of a dinosaur for say 'Jurassic Park 5,' they need to know how to take a small image of a pattern and replicate it across the model."
Texture synthesis would automate the slow and painstaking process of hand-painting patterns on the surface of an object, which moviemakers do for now. Automation should make it easier to compare different variations to get just the right look, Turk adds.
This work, funded by the National Science Foundation, grew out of a GVU Center-funded modeling project led by recent Ph.D. graduate Quynh Dinh in collaboration with Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tony Yezzi. Researchers animated the morphing of one object into another, such as a sphere to a doughnut, one sphere to two globes and a cow into a horse. The research – with applications in special effects and medical visualization – focused on techniques to transfer the 3D coloration of an object as it morphed.
"If through some process, you created a morph between a doughnut and a cow, how could you take the spots on the cow and pull them over to the doughnut?" Turk says. "We were solving partial differential equations to do this. The morph is a four-dimensional object where time is the
For more information, contact Greg Turk at 404-894-7508 or
greg.turk@cc.gatech.edu.
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Last updated: Dec.11, 2003