When: Friday, July 16, 3:30 p.m.

Where: 1305 Newell-Simon Hall

Michael Garland, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Robitics Graphics Group Seminar

Abstract:
Traditional modeling tools are often cumbersome for non-expert users. They are typically designed to give very precise, detailed control over shape and appearance to the user. However, this often results in steep learning curves, and simple tasks where precision is of less consequence can be unnecessarily difficult to accomplish.

In this talk I will discuss some of our work on developing novice-friendly modeling tools. Our general approach to this problem is to support "modeling by example". The intent is that the user should provide a simple example of the desired editing operation and that this example should then be automatically applied to the entire surface.

I will focus primarily on a powerful new technique for similarity-based editing of surfaces. This allows a user to operate on a single point -- operations may include geometric deformation, painting, etc. -- and this operation will be automatically applied to all "similar" points. At the heart of this method is a new framework for local surface analysis based on fans of geodesic curves. I will also discuss an algorithm for automatically texturing a surface from an example image at interactive rates, and show some examples of sketch-based deformation of surfaces.

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