Keynote Lecture at SPM05
Making Green Goop from Polygon Soup
James F. O'Brien
Abstract
Applications ranging from commercial
entertainment to surgical training demand efficient methods for
realistically modeling the appearance of physical phenomena in
synthetic environments. In this talk, I will describe methods we
have developed for simulating the behavior of a wide class of materials
known as viscoelastic fluids and elastoplastic solids. These
materials span a huge range of material properties including examples
such as mucus, liquid soap, pudding, toothpaste, clay, wax, plastic,
and steel. They exhibit a combination of both fluid and solid
characteristics. Like a solid they can resist strain elastically,
but under large or sustained strains they flow like a fluid. I'll
talk about methods for modeling materials both at the predominantly
fluid-like and predominantly solid-like ends of the spectrum.
I will also briefly describe other simulation techniques for modeling
phenomena such as explosions, fracture, real-time deformation, and even
sound. One issue that arises recurrently is that all of these
simulation techniques require clean geometric descriptions of the
objects and environments they model. Unfortunately, most modeling
techniques do not produce such clean descriptions. Even when
clean models are available they often contain inappropriate amounts of
detail. To address these issues I will show how highly detailed
implicit surfaces can be built from defective input models using
moving-least-squares interpolation techniques.
Speaker
Biography
James O'Brien is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the
University of California, Berkeley. His primary area of interest
is Computer Animation, with an emphasis on generating realistic motion
using physically based simulation and motion capture techniques.
He has authored several papers on these topics, including ten presented
at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference and his work has been featured multiple
times in the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. He received his
doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000, the same
year he joined the Faculty at U.C. Berkeley. Professor O'Brien is
a Sloan Fellow, Technology Review selected him as one of their TR-100
for 2004, and he was recently awarded research grants from the Okawa
and Hellman Foundations.