Colloquium - Choi

Over the past decades, a great stride has been made in the computer graphics making a tremendous impact on motion picture and gaming industry. As the visual quality of photorealistic imagery improves, attention shifts to other aspects increase the feeling of reality, particularly for the behavioral realism in animation and simulation. Due to the recent advancement of computer graphics hardware and software, simulating the natural phenomena that is typically prohibitively expensive to process in real-time has become a viable alternative to the key frame based animations. This talk presents techniques in computer graphics to model and simulate various deformable objects such as volumetric human tissue model, thin shell cloth, fluid, and molecular dynamic simulation. Two major issues pose a significant challenge. First, the conflicting demand between computational efficiency and visual realism directs us to take trade-offs or to sacrifice one for the other. Second, identifying the factors that contribute the visual realism, not the overall accuracy of the simulation, is often very difficult. While some very inaccurate and physically non-conforming scenes may look perfectly natural, some animations based on a rigorously tested numerical simulation look significantly abnormal. This talk addresses techniques to reduce overall computational load while preserving important visual realism by using domain decomposition, level of detail, and adaptive simulation. Although the presented simulations are not strictly accurate, they capture the essential visual, temporal, and an object's behavioral characteristics in animation. In addition, the controllability issues will be presented to accommodate a director's intension (even if it's physically non-conforming) into animation and to generate compelling surrealistic animation. Practical aspects, implementation, and future directions on collaborative research will also be discussed.