Autodesk Research at SIGGRAPH 2015

If you're attending SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles, watch out for these presentations from members of Autodesk Research and say hi to the presenters!:

Kitty: Sketching Dynamic and Interactive Illustrations

Monday, 10 August 3:45 pm - 5:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 402AB

Rubaiat Habib, Fanny Chevalier, Tovi Grossman and George Fitzmaurice

Kitty will be part of the UIST Reprise and you can read more about Kitty in this blog post.

Printing Elastics

Thursday, 13 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 150/151

Session Chair: Nobuyuki Umetani

Convolutional Wasserstein Distances: Efficient Optimal Transportation on Geometric Domains

Tuesday, 11 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 152

Justin Solomon, Fernando de Goes, Gabriel Peyré, Marco Cuturi, Adrian Butscher, Andy Nguyen, Tao Du, Leonidas Guibas

This paper introduces a new class of algorithms for optimization problems involving optimal transportation over geometric domains. The main contribution is to show that optimal transportation can be made tractable over large graphics domains, such as images and triangle meshes, improving performance by orders of magnitude compared to previous work.

OmniAD: Data-Driven Omni-Directional Aerodynamics

Wednesday, 12 August 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 153A-C

Tobias Martin, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel

Introducing OmniAD, a novel data-driven pipeline to model and acquire the aerodynamics of three-dimensional rigid objects simply by capturing their falling motion using a single camera. OmniAD enables realistic real-time simulation of rigid bodies and interactively designed three-dimensional kites that actually fly.

Computational Tools for 3D Printing

Thursday, 13 August 2:00 pm - 5:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 403AB

Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel, Wojciech Matusik

This course reviews current 3D printing hardware and software pipelines, and analyzes their potential and shortcomings. Then it focuses on computational specification for fabrication methods, which allow designing or computing an object's shape and material composition from a functional description.

3D-Printed Prosthetics for the Developing World

Thursday, 13 August, 9-10:30 am,SIGGRAPH Studio

Ryan Schmidt, Ginger Coons, Vincent Chen, Timotheus Gmeiner, Matt Ratto

You can read more about this project here.

Autodesk Exhibitor Sessions

Members of your favourite Autodesk product teams will be showing off cool, new things throughout the week.

The Art of Fluid Animation

And you may see Jos Stam wearing a shirt like this - ask him about it :)

 Enjoy SIGGRAPH!

 

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Kitty is a Drawing Tool for Interaction Authoring

Hopefully you're familiar with Project Draco, our answer to the question:

Can animation be made as easy as drawing?

We've discussed Draco here on the blog and have a video overview of what we were showing at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver to catch you up.

Kitty builds on Draco and looks into the animation question and asks:

Can we make Draco interactive?

 

In the image above you'll see two interactions happening:

• the user can move the dragon's head into the frame
• the user can move the baby dragon into the pot

With the egg going into the pot, you'll notice that the monster's eyesfollow the egg and that the egg causes a particle splash as it enters the pot.

This opens up a lot of possibilities for iteractive storytelling. 

• How would children like this for an ebook on a tablet?
• Does it make web content more dynamic?
• Could it be useful for game authoring?
• Is it useful for training and instructions?

Kitty builds on Draco but how does it work?

We've introduced a simple node network to define the relationships between objects. Let's look at the picture below of a different egg going into a different pot - yes we like cooking here at Autodesk Research.

We've set up the scene as you would in Draco with steam and splashing particles coming from the pot. In the following image you can see that we have a simple node graph that gets overlaid on the picture. This helps reduce UI while keeping the events and relationships in context.

You can see the path the egg takes to get into the pot as well as two blue circles representing the particle events. The user is making a connection from the egg to the circle on the right to tell the splash to only happen when the egg is close.

When the connection is made between the nodes, the egg path and the splash, the user can then choose how to link the events. In this case the movement of the egg is connected to the emission of the particles. The inlaid square defines the timing of the event. 

The curve can be redrawn to control what happens. The horizontal axis represents the object that triggers the event (the egg). The vertical axis represents the object that is being driven (the particle splash). When the line is flat, there are no particles being emitted.

In this image below we explore using Kitty to explain how an electric doorbell works.

You can learn more about Kitty and see how easy it is to author these kinds of behaviours in the video below. More information is available on the Draco project page.

We'll be presenting this latest research at this year's UIST, the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, in Hawaii in October. If you are there, stop by to see the demo or attend the talk. 

Whether you are at UIST or not, please let us know what you think about these tools and the possibilities that they open up for you. 

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Come see Autodesk Research at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver

3D Printing Trophies for SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live!

We've done a bunch of work with 3D printing. Some of the most notable work has been the work with Meshmixer, geometry preparation and creating branching support structures so that your objects come out faster, with less waste and no drooping. In the image below, our example support structure uses 75% less plastic than the manufacturer-provided supports, which also reduces print time by one hour.

There's another nice benefit to these branching support structures - they break off your print really easily for fast finishing and clean-up. If you haven't worked with them, you should get a copy of the latest Meshmixer and try them out.  While you're at it, you can also play with some interesting tools to subtract components of your model for a more interesting statue, like we used in our example above.

Beyond researching 3D printing things, it's important to play and explore what is possible with 3D printing.

Part of the fun in 3D printing is creating something unique. Autodesk Research was fortunate to be involved in providing 3D printed awards for the Real Time Live! event at SIGGRAPH 2014. Real-Time Live! is:

An interactive extravaganza that celebrates the real-time achievements of evil geniuses, mad scientists, and creative computer gods! Real-Time Live! shows off the latest trends and techniques for pushing the boundaries of interactive visuals.

The Real-Time Live! logo looks like this:

The 2D artwork was taken into Autodesk Maya and turned into a printable 3D model.

Here are a couple photos of the awards as they came out of our Objet printer and then drying off after being cleaned with the water jet.

The finished awards look quite nice and are a goood compliment to the cool things that the Real-Time Live! participants showed this year, from video game technology, to film production to flying and helping vision impaired people see better. Like all of SIGGRAPH, it was very inspiring. Congratulations to everyone involved!

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Come see Autodesk Research at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver

The Autodesk Research team will be attending and presenting at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver.

We have the following talks scheduled:

Pteromys: Interactive Design and Optimization of Free-Formed Free-Flight Model Airplanes: Interactive techniques for designing original hand-launched free-flight glider airplanes that can actually fly. Based on a compact aerodynamics model, a design tool allows users to interactively optimize wing configuration to maximize flight-worthiness.

Tuesday, 12 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Vancouver Convention Centre, East Building, Ballroom B-C

Branching Support Structures for 3D Printing: To 3D print a complex shape, a support structure is needed. Printing this support structure wastes time and material. We minimize this waste by generating a novel branching support structure which takes into account both the geometry of the model, and the properties of the printing process.

Tuesday, 12 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Vancouver Convention Centre, West Building, Rooms 116-117 

 

 

Sensitivity-Optimized Rigging for Example-Based Real-Time Clothing Synthesis: A predict-then-blend scheme for data-driven real-time clothing animation that can produce realistic wrinkles. The prediction model is developed based on sensitivity analysis, and its implementation is as simple as rigging technique.

Wednesday, 13 August 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Vancouver Convention Centre, East Building, Ballroom B-C

Position-Based Elastic Rods: Efficiently simulate complex bending and twisting of elastic rods using position-based dynamics. Our formulation is highly efficient, capable of simulating hundreds of strands in real-time.

Wednesday, 13 August 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM | Vancouver Convention Centre, West Building, Rooms 109-110

Get your hands on Draco, our project exploring animation for illustration! 

We'll be showing Draco as a SIGGRAPH Studio Project. Come by the Studio Sunday through Thursday to see it live and even try it for yourself. Draco allows users to sketch objects and their motions using familiar digital illustration techniques. Motion created with Draco enriches the picture and allows for new possibilities in storytelling.  

Maya, 3ds Max and General Media & Entertainment Industry Discussions

Our colleagues in the Media & Entertainment group will be showing off 3ds Max and Maya. Along with that they'll be discussing industry trends in Design, Film and Games and the trends they see. For educators, there will be a breakfast to meet and discuss these things and more. You can get the full details and register on the Autodesk Area SIGGRAPH 2014 event page.

Whatever you're interest, please say hello!

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