Research Project

My project deals with non-photorealistic rendering. The goal is to make a real-time immersive walk-through of an area using a style similar to that found in architectural renderings. The Olympic Village was chosen as the area of focus for this project. Previous work occured during the summer of 2000, when students created models of the buildings in the Olympic Village.

One of my main tasks is to create animations of people, plants, and objects and place them into the scene. This is a concept known as entourage. It is used to give the buildings a sense of scale as well as purpose; ie. what is this building used for? what kind of people would you typically find here? Some of the challenges involved in this endeavor are keeping things to scale and ensuring that the people complement the buildings instead of overshadowing them. There is also a possibility of putting snow into the scene, which will present challenges of its own.

My other main task in working on this project is to investigate the problem of importing the animations from Poser, a character animation software, into World Tool Kit (WTK), a development environment for real-time 3D graphics applications. This work is important for not only the Olympic Village project but also the Mayan Temple project, which another DMP participant is working on.

Below are some examples of what I have been working on over the course of the summer. Click on the links below each image to see a larger or different version of the image or to see an animation. Depending on how your browser is set up, you might have to click on the animation once it is finished downloading in order to make it play. Also, the animations are intended to loop, but they may not depending on your setup.

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