Beyond Blobs:
Recent Advances in Implicit Surfaces

ACM SIGGRAPH 2003

Course 13

Contents

This is a directory for the supplemental materials for the ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Course Beyond Blobs: Recent Advances in Implicit Surfaces . Some materials were prepared for the SIGGRAPH2003 course notes. Additional information and any materials added after production of the electronic and printed documents can be found in the current online repository for the course at http://visual.nlm.nih.gov/tutorials/sig2003

Abstract

Several recent advances allow implicit surfaces to be used effectively to model real world objects. To demonstrate this, we show how radial basis functions can model various body parts, level sets can morph darts into fighter jets, curvature can tie-dye bunnies, and convolution can animate objects. Some people think that implicit surfaces are rubbery, but we will show that they are a solid foundation upon which to build modeling, animation and visualization tools. This course presents these techniques in a full day of valuable detailed talks, including application demonstrations, implementation details and well-documented source code for implementing these techniques.

Supplemental Course Materials

Speaker Information

Speaker Biosketches

Jules Bloomenthal received an MSc in Computer Graphics from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary. He has conducted research at the NY Institute of Technology and at Xerox PARC. He edited Introduction to Implicit Surfaces, and has written on related topics, including uniform and adaptive polygonization, polygonization of non-manifolds, convolution of skeletons, bulge elimination in implicit blends, volume/surface blends, definition of branching structures, and interactive design and display techniques. He co-chaired the 1995 Workshop on Implicit Surfaces, and has organized and lectured at several previous SIGGRAPH courses. Today he is president of Unchained Geometry.

H. Quynh Dinh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in modeling in computer graphics with emphasis on modeling shape metamorphosis, and computer vision techniques for shape reconstruction. She has co-authored several papers on reconstructing implicit surfaces from data generated by space carving. Quynh received her B.S. from the George Washington University in 1994, and her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002.

John C. Hart is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 1993 he received an NSF award to explore implicit surfaces, and got hooked. He co-chaired the 1996 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Implicit Surfaces, and has organized/lectured in previous SIGGRAPH courses, including several on implicit surfaces. Hart is co-author of Real-Time Shading and a contributing author of Modeling and Texturing: A Procedural Approach, 3rd edition. Hart is the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics. He served five years on the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and was an executive producer of the documentary "The Story of Computer Graphics."

Greg Turk is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is also a member of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU). His research is primarily in the areas of computer graphics modeling and rendering. Greg has authored or co-authored numerous SIGGRAPH papers on topics including reaction diffusion textures, surface simplification, zippered polygonal meshes, and implicit surfaces. Greg received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill in 1992. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and then a research scientist at UNC Chapel Hill.

Ross Whitaker is currently an associate professor at the University of Utah, Department of Computer Science. His research interests include: computer vision, image processing, medical imaging, and computer graphics/visualization. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics from Princeton University in 1986 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. Previously he has been a research scientist in the User Interaction and Visualization Group at the European Computer-Industry Research Centre in Munich, Germany and an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Tennessee.

Terry S. Yoo is a Computer Scientist in the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, National Library of Medicine, NIH, where he explores the processing and visualizing of 3D medical data, interactive 3D graphics, and computational geometry. Previously as a professor of Radiology, he managed a research program in Interventional MRI with the University of Mississippi. Terry holds an A.B. in Biology from Harvard, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill.