More info
Much of what appears in this site is explained in this book. There's all kinds of new stuff in the third edition--it's up to 687 pages now!
The production is much improved in the third edition and there's color throughout, not just in a color insert.
What should cyberspace look like when we can actually build realistic, immersive environments? Here's a short invited paper I delivered on the topicat the CGI 99 conference. It now appears as the final chapter in our book, above.
Surf's up!
Manuel Gamito visited us from Portugal for a year in 1998/99. He worked on ray-domain distortion variations on QAEB tracing to render connected non-height field surfaces.
The next thing to do was to animate it. And so he did.
Manuel has since developed a complex and accurate model of shallow-water wave propagation to give this wave model a raison d'etre.
Some genetic images
Some genetic programming done while at MetaCreations...
A brief project description
Sang Yoon Lee and I did cloud models with improved realism in both geometry and illumination.
A technical sketch submitted to SIGGRAPH 98.
A technical sketch submitted to SIGGRAPH 97.
Sonya Shannon, of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and I submitted a technical sketch on the methods painters use to convey depth in their renderings. What's interesting is that painters have used these four perspectives for hundreds of years, yet we generally use at most two of them in computer graphics.
"Emil"
Springer-Verlag asked me to provide an image for the cover of the book "Beyond Computation" commissioned by the ACM for the 50th Anniversary of the invention of the electronic computer. Such an honor! I figured that such an image should represent the absolute state of the art in all of my capabilities.
The image above was my first cut at this challenge. It represents about two day's work as shown. It includes some of the items mentioned below: QAEB-traced mountains, GIT texturecoloring, and the Milky Way texture background.
It was requested that the image for the book cover include a horizon, so my next cut involved both of the novel elements in the above two images. This image features two QAEB-traced primitives, with different near and far clipping planes, in the same image. Accomplishing that required programming some new capabilities into my ray tracer. This image then represents a clear case of art driving technology in the development of my renderer. That, in fact, is pretty much how all of my modeling and rendering capabilities were developed: in service of some artistic visual goal. This image simply illustrates that process very clearly.
The full title of this image is "Parabolic Curves in the Plane of the Ecliptic." The plane of the ecliptic is the plane in which the orbits of planets in a solar system lie. Just as the planets' orbits all lie in prety much the same plane, for a given solar system its ecliptic plane is likely to lie nearly in the same plane its host spiral galaxy. Thus the alignment of the planets and the milky way is not simply a visual trick; it is an idealized conception of a possible solar system.
In several ways this was the most sophisticated of my images to date: It features rendering with adaptive level of detail via QAEB tracing, geometrically correct reflections off the water also via QAEB tracing, the complex procedural Earth and Moon models "Gaea" and "Selene," a spherical planetary atmosphere in the foreground and another around Gaea, a GIT texture on the mountains, and multifractal models in the mountains, Gaea and the milky way texture. The visual composition is also complex: there are parabolic V-curves in the mountains and Coriolis-twisted clouds of Gaea, and a similar exponential curve in distance from the near foreground up to the horizon, then to Gaea, to Selene, and finally to the galactic background--the most complicated deliberate composition I'd ever executed.
A moontrail on the water.
To quote Ian Hunter, "I've been wanting to do this for years."
It's far more easily said than done, as it requires geometry
(as opposed to a bump map)
all the way out to the horizon.
This is the image that was chosen for the cover.
A bunch of snapshots taken during the week we were snowed in at home in the big blizzard on 1996 (which wasn't all that big -- two or three feet of snow -- but enough to paralyze Virginia!)
In the January issue of Scientific American, pages 36 and 37, there was a short article about my planet building. This is the project that eventually became MojoWorld.
"Ecliptic"