Lovely digital creatures on display at Research Expo April 16

A relative of this cute digital white rabbit will be part of one of the many posters on display April 16 at Research Expo at the Price Center. The picture is a--very rough--draft for the work of computer science Ph.D. student Chiwei Tseng, who works with Professors Ravi Ramamoorthi and Henrik W. Jensen. The work also is part of the Jacobs School's new Center for Visual Computing.
Here's the abstract for Tseng's poster, which is titled "A generic light scattering model for rendering photorealistic animal fur fibers:"

Rendering photorealistic animal fur is of practical importance in many computer graphics productions. In the past, the visual appearances of specific fiber types have been studied, and various light scattering models derived from cylindrical geometry have been proposed. These models, however, lack either physical accuracy or versatility to produce the wide range of specular and diffusive material properties observed on animal fur fibers in the wild. We propose an anatomically based light scattering model for arbitrary animal fur fibers, represented by two coaxial cylinder volumes. We show that our model preserves high fidelity to actual animal fur and can simulate a large array of visual appearances by qualitatively matching synthetic optical microscopy images and far-field scattering profiles with measured data. Through reconstructing the light paths for formerly unexplainable scattering lobes observed on 10 animal fur fiber types, we reveal how the subsurface structures of a fur fiber can bring about decisive effects to its visual appearance.

More info about Research Expo at: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Jacobs School Research Helped Bring Gollum to the Silver Screen

Are you going to see The Desolation of Smaug? (Or have you seen it already?) Well, that eerie, blueish glow on Gollum's skin is courtesy of algorithms developed by Jacobs School Prof. Henrik Wann Jensen. (Jensen did the work while a research associate at Stanford). Jensen's research earned him an Academy Award back in 2004.
Joe Letteri, the co-creator of the character and an Oscar winner, explains in a Nature article:

Digital characters also have to appear realistic in their surroundings, whether that is a photographed environment or a complete digital creation such as the jungles of Pandora. So we looked to understand how light and materials interact in nature. One of the best examples of this interaction is subsurface scattering. We first developed a technique to replicate this mechanism of light transport to create the translucency of Gollum's skin, leveraging pioneering research by computer-graphics specialist Henrik Wann Jensen and his colleagues at Stanford University in California (see go.nature.com/lyzuh2). The thick skin of a dinosaur can be simulated by bouncing light off the exterior. But human skin is softer and more translucent, so light enters and bounces around dozens of times before exiting. These properties, which are easily observed by putting your hand in front of a bright light, are crucial to a realistic portrayal.

Alumni from Jensen's lab here at the Jacobs School have gone on to work for Google, Disney and other animation companies.

 A list of some ground-breaking projects below:

Computer Simulations Shed Light on the Physics of Rainbows

Nice Threads! Computer scientists develop new model to simulate cloth on a computer with unprecedented accuracy

It's all about the hair

Render smoke without being a computation hog

Computer graphics spills from milk to medicine