Radiosity And Raytracing

Radiosity is a rendering technology that simulates in a realistic manner the way that light interacts in an environment.

There are certain benefits when using radiosity lighting over standard lighting, one of these is the improved image quality, for example, 3DS Max’s radiosity technology can produce more accurate photometric simulations of the lighting within scenes, when using radiosity effects such s indirect light, soft shadows, and colour bleeding between surfaces will produce images with a much more realistic and natural finish, this standard of image is simply not achievable with standard scan-line rendering. Images using radiosity technology will give a more predictable example of what your finished design will look like when using specific lighting effects.
The main benefits of radiosity being that it will render lighting ina much more sophisticated, complex and realistic way as show below, but a significant disadvantage of using radiosity is that it will also take a much longer time to render than that of a standard lighting render.

Photometrics are used to specify light entensity, examples of the units used are lumens and candelas.

There are two kinds of illumination, global illumination and local illumination, the differences between the way these two render algrithms are as follows:

Local: Light sources shine directly on Object

Global: Lights from objects shining on other objects, ambient illumination

An algorithm is a formula/set of steps for solving a specific problem, an algorithm must be unambiguous and have a distinct stopping point, an algorithm can be expressed in any language, be it a natural language such as English or a programming language such as FORTRAN.

The two kinds of global illumination algorithms that are used in 3DS Max are radiosity and raytracing. Ray tracing works by recognising that although there may be billions of protons traveling in a room that the most important of these photons are the ones that enter the eye. The ray tracing algorith then works by tracing rays backwards from all the individual pixels on the screen into the 2d model, this way we compute only the information needed to construct the image.

Below is an example of some basic ray tracing:

3D Production Pipeline – Games

http://games.ign.com/articles/696/696273p1.html

This is a step by step production pipeline on making a game, Ralph Edwards gives you his first hand experience in the field, including examples on Concept and Pre-Production, here is an extract from the Concept section:

Phase 1: Concept The genesis of all games that you see available on store shelves at your local Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Toys R Us or Electronics Boutique is a simple concept or idea. If it’s an original concept, it’s typically derived from a source within the company, albeit there are times that ideas from individuals outside the company will be used.

In either case, the original concept is just a simple idea for what the game can be about. For instance, a simple game concept could be to make a futuristic 3D street racing game with hovercrafts with a setting akin to the current import tuner street racing scene of today’s world. It can also be something as simple as making an action/adventure game where you’re controlling a ninja. The game’s conception can also start as simply wanting to make a follow-up or sequel to an existing title, a game based on an existing non-gaming characters, stories or franchises – from other mediums such as television, comic books, board games, movies, folklore, or history – or a game that’s meant to simulate some real world experience, such as the case with sports, flight, or driving simulations. In these cases, the genesis of the game’s development can simply be the company deciding that it wants to make a game that simulates the real-life sport of professional baseball or one that’s based on the television series The Sopranos.

Era’s of CGI…

I have been looking into where the character (Fred I Parke) I am researching into for CGI fits into in the timeline of CGI, whether he was a pioneer, an innovator, an early adapter or a follower. Below is a list of things from Parke’s own section on the Texas AM university that lead me to believe he was an innovator…
As Parke was greatly involved in the creation of the first CG physically modeled human face, this leads me to beleive he is a innovator of the CGI world, as he brought in an idea that people had probably already thought of, but he was the first one to go out there and do it.

Below are some pictures of his early CGI face model work, the one on the left is the finished final model that made him an innovator.

 

    

• Parke, F. I. (1974) A parametric model for human faces, Tech. Report UTEC-CSc-75-047 Salt Lake City: University of Utah
• Parke, F. I. (1975) A model for human faces that allows speech synchronized animation. Journal of Computers and Graphics, 1(1), 1-4.
• Parke, F. I. (1982) Parameterized models for facial animation, IEEE Computer Graphics, 2(9), 61-68.
• Parke, F. I. (1991) Control Parameterization for facial animation, in N. M. Thalmann and D. Thalmann (Eds.) Computer Animation ‘91 Tokyo: Springer-Verlag.
• Lewis, J. P. & Parke, F. I. (1987) Automated lipsynch and speech synthesis for character animation. Proceedings CHI+CG ‘87, Toronto, 143-147.
• Parke, F. I. & Waters, K. (1994) Computer Facial Animation, AK Peters. ISBN 1-56881-014-8.

Cartesian Co-ordinate System

I have been learning about the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in 3DS Max, It is the system that 3D software packages use to create the illusion of working in a three-dimensional space. The man who created the Cartesian co-ordinate system was French mathematician Rene Descartes, he did so in 1637, he did this whilst trying to merge algebra and Euclidean geometry. The two axes that define the 2-dimensional Cartesian system are the horizontal axis (x) and the vertical axis (y), these axes form the xy plane. The point where these two axes meet is known as the point of origin (o), the origin represents the centre of the coordinate universe.

To locate a point on the xy plane relative to the origin, we must first give the x axis a value followed by the y axis in the form of (x, y). To locate a point that has a value of 5 on the x axis and a value of 6 on the y axis, we would write this as such: (5, 6), as seen in the diagram. The origin (o) will always be known as (0, 0).

Later on in the early 19^th century the third dimension of measurement was added, this was (z), also known as the depth axis, this axis enables us to locate any point in three dimensional space. The way of locating a point in 3d space is not dissimilar to the example above in the xy plane.So if we were to try and locate a point in 3d space that is 59 units along the negative x axis, 100 unites along the positive y axis and finally 50 units along the negative z axis, we would display it as the following (-59, 100, -50) as seen in the diagram below.

The purpose of the viewports is to present us with multiple views of the coordinate system at the same time, the top, front, and left views in the viewports are known as orthographic views

 

  

Production Pipeline – Shrek

 http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/opencms/inside/how_we_make_movies/intro/story.html  

This site shows various stages from pre-production to post production within Dreamworks based films, such as Shrek and Over the Hedge.
These include storyboarding stages, layout stages, lighting stages and rendering…

 

Production Pipeline – Games

 http://games.ign.com/articles/696/696273p1.html 

This is a step by step production pipeline on making a game, Ralph Edwards gives you his first hand experience in the field, including examples on Concept and Pre-Production, here is an extract from the Concept section: 

Phase 1: Concept The genesis of all games that you see available on store shelves at your local Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Toys R Us or Electronics Boutique is a simple concept or idea. If it’s an original concept, it’s typically derived from a source within the company, albeit there are times that ideas from individuals outside the company will be used.

In either case, the original concept is just a simple idea for what the game can be about. For instance, a simple game concept could be to make a futuristic 3D street racing game with hovercrafts with a setting akin to the current import tuner street racing scene of today’s world. It can also be something as simple as making an action/adventure game where you’re controlling a ninja. The game’s conception can also start as simply wanting to make a follow-up or sequel to an existing title, a game based on an existing non-gaming characters, stories or franchises – from other mediums such as television, comic books, board games, movies, folklore, or history – or a game that’s meant to simulate some real world experience, such as the case with sports, flight, or driving simulations. In these cases, the genesis of the game’s development can simply be the company deciding that it wants to make a game that simulates the real-life sport of professional baseball or one that’s based on the television series The Sopranos.

Production Pipeline Shark

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3683
On this site I found lots of homebrewed examples of 3D character models that could be used in films or games, I particularly liked one example of a shark, I am going to show a few of the steps used in the creation of this model…

3D Production Pipeline LOR

This is the average time taken to completely finish a small 3d animation, I used LOR creator Andy Murdock as an example: Target Audience
Research
Copyright
Concept Art
Competition
Research anatomy
Finance
Storyboard – Comic Books, Voice over (6 months)DurationScript
Character ModellingChoreographerLayout – Design – Composition (4 weeks)
Physics – Characters
Forces- Momentum (4 weeks)
Textures – UV Wrapping, Painters – Programmers
Special FX Scene
Lighting (8 weeks)
Sound

Fred I Parke

Research into why Fred I Parke is important in the field of 3d CG

http://www-viz.tamu.edu/faculty/parke/

On this page I found a self written biography of Fred I Parke, naming all things past and present about him including an online vita where you can view all his past projects.
He is currently the Program Coordinator for the graduate program in Visualization sciences at Texas A&M in the College of Architecture.
He is important to the field of 3d CG for the reason that he is the creator of the first CG physically modeled human face.