Meeting Agenda

April 28, 1999

Location:

DC1304

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Celine Latulipe

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:

Celine Latulipe

Coffee hour next week:

Anyone?

3. Next meeting

Date:

Wednesday, May 5, 1999

Location:

DC1304

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Marryat Ma (May 5)

Technical presentation:

Josée Lajoie (May 5) 

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

1. Mike McCool ( May 12 ) 
2. Viet-Tam Luu ( May 19 ) 
3. Liddy Olds (May 26)

Tech Presenters:

1. Celine Latulipe  (May 12) 
2. Marryat Ma (May 19)
3. Mike McCool ( May 26 ) 

5. Technical Presentation

Presenter:

Rick Knowles 

Title:

Matching the technical and conceptual sides of digital artwork

Abstract:

One of the hopes of the Computer Animation program is to bring together the technical and conceptual sides of digital artwork. By introducing one to the other we can hopefully achieve a better understanding and thus better programs to serve those wishing to use the computer as an artistic tool. I will be discussing my current research paper based on an article by Simon Penny entitled "The virtualization of Art Practice". A copy of this article ca be found off my web site at "http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~rdknowle/Virtualisation.html"

6. General Discussion Items

• PC Labmember accounts going... get any stuff you need off of the PC labmember account
• Evil demon Mark has been banished by Tim
• Anything else?

7. Action List

• Cables (Bill, Blair)
• Alias/Side Effects talks (Mike)

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

Master's Thesis Presentation
Computer Science
Wednesday, 28 April 1999 at 3:30PM
DC 1304

Folding Orthogonal Polyhedra
Julie Sun

Folding polyhedra is an interest among geometry enthusiasts and children alike.
Not only for whatever underlying mathematical discoveries they may reveal, but
also for the sheer fun and beauty of folding polyhedra. In fact, there are many
books written on constructing models of polyhedra with cardboard and glue.

In this presentation we examine foldings of a particular class of polyhedra,
namely orthogonal polyhedra - those whose edges and faces lie parallel to the
three axes. We give an algorithm to determine the following question,

"Given an orthogonal polygonal cutout with directed fold lines shown, does the
polygon fold into an orthogonal polyhedron?"

Next, we prove that the same problem with undirected fold lines is NP-complete.

The last part of the presentation raises some questions about the process of
folding a polygon once it has been determined that it does indeed fold into a
polyhedron. Examples are given of some polyhedra that cannot be folded with
stiff material such as sheet metal though they can be folded out of paper.

Institute for Computer Research Seminar
Friday, April 30, 1999 at 1:30 p.m.
DC 1304

Realistic, Hardware-accelerated Shading and Lighting
Dr. Wolfgang Heidrich, PhD
Max Planck Institute for Computer Science
Saarbruecken, Germany

With fast 3D graphics becoming more and more available even on low end
platforms, the focus in hardware-accelerated rendering is beginning to shift
towards high er quality rendering and additional functionality instead of
simply higher performance implementations based on the traditional graphics
pipeline. In this talk I present techniques for realistic shading and lighting
using computer graphics hardware. In particular, I discuss multipass methods
for high quality local illumination using physically-based reflection models,
as well as techniques for the interactive visualization of non-diffuse global
illumination solutions. These results are then combined with normal mapping
for increasing the visual complexity of rendered images. Although the presented
techniques work at interactive frame rates on contemporary graphics hardware, I
also discuss some modifications of the rendering pipeline that help to further
improve both performance and quality of the proposed methods.

Monday, May 10, 1999
Master's Thesis Presentation

``Generalizing Database Access Methods''
Ming Zhou, CS Graduate Student, U. of Waterloo
10:30 a.m.; DC1331

Artificial Intelligence Seminar
``Searching the Web: It's Worse Than You Thought!"
Lee Giles, NEC Research Institute
2:00 p.m.; DC1304

10. Lab Cleanup