Computer animation has emerged as an important area of computer science, generating billions of dollars in the film and video game industries and captivating audiences around the world.  Physical simulation is an important tool for computer animation because of its ability to generate extremely realistic behaviors of complicated, high degree-of-freedom systems.  Simulation of liquids, explosions, and fracture have been used extensively for generating special effects.  In this talk, I will present a semi-Lagrangian contouring method for tracking liquid surfaces in fluid simulations.  Our method takes the unusual approach of representing the liquid surface explicitly with a polygonal mesh.  However, our approach updates the surface in time through an implicit representation, thereby avoiding topological issues.  We then extract a new polygonal mesh from this implicit representation.  Our technique generates nice looking, very detailed, and temporally coherent surfaces suitable for high-quality computer animation.  I will also briefly discuss our methods for simulating the behavior of viscoelastic liquids and elastoplastic solids, such as clay, gels, and mucus.

Bio....
Adam W. Bargteil is a graduating Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.  His primary research interests are in computer graphics and animation. Adam's thesis work focuses on the problem of tracking liquid surfaces in fluid simulations.  A paper describing a portion of this work appeared in the January 2006 issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.  Adam has also co-authored two SIGGRAPH papers: modeling ductile fracture and on modeling viscoelastic fluids. Animated shorts showcasing both of these projects as well as the surface tracking method have appeared in the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater.  He received dual BS degrees in mathematics and computer science (magna cum laude) from the University of Maryland in 2000.  Adam was a U.C. Microelectronics Fellow in 2000 and is currently a Siebel Scholar.  For the last year, he has been consulting at PDI/DreamWorks, developing fluid simulation tools for a production environment.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Wu & Chen Auditorium

101 Levine Hall

3:00pm - 4:15 pm