Siggraph 2011 – Day 3

One of todays` highlights at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver was the approach of Prof. Deussen`s group in Konstanz and their partners at the universities in Shenzhen and Tel Aviv to use so-called “texture-lobes” for tree modelling from Lidar data. For more information, see http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/publikationen/2011/texturelobesfortreemodeling/website/

Texture-Lobes for Tree Modelling from Soeren Pirk on Vimeo.

The afternoon was dedicated to urban modeling, starting with a review of the latest literature by Peter Wonka (Arizona State University) and Daniel Aliaga (Purdue University). During the second part of the session, Pascal Mueller from Procedural/ESRI (CityEngine) presented issues encountered in practice and their new Urban Vision project together with the urban planning department of San Francisco and Urban Sim (Paul Waddell). The session closed with a visually very engaging case study by Michael Frederickson from Pixar, using CityEngine for virtual London in Cars 2.

Siggraph 2009

Currently, SIGGRAPH 2009 takes place and many visualization companies show their latest product versions. Autodesk focussed mainly on Maya, no news from LandXplorer here. However, they are currently working on a complete re-programming of the promising geobrowser, so that might still take a while.

Always interesting for landscape visualization is E-on’s software Vue (see the previous post on Vue 7) which will be released as Vue 8 until the end of the year. The new version will support 3D terrain modelling and even more advanced atmospheric models for haze and clouds. The image shows a recent test rendering in Cinema 11 with trees, wave and atmosphere model from the Vue 7 plugin for Cinema.

Schroth 2009
Schroth 2009