Thoughts on GFX
AGI had a great presence at SIGGRAPH this year.
You can check out a few of our videos presented at the Dailies on YouTube:
The Fate of the Apollo 13 Crew
Might Have Been Much Different Than Originally Thought
US Airways Flight 1549:
Hudson River Crash Animation With Flight Data
Satellite Collision Visualization:
Technically Accurate Depictions of Debris Breakup and Evolution
If you've read any of my previous posts about SIGGRAPH (2008, 2009), it's pretty obvious that it is my favorite conference of the year (except, of course, for our user's conference). This year, SIGGRAPH is particularly exciting because AGIers are presenting in three different areas:
SIGGRAPH Dallies! is new to SIGGRAPH this year. It is an hour and a half of 60-90 second videos with live commentary from the presenter - a format similar to the popular Technical Papers Fast Forward session. If my numbers are correct, AGI is presenting 4 of the 38 videos, second to only Pixar and Disney, and tied with Texas A&M University. I'm happy to see that the SIGGRAPH community is so interested in our videos.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Our team has learned a lot while developing Insight3D and the 3D capabilities in STK. Designing a 3D engine that meets the precision and performance requirements for these types of applications is challenging, to say the least. It takes a carefully designed engine to do things like visualize immense amounts of imagery and terrain, and precisely render a massive world.
Deron and I realized that not much has been written about this type of 3D engine, at least not all in the same place, so we decided to start writing a book on the topic: Virtual Globe and Terrain Rendering. This isn't a book on Insight3D or STK specifically but rather a best practices guide for designing and implementing 3D engines for virtual globes, GIS, simulations, etc - all things we've learned by working on Insight3D and STK. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, check out the book's blog as we continue to work on the manuscript and example code.
I should mention that our book is not directly affiliated with AGI. Although, since AGI is such an awesome employer, they are very encouraging about our book project and allowed us to mention it on this blog.
We've just released AGI Components 2010 r4. New Insight3D features include the cylinder triangulator, which computes cylinders for visualization with the solid primitive.
Download r4 from ADN.
The first AGI Components release for 2010 is now available on ADN. This release includes the solid primitive: a new primitive for visualizing solids such as ellipsoids and boxes, as shown below.
A new overview, available in our online help, explains how to use the solid primitive, including using visual cues such as the white silhouette edge and removal of back facing lines shown above. The polyline and point batch primitive now have an optional outline with a unique size, color, and translucency. This small feature adds a nice visual cue:
Download AGI Components 2010 r1 from ADN and give these new features a try.
Over at the Dynamic Geometry Library Blog, Ted Driver explains how to use Insight3D and other AGI Components in Matlab.
You may have heard in the news that NASA’s LCROSS satellite has reached the Moon. The satellite’s mission is to map the Moon’s surface for future manned missions and to determine if water in the form of ice exists in a crater at the Moon’s south pole.
STK, software that we work on, was used amongst others to help plan the mission. STK was streamed live on June 23, 2009 to visualize the lunar swingby in 3D in real-time. A recording of the swingby is here under the section titled “Lunar swingby coverage animation”.
Telemetry, for example the satellite’s orientation, was sent in real-time from the satellite to the Earth and into STK; based on that telemetry, the satellite was oriented and displayed in 3D. The satellite, the satellite orbit, the two camera sensor beams, the Moon, vectors, textual information, and more were all displayed together in one 3D window.
While we are excited that we just officially released Insight3D, this is also very exciting for us. By the way, Insight3D is based on the same 3D engine used in STK and uses AGI’s Dynamic Geometry Library for astrodynamics, which is also based on STK’s. The use of STK for NASA’s mission underscores the quality and accuracy of the 3D visualization that you can expect from Insight3D.
We wish NASA continuing success in this mission.
We’re excited to announce the release Insight3D. Visit Insight3D.com for product information, and then please give it a try. You can download it here.
Chances are that you won’t read the documentation first, so I recommend that you open …\Program Files\AGI\AGI Components 2009\r3\Examples\Insight3D\ Examples.sln; then, build and run our How To example pictured below.
This example demonstrates many of our features. In the left window is a tree of those features. When you check a feature’s box, it is displayed in the 3D window, and the its code is displayed in the bottom window. This a quick way to familiarize yourself with Insight3D.
Believe it or not, the first post to this blog was made one year ago today. A lot has happened to our product, our team, and our blog since then. For starters, we released an alpha version of Insight3D and four significant updates to it. If you haven't had a chance to try it yet, contact Tom Urie at Insight3D@agi.com. Point Break was renamed to Insight3D. We still have a soft spot for Point Break, as do many of our users.
Two of our team members finished school, one bachelors and the other a masters, while another member started graduate school. A few of us made it to SIGGRAPH, which has fueled all sorts of ideas going into Insight3D.
Besides informing Insight3D users of what's new and exciting, we used this blog to make technical contributes to the field of computer graphics, and in particular, real-time rendering. The blog's statistics show that both types of posts receive a good amount of attention with the more popular being the technical content, which makes sense since our alpha user base isn't huge. The most important technical contribution of the past year was probably Deron's post: Precisions, Precisions. The posts on text rendering and picking have also attracted some interest.
Although it's worthwhile to review the past year, I think its even more important to consider this coming year. The offical version of Insight3D will be released, including .NET interfaces that make it easy to use with DGL. This will include all sorts of features that we've barely mentioned, like an overlays system that can be used to render translucent user interfaces on top of your 3D scene. We plan to continue to contribute significant technical content to the blog. You can expect details on the new lines on terrain algorithm (or at least a link to the paper if we formally publish the algorithm). You'll probably hear more than you can imagine on out-of-core rendering, since that was the topic of my thesis. If enough people ask, I will describe the rendering engine behind primitives, which like all modern scene management systems, is now shader-based, and utilizes hierarchical culling and state sorting. Finally, you've only heard from half our team so you should expect some fresh content from new authors.
You are currently browsing the AGI Graphics Team Blog weblog archives for the General category.
