To assist with promotion of departmental projects and activities, CGT has recently unvelied the CGT Showcase, a Web-driven application designed to allow students and faculty members to showcase their learning discovery and engagement projects.

Click here to visit the CGT Showcase Application...

Developed by recent graduate Kurt Luther under the supervision of faculty members Ron Glotzbach, Kellen Maicher, and Nate Hartman, the CGT Showcase provides an alternative venue for those wishing to learn more about various departmental projects. Faculty members can upload descriptions, images, URL's, and various other media elements to highlight the features of their research projects.

The Showcase was unveiled at the annual SIGGRAPH in Boston in June, and was met very positively in it's first few days of existance.Currently the Showcase is in it's trial phase, with subsequent testing taking place over the coming months. As input is gathered from faculty, students, alumni, and industry partners, the CGT Showcase will add new features in a progressive manner.

Recent progress in data structures for computer graphics shows increasing interest of subdivision surfaces and adaptive meshes in general. One of the interesting problems is description of the subdivision surfaces and meshes by means of formal methods such as vv-programming language, or the stellar grammars. These techniques are promising for description of “living” structures such as biological tissues, or plants. An attempt to describe tensor product surfaces as the rewriting process by means of L-systems was presented as the result of the collaborative work of the University of West Bohemia in Czech Republic and Dr. Benes at the conference the Spring Conference of Computer Graphics (http://www.sccg.sk/main_frames_php.html).

One of the vibrant areas of computer graphics is the simulation of fluids dynamics. Running water and turbulent gases are becoming standard in computer animation, although they animation is time consuming and is not easy to define. Another interesting area of computer graphics is simulation and modeling of aging and weathering. Dr. Benes, together with his colleagues in the Czech Republic and St. Luis University, has published in the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds original paper about simulation of hydraulic erosion by means of fluid dynamics. Click here for more

Ronald J. Glotzbach, working with an interdisciplinary team headed by David McKinnis, Director of the Technical Assistance Program, has been developing a dynamic and interactive presentation mechanism for metrics in a given geographic space.

Professor Glotzbach’s team has used a combination of web technologies to graphically interact with and display health departments, districts, and their related metrics. The application saves a history of maps, allows viewing and hiding of various data, dynamically generates a JPG image of the current page, and prints to PDF format. Click here for more...

Granular material manipulation has been in focus of computer graphics society for a long time, but the recent progress in the graphics hardware has allowed its real-time simulation. Small-scale sand manipulation is possible, but one of the aspects that have not been captured so far is the haptic feedback. Click here for more...

Knowing the importance of real projects students the course Digital Lighting and Rendering CGT 340 were encouraged by Dr. Benes to participate in the EPIC project for the Lafayette Imagination Station. Margret de Dios has created animation of the simulator of the wind tunnel that will be used on its web-page and on the booth in the Imagination Station. The work was conducted together with the Department of Educational Technology under supervision of Alejandra Magana.