Spotlight

Graphics Lab Juggling Time

By Geoff Wyvill

Monday morning, 3 am. The birds are not yet singing, the stereo plays Maxwell's Silver Hammer for the fifteenth time. It's the holidays. So why are all these students still here?

"Just one more fix and then we'll go. Right?"
"One more fix." That describes a whole lot. No matter how smart you are, computer programs virtually never work first time. design write, test edit (fix), rewrite. That's the way it's done.
"OK, it looks right...four seconds by twenty-five...100 frames...fifteen minutes each, that's twenty-five hours."
"Too long."
"So we use two machines. See you at four o'clock."

No, it's not the beginning of a science fiction novel. They're setting up an animation test in the Computer Graphics Research Group -- part of the Computer Science Department at Otago University. No-one makes them work an 80-hour week. Just now, they are living on vacation research bursaries. They could earn more cleaning or gardening. By any normal standard they're crazy, so what makes them do it?

Making animation is hard. Walt Disney used dozens of artists to draw thousands of frames. We use computers. We don't have any supercomputers. Our fastest machine cost $24,000. Elsewhere in the world, $3,000,000 is seen as an "entry" budget in this business. A four-second test may take 12 hours before it's ready to view, so 12 hours later your working day begins again.

Midday, meet some of the gang. The one with the short hair and dark beard, that's Craig McNaughton. That's right, the one juggling five balls in the corner of the yard. Juggling is not compulsory in computer graphics, but almost all of us do it. Versatile, is Craig. He had his first research paper accepted for an international conference while still an undergraduate and, in the same year, he was one of Otago's team that won the ACM Programming Contest in Washington DC. Right now he's working on a way to draw medieval castles. This is a serious project. The same software will allow us to generate other complex building models and view them from any angle and with different lighting.

Another very successful student is Andrew Trotman. He also published a paper internationally this year. Midday's a bit early for Andrew. He'll be in around three, ready to work until 3 am.

The ginger haired one in the corner quietly working at a terminal is Stuart Smith. He doesn't say much, but he's amazingly productive. Last year he developed a special project in representing transparent objects. We will be able to use this work to model compound lenses and predict their behaviour. These holidays, he's developed a thing called a volume renderer which enables us to make pictures of clouds of dust, amongst other things.

Ann Whitbrock is also sitting at a computer. She has a background in fine art and dance, and has been working on ways to describe human motion to make the animation task easier. This vacation she's working on a project for the biochemistry department, making pictures of large molecules. I don't think she knew any biochemistry when she started, but you have to learn fast in this place.

Derek Rendall is another quiet one. You know those moiré patterns, swirls of squares that appear when you put one layer of silk or fine netting over another? Well you can get a similar effect in a computer generated picture when a pattern interferes with the thousands of dots that make up the picture. Derek spent most of last year developing a new way to fix this problem. Now he's working on a way to reconstruct the shape of tooth roots in three dimensions from ordinary dental x- rays.

You may have noticed there's a 2-year-old child running around the lab -- the one with the chocolate-covered juggling club. That's Ben Hinch. His dad, Chris, was a student here a couple of years ago. He works for the city council now, but somehow we never quite lost him. He's been working on a design for a simulator for training air traffic controllers. Ben has been adopted as the group's official mascot. So if you can't work with a child pulling at your ears, you're probably in the wrong place.

In some ways, this is not the best time to see the Graphics Lab. It may seem a little crowded, but last year we had six undergraduate students in the team too, and a visitor from the US. It was quite a year. Papers were presented at three major conferences, and we had visits from five international experts who wanted to meet the group. We seem to be better known in England, Japan and the US than here in Dunedin. Funny that.

Another thing you don't see in this laboratory is the high quality animation production and recording. This is done in the Animation Research Unit downtown in the TVNZ studios. Two former students, Paul Sharp and Nigel Caughey, now work full time there. They made, among other things, the title sequences for Telethon and One Playhouse.

Our cooperation with TVNZ has been enormously productive and it's very difficult to see how anything like it could have worked anywhere else. So many people in Dunedin have helped to set this project up, and mostly with nothing to gain but the satisfaction of having been a part of it.

Several people have asked me recently, "How do you coordinate such a group of very talented people?" The amazing answer is, I don't. If I started telling people what to do, the magic would quickly fade away. Occasionally I make suggestions, but mostly everyone does just what they want to. Maybe that's why they're here at 3 am.

Geoff Wyvill is a Senior Lecturer at Otago University and Research Director of the Animation Research Unit