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June 10, 2005
"These projects are entertaining and exciting, but they're also a form of informal science education and a way to make state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge science accessible to everyone," said Donna Cox, director of NCSA's Visualization and Experimental Technology Division and chair of the Emerging Technologies exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2005.
The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival has been called "the Academy Awards of computer graphics." The annual conference and exhibition spotlights cutting-edge graphics and interactive technology and features the best in computer graphics from Hollywood, industry, academia, and independent artists.
The SIGGRAPH 2005 Electronic Theater will feature NCSA's visualization of an F3 tornado within a simulated supercell thunderstorm. University of Illinois atmospheric scientists, led by NCSA chief science officer Robert Willhelmson, first used NCSA's high-performance computers to simulate the birth of a tornado. The initial data for the simulation was based on the actual environmental conditions that produced an F4 tornado that devastated South Dakota with winds in excess of 200 mph. In the simulation, these conditions produced a severe F3 tornado capable of uprooting trees, ripping the roofs from homes, and overturning trains.
The calculations generated 1 terabyte of data, which NCSA's visualization team translated into a dynamic, high-definition animated visualization of the tornado's birth and growth.
Visualization team members collaborating on the piece were Alex Betts, Cox, Matthew Hall, Stuart Levy, and Robert Patterson. Levy created the trajectory data that was used to locate the tornado with a swirling mass of spheres and the streamtubes that represent the geometry of the airflow. Hall generated the isosurfaces representing the body of the thunderstorm, as well as the cones at the ground plane that show wind speed and direction. Betts created a software plug-in for the animation authoring package called Maya, which enabled the reading of the HDF data, trajectories, and geometric isosurfaces. Patterson then used Maya and the NCSA data plug-in to integrate all of the pieces. He was responsible for choreographing the final scene, which included both volume and geometric rendering.
Recently Levy enabled a system for rendering images for a variety of planetarium dome configurations, which involves rendering numerous camera views and blending them into a hemispherical dome image.
Also shown during the Computer Animation Festival will be a selection of the world's best full-dome animations from DomeFest 2005, including three animations produced at NCSA. The DomeFest animations will be screened daily on a 9-meter digital dome assembled especially for SIGGRAPH 2005.
DomeFest is the only festival in the world dedicated to dome-work, incorporating video, animation, art, and technology in a fully immersive experience. Pieces of four minutes or less were chosen by a world-class jury for inclusion in the festival, which will kick off July 15 at the LodeStar Astronomy Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and will then travel to national and international screenings.
NCSA's contributions to DomeFest are:
(Digg, Technorati, more)
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