Description: We present a particle system that runs almost exclusively on graphics hardware in order to create an interactive visualization of time-varying vector field data, such as wind speed data of hurricanes. Small sets of the particles are bound together with spring constraints, creating deformable elements that tumble as they move, demonstrating vorticity within a given field. The application runs in XNA game studio, and is able to simulate a large number of custom, elastic elements at real-time rates. It has not been run on the Xbox 360, since it requires access to large repositories of data.

Jonathan Decker "System of Bound Particles for Interactive Flow Visualization", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, 2007.

Description: We present a method for generating expressive stencils from arbitrary 3D models. Users provide input geometry and can interactively adjust desired view, line thicknesses, and lighting to achieve their final desired stencil. Stencil connections are then automatically chosen in a few seconds in a manner which will cause the least amount of destruction to the image while satisfying physical connectivity constraints. The final stencils can be used digitally or physically fabricated for personal or business use.

Bronson, J., Rheingans, P. and Olano, M. 2008. Semi-automatic stencil creation through error minimization. In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (Annecy, France, June 9 - 11, 2008). NPAR 2008.

Description: We propose the Haptic Shading Framework (HSF), a framework for procedurally defining haptic texture. HSF haptic texture shaders are short procedures allowing an application-programmer to easily define interesting haptic surface interaction and the parameters that control the surface properties. HSF can be used in an existing haptic application with few modifications.

Shopf, J. and Olano, M. 2006. Procedural haptic texture. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Montreux, Switzerland, October 15 - 18, 2006). UIST '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 179-186.

Description: We propose a method for the modeling and interactive rendering of heterogeneous translucent objects such as marble. More specifically, object surface materials that exhibit small surface structures, translucency and volumetric texture variations. Objects using our method are modeled as a heterogeneous outer layer, constructed by tiling a volumetric base volume across the surface, and a homogeneous core.

Jermey Shopf. "Interactive Rendering of Heterogeneous Translucent Objects", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, December 2006.

Description: We propose several optimization techniques which could be used to render shadowed illumination from hundreds of point lights using a commodity GPU. This allows for interactive rendering of soft shadows by point sampling an area light, and also allows for approximate indirect illumination using Instant Radiosity.

Joshua Barczak. "Interactive Illumination Using Large Sets of Point Lights", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, January 2006.

Description: New techniques inspired from the illustration literature were used to convey change over time more effectively in time-varying data. Speedlines, Flow ribbons, Strobe silhouettes and opacity-based techniques were shown to effectively convey change over time

Alark Joshi and Penny Rheingans, Illustration-inspired techniques for visualizing time-varying data, Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2005.

Description: We model a piece of wood as a texture map that reflects the properties of wood. A mold growth sequence is applied to the texture map to create the look of mold on wood. The technique for creating the mold growth is dependent on time and builds upon the surface of the wood model.

Aimee Joshua. "Modeling and Rendering of Mold on Cut Wood", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, May 2005.

Description: We have built a true hybrid real-time rendering system. The traditional polygon rendering pipeline is used for triangle patch rendering. A point-based rendering pipeline applying splatting techniques is used for point patch rendering. A hardware implementation of anisotropic elliptical weighted average (EWA) filtering is provided for the point-based rendering pipeline, utilizing graphics hardware, to achieve interactive frame rate.

Hanli Ni "Hybrid 3D-Model Representation Through Quadric Metrics and Hardware Accelerated Point-Based Rendering", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, May 2005.

Description: Our system conveys the tangible, non-visual properties of a surface by applying common pen-and-ink techniques that expose them. It also allows an object with one property to be transformed into another property using dynamic pen-and-ink techniques. Hard to soft and heavy to light were implemented.

Simone' Thomas. "Morphing Materials: Capturing Tangible Material Properties in Pen-and-Ink Style Rendering", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, 2005.

Description: We designed and implemented a framework to use both CPU and GPU to do real-time cloth simulation. The cloth mesh is organized hierarchically. Coarse mesh simulation is done on the CPU and fine cloth simulation is done on the GPU. The GPU algorithm integrated a surface subdivision method with an image-space collision detection method. Collision is detected and corrected during cloth surface subdivision process.

Yi Wang. "GPU Based Cloth Simulation on Moving Avatars", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, 2005.

Description: We propose a new algorithm for rendering refractive caustics from water at interactive framerates. The new algorithm is based on previous techniques using illumination volumes, but is more efficient, and able to render shadows in the caustics for more realistic images (note the hole in the caustics in the diving board image to the left). Shadows are implemented by detecting and culling light volumes from occluded areas of the water surface, which not only improves the realism of the image, but can also speed up the rendering.

Description: We present a method for automatic simplification of complex procedural shaders designed for use on graphics hardware. The resulting LOD shaders automatically adjust their level of shading detail for interactive rendering. We presented a general strategy for shader simplification, a specific example for reducing texture accesses, and a system that provides a shader compiler and shader simplification to an application.

Marc Olano, Bob Kuehne and Maryann Simmons. "Automatic Shader Level of Detail". Proceedings of Graphics Hardware 2003, Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH, July 2003.10

Description: We propose methods to refine implicit surfaces iteratively using fewer constraints. Initially a small set of constraints are taken to generate an approximate implicit surface. Later, constraints are added to the existing model based on the error, the region of interest specified by the user, the iter-contraint distance and the surface curvature of the model.

Namita Parab "Refining Implicit Models", M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, 2003.