A Butterfly Takes Flight at UCSD Computer Graphics Competition
By Daniel Kane, dbkane@ucsd.edu
San Diego, CA, June 9, 2007 -- A pink and black butterfly and its reflections within drops of water has edged out an intentionally bad photograph (too much flash) of a kitchen: Welcome to the Spring 2007 edition of UC San Diego’s “rendering algorithms” graphics contest. In place of paints and brushes or cameras, computer science students in the Jacobs School of Engineering created realistic, 3D graphics by leveraging number-crunching algorithms with the art and science of computer programming under deadline pressure.
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The class, “CSE 168: Rendering Algorithms” is taught by Henrik Wann Jensen, UCSD’s Academy Award winning computer scientist, well known for his contributions to photo-realistic, computer-generated humans in the movies. Jensen is an academic paritcipant in Calit2 at UCSD, and the judges included Calit2 staff researcher Jurgen Schulze, Per Christensen from Pixar, and Wojciech Jarosz, the course teaching assistant.
Iman Sadeghi, a first-year Ph.D. student in the computer science and engineering department of the Jacobs School, won the grand prize for his efforts to render a colorful snapshot of the natural world with algorithms.
The runner-up First Prize went to Toshiya Hachisuka, who portrayed the suburban kitchen with what the judges considered "the most technical content", i.e., the most complicated algorithms and techniques from the field of computer graphics.
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Each contestant had 4 minutes to describe how his or her realistic image was rendered using software that each student developed as part of the class.
“I’m very impressed. You all definitely learned a lot in this class,” said Jensen after the presentations, while the three judges deliberated.
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The grand prize: admission to SIGGRAPH 2007, the premier computer graphics and interactive techniques conference.
To see other recipients of Honorable Mentions in the competition, click here .