Abstract

Today’s computer graphics techniques can create many kinds of visual effect and can simulate light transport with high fidelity. The real challenge, now, is how to create, edit, store, render, and transmit the associated mass of data efficiently. For example, in the movie “Avatar”, around one billion surfaces needed to be rendered in an average frame. I discuss the modelling problem, using the example of realistic plants and landscapes. I describe methods that divide the models into visually important aspects and procedural detail. Such representations are efficient, compact, easy to modify, and allow interaction with the environment. They are thus especially well-suited for today’s computer graphics applications.

Prof. Oliver Deussen graduated from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,  Germany in 1996 and was appointed as a professor for Computer Graphics and Media Design by Dresden University of Technology in 2000. Since 2003 he has been Professor for Computer Graphics and Media Informatics at Konstanz University. He is Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Eurographics Association and Editor-in-Chief of Computer Graphics Forum, the largest journal for Computer Graphics. His research interests are non-photorealistic rendering, information visualization, and the modeling and rendering of complex objects, in particular botanic objects and landscapes.