[Ieee_vis_open_positions] Ph.D. and Master's positions in Computer Graphics

[Eric Paquette]

Dear colleagues,

Feel free to forward this announcement to students and colleagues.

Regards,
Eric Paquette

We are looking for candidates knowledgeable in computer graphics and 
interested to join the Multimedia Lab team at ÉTS in Montreal Canada to 
work on computer graphics projects under the supervision of Prof. Eric 
Paquette (http://profs.etsmtl.ca/epaquette/). While ÉTS is a French 
speaking engineering school, all of the courses and the thesis can be 
done in English. Montréal is quite bilingual and someone who knows 
English and very basic French can do all of their day-to-day activities 
without any problem.

Interested candidates should send their resume and transcripts to Prof. 
Eric Paquette (eric.paquette at etsmtl.net)

*Mesh matching and skeleton retargeting and creation research project*
In computer graphics, character creation and animation remain difficult 
because humanoid characters are expected to have a high level of realism 
in their appearance and animation. Autodesk Pinocchio (formerly Evolver) 
lets users create humanoid characters by mixing polygon meshes from 49 
ready-made "ancestor characters". The created character is also provided 
with animation setups (blend shapes and skeleton), making it easy to 
animate the created character. Compared to other tools where specific 
attributes such as tall/short and thin/heavy are adjusted, Pinocchio 
proposes a creative workflow where the user defines the shape of the 
character by selecting the ancestors that will influence it. A 
limitation of current character creation tools, including Pinocchio, is 
that the basis of character shapes that they work from is limited. It 
makes it difficult to create a wide range of characters such as aliens, 
werewolves, witches, etc. The purpose of this project is to allow the 
user to propose his own "artistic signature" polygon mesh, and create 
similar characters, with the ease of ancestor mixing found in Pinocchio. 
Even character accessories, such as clothes and bags, will be 
transferred to the created character. In order to achieve such an 
interactive character design system, scientific problems need to be 
solved. First, deformation and shape matching methods need to be 
improved in order to provide more robust mesh matching and deformation, 
faster computation times as well as proper deformation of accessories. 
Furthermore, creating high-quality animation controls for such a wide 
range of characters will require the development of tighter integration 
between skeleton and blend shape animation setups, novel approaches for 
ancestor animation setups transfer to the created character, and 
automatic generation of animation setups for the accessories.

The ideal student has a master's degree in computer graphics, knows 
about character animation, meshing, rigging or blend shapes. He is also 
a capable C++ programmer and knows either OpenGL or Direct3D APIs. The 
ideal time frame would be for the candidate to start his Ph.D. at ÉTS in 
September 2013 or January 2014. Funding is available for two Ph.D. 
students to work on this project. The research will be conducted in 
collaboration with Autodesk.

*Liquid simulation for visual effects projet*
Research on fluid simulation is ongoing at the Multimedia Lab of ÉTS, 
currently focusing on SPH liquid simulation. Fluid simulation requires 
lengthy computation times and should allow some artistic control. 
Parallel computation approaches are promising for reducing the 
computation times. Examples of such approaches include the works of 
Zhang et al. [Y Zhang, B Solenthaler, et R Pajarola. August 2008. « 
Adaptive Sampling and Rendering of Fluids on the GPU ». In Proceedings 
Symposium on Point-Based Graphics. p. 137--146.] and those of Hérault et 
al. [Alexis He?rault, Giuseppe Bilotta, et Robert A. Dalrymple. 2010. « 
SPH on GPU with CUDA ». Journal of Hydraulic Research, vol. 48, n ? 
sup1, p. 74--79.]. With respect to artistic control, the simulation 
should allow artists to force the liquid to achieve some key poses such 
as what can be done for gases [Michael B. Nielsen, Brian B. Christensen, 
Nafees Bin Zafar, Doug Roble, and Ken Museth. 2009. Guiding of smoke 
animations through variational coupling of simulations at different 
resolutions. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics 
Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA '09), pp 217-226.]. It should also 
allow the artists to efficiently texture the surface of the fluid. The 
paper by Bojsen-Hansen et al. [Morten Bojsen-Hansen, Hao Li, and Chris 
Wojtan. 2012. Tracking surfaces with evolving topology. ACM Trans. 
Graph. 31, 4, Article 53 (July 2012)] is an example of work that tries 
to address the problem of texturing the surface of liquids.

Master's and Ph.D. candidates are welcome to apply to work on this 
project. The ideal candidate has relevant experience in computer 
graphics, knows about numerical simulation as well as fluid simulation. 
He is also a capable C++ programmer and knows either OpenGL or Direct3D 
APIs. The ideal time frame would be for the candidate to start his 
thesis at ÉTS in September 2013 or January 2014. Funding is available 
for students to work on this project. The research will be conducted in 
collaboration with the Mokko Studio visual effects studio.



-- 
http://profs.etsmtl.ca/epaquette/
eric.paquette at etsmtl.net
Prof. Eric Paquette, Ph.D., ing. jr.
Directeur de la maîtrise en TI
Département de génie logiciel et des TI
École de technologie supérieure
1100, rue Notre-Dame Ouest, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 1K3
Tel. : +1 (514) 396-8587 Fax : (514) 396-8405
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