What a crazy 12-week session that it was this time around. I completed my second Integrated Research Component, this time in graphics. I tried to create a new technique for rendering realistic looking smoke that could work in real-time. The problem though is that using a physics basis tends to cause rendering times to be on the order of 4-5 seconds or more per frame, but real-time rendering demands 20+ frames per second. The results of my research are a system that uses OpenGL’s programmable vertex and fragment shaders to make somewhat realistic smoke.
In the coming months I’m going to actually continue the research a little and clean up the system I have defined on paper and then submit the research to SIGGRAPH ’08. SIGGRAPH is the Special Interest Group in Graphics, one of the major conferences run by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). For the 3-week I’m taking Linear Algebra. It turns out that I will be able to finish my math minor after all, because I’ve rearranged my schedule to allow me to take Linear Algebra and Statistics II. It’s not easy statistics, but calculus based statistics and probability, an upper-level math course.