Research Statement

Research Statement

Adam Bargteil

While exploding trucks and collapsing buildings are rare occurrences in everyday life,they are frequently depicted infilms,video games,and training simulations.Filming such effects in the real world can be dangerous and obtaining a specific outcome is often difficult.Consequently, such effects are increasingly generated through physical simulations where initial conditions and parameters can be tuned to produce the desired effect.My research has focused on developing tools that allow artists to create high-quality,realistic,visually-detailed animations of complex materials for applications in computer graphics.

One thrust of my research focuses on the behavior of materials in the real world and results in new material models and accompanying methods for computing their behavior.For example,I have developed a sophisticated model of plasticflow and simulation methods for animating materials, such as clay and toothpaste,that demonstrate both elastic and plastic deformation.My research also seeks to develop high-quality representations of the visual detail of simulated materials.For example,I have developed methods for high-resolution tracking and temporally coherent texturing of moving liquid surfaces.Visual details such as these are essential for creating compelling visual experiences or the illusion of reality sought in most computer animations.

New simulation techniques and better material models also have value outside of computer graphics, of course,as simulation has been an important part of computational science forfifty years.It has allowed engineers to determine whether a bridge would collapse or an airplane wouldfly,facilitating new designs,saving many dollars and potentially many lives.Although my work to date has primarily focused on computer graphics applications,I plan to work on simulations with medical and engineering applications such as the movement of muscles and other elements of the human body and the failure of non-homogeneous materials during an earthquake orfire.

What sets physical simulation for computer graphics apart from simulation in medicine and engi-neering is that in computer graphics we focus on achieving visualfidelity and physical plausibility, rather than on high physicalfidelity and predictivity.In the past,these differing requirements have meant that computer graphics techniques tended to be more heuristic or approximate than would be acceptable in engineering applications and most of the information transfer between the two fields has gone from engineering and applied math to computer graphics rather than the reverse. Now,however,there are many engineering applications that have stringent requirements for visual fidelity making techniques developed in computer graphics essential.For example,the realistic

Figure1:A visual summary of my research.From left to right:animating elastoplastic solids, animating large viscoplasticflow,animating viscoelasticfluids,animating liquid surfaces,and ani-mating textured liquids.