Can artists become programmers? Can programmers become artists? So does seem to think Don Marinelli, one of the founders of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Centre and yesterday's keynote speaker here at Siggraph. "There is no such thing as left-brained and right-brained people" he told the audience. "If I open up your skulls, we are going to find two hemispheres in everybody's brain". Don insisted a lot on the importance of inter-diciplinarity in the field of computer graphics. And it seems to be a trend this year at the conference (probably not unrelated to the fact that Siggraph seems to be going through a crisis and is trying to broaden its scope - more on that in a later post).
In any case, if programmer and artist can't live in a single person, they will have to keep working together for a while. Today's technical paper session on "Expressive rendering & Illustrations" brings another proof of that fact.
The first of these, entitled Programmable motion effects, is inspired by the work of James E. Cutting on the depiction of motion in static images in art, science and popular culture. The framework presented allows one to program the trace created on a rendered image by the motion of a 3D object. The following video shows some results optained:
It is interesting to note that once again, a technical paper has its roots in previous work in the field of human visual perception. This is a trend.
The second paper, called "Programmable rendering of Line Drawing from 3D scenes", presents a framework that allows to programatically describe the style and placement of lines used to render the contours of a 3D model. Even though I'm not a big fan of line drawing depiction of 3D scenes, I must admit that images from this paper are more promising than what I have seen so far. If no artistic value, this kind of technique could at least be used to improve the readability of technical illustrations.
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