@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

topher_batty

@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org

Associate Professor in CS at University of Waterloo doing computer graphics and computational physics. I also manage https://physicsbasedanimation.com and maintain a list of graphics researchers on Mastodon: https://christopherbatty.github.io/Mastodon-Graphics-Academics/

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demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Does anyone know of any code laying around the net that distributes points on a mesh in a blue noise distribution?
A student intern i work with is looking for this. It's tempting to write it, but im also kinda swamped :X

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox https://www.alecjacobson.com/weblog/4111.html maybe?

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

LF individual with last name of Mann to co author a paper and help invent the Wolfe Mann algorithm :)

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox you could try my colleague Steve Mann.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox no, not that one, this one: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/

flexghost, to random
@flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

In 2020 we has to defeat the far-right

In 2024 we also need to defeat the far-left.

Vote.

🇺🇸

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@flexghost I dunno, you could try winning their votes.

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

graphics research lifehack: you can cut out a ton of paywall scams and inscrutable academic wankery by excluding "we present" from your searches

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@aeva seems like an unnecessarily mean-spirited dunk on academics, yeesh, but regardless, I don't quite get it -- how does appending "we present" achieve your (I presume) goal of avoiding academic writing? there's no shortage of verbose and inscrutable papers that start off that way.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@julian @aeva tangentially, this reminds me that last week on a whim I pushed a chunk of one of my papers through an LLM asking it to rephrase it in the style of a gamedev blogger (and then also in the style of James Joyce, and of a historic European explorer). Amusing results, but also not a particularly effective solution!

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@aeva publishing failures is an idea not without merits, but realistically if the only thing you change is (somehow) removing the incentive to publish mostly things that work well / better, many of the other issues you mentioned would be worsened. The space of "stuff that was a wrong/foolish/flawed idea" is quite large, making it even easier to flood the literature with half-assed, poorly written, unnecessary papers to dig through. Careful what you wish for.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

The first of the two SIGGRAPH North America 2024 papers I'm on is "Reach for the Arcs: Reconstructing Surfaces
from SDFs via Tangent Points" https://odedstein.com/projects/reach-for-the-arcs/

Building on our SIG Asia "Reach for the Spheres" idea, we interpret discrete signed distance field data as a collection of spheres, to which the unknown surface must lie tangent at (at least) one point. We further observe that only the "arcs" of spheres not covered by other spheres can host valid closest/tangent points.

j_bertolotti, to random
@j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz avatar

People studying brains: "We found no correlation between number of neurons and IQ."*

People talking about AI: "If we just add more nodes to our deep neural network we are surely going to create a super-mind!"

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@j_bertolotti for this to be evidence of something, doesn't it assume that NNs are equivalent to physical neurons? Is that really true?

nervous_jesse, to random
@nervous_jesse@mathstodon.xyz avatar

There's a lot of obfuscation in scientific papers, especially when it comes to mathematification. A good one is when there is an algorithm with a magic number in it, so they just call it a "variable," and then they're like in all our examples we set this variable to SOME_VALUE. This is because arbitrary numbers are considered bad practice, but if it's a variable we've tuned then it was a scientific process.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@nervous_jesse I mean, probably better to acknowledge it's an empirically chosen parameter value that seems to work, than to claim it's the one true perfect magic number that shall not be questioned. But yeah, it's still magic numbers at the end of the day.

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