From: yuri@atr-sw.atr.co.jp (A.Tijerino) Subject: Re: INFO: Metaballs? Date: 01 Jul 1993 01:44:04 GMT Organization: ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories, Kyoto In article <20rgv0$b80@news.u.washington.edu> wright@sunny.dab.ge.com (Michael Wright) writes: |From: wright@sunny.dab.ge.com (Michael Wright) |Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds |Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 19:34:14 GMT |Organization: Martin Marietta SAS, Daytona Beach, FL | |I recently saw a magazine article on METABALLS. It was the way some of |the animation of Jurastic Park was done. Does anyone remember what |Magazine that was in (I do remember that it was an engineering type |journal)? If you have the info, could you forward it to me? Michael, the article that you saw, I believe, is on the May 1993 issue of Computer Graphics World. The title is "The Magic of Metalballs" and was written by Gaye L. Graves. The technology was invented by Koichi Ohmura in 1982 at Osaka University (this is where I got my Ph.D. from). The article mentions that about the same time Jim Blinn was working on a similar idea which he called "blobby molecules". The concept of Metaballs is very simple and powerfull for rendering humans and animals. The article gives a very nice overview of how they work. At first metaballs were extremely difficult to specify and edit until Eiji Takaoka, also from Osaka University, invented the MetaEditor in 1986. Afterwards he founded Meta Corp in 1988 and has been marketing its products as well as making comercials for television. I recently attended one lecture from Eiji Takaoka, BTW his bacground was on sculpturing and not CS, at CGOsaka'93. He spent most of the time talking about his background on Art and not on CG, so I thought that he was wasting my time and the +-$300 my company paid for me attending to the lecture. Then, about half way he started showing videos of the commercials developed with metaballs and the talk started to become more and more interesting. He then showed simulations of different types of metaballs and how nice they blend together with each other creating curved surfaces *VERY* smoothly. He then showed how you can conbine 43 metaballs and create a smooth depiction of a female human torso, even on closeups. The talk got even more interesting at the end when he showed how he was creating an anatomical library of the human body. The library included not only the outer parts, but also bones and organs, all created with metaballs. The main benefit of using metaballs seems to be that it creates very smooth curved surfaces, specially usufull for models of humans and animals. However, in Eiji Takaoka's talk he mentioned that at the moment it was very difficult to texture the models. He said that this was the reason why most models created of humans in the Japanese comercials were either gold, silver or liquid. I don't know how he textured the organs and bones in the human body or if he did at all. I would be particularly interested on finding out how they textured the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I haven't seen the movie but will be the first on line whe it premiers here in Japan on July 17th. For those of you who have seen it were the animals textured or just colored and shaded? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Yuri A. Tijerino PhD | ATR Communication Systems | Research Laboratories | _ __ _ 2-2 Hikaridai, Seikacho, | \ | ) Sorakugun, Kyoto 619-02 Japan | _ \ | / Tel: +81-7749-5-1264 (Direct) | / \ | \ Fax: +81-7749-5-1208 | E-mail: yuri@atr-sw.atr.co.jp | ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++