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July 14, 2006
Rendering terrain in time-varying conditions
We've recently completed a camera control system for capturing images of Squaw Peak, in Provo, Utah, throughout the day and pairing the resulting images with weather information. Our goal is to develop efficient methods for rendering the terrain and sky in the presence of time-varying conditions--such as the weather and time of day. The images (not very many so far...) and a more detailed description of the project are now available.
Contact me if you'd like to participate in or support the project. It will be fun. Just the other day I was cruising around on the back of Squaw Peak at 7700 feet with a 4wd truck, hiking shoes, a GPS and a camera to collect images of a weather monitoring site and get a better understanding of it's location relative to the camera site.
Posted by jones at July 14, 2006 04:21 PM
Comments
Why? Is it so you can render what the mountain is likely to look like at the moment but just based on weather data? What's next, "Ski Google!" bumper stickers? :)
Posted by: loscielos ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://vv.cs.byu.edu/~jones/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 17, 2006 12:16 PM
Ioscielos,
I am working on two main problems with this project at the moment: The first is "what are we going to do with it?" and the other is "who cares?"
In the "what are we going to do with it department, I think we are going to go after rendering synthetic terrain first. The idea is that the mood and feeling of a movie scene can be strongly influenced by the weather and time of day. Unfortunately, rendering terrain in different weather conditions and times of day is hard and I'm yet to see convincingly rendered scenes.
So our idea is to collect information about how a certain mountain looks in different weather (Squaw Peak in this case) then analyze that information to render terrain elements, such as scrub oak, granize, quartzite etc, in different weather and times of day. I expect that we'll just make up terrain in the bengining and see if we can make synthetic sunset picture for different times of day and weather conditions.
As for "who cares?" I am still working on that. My guess is that people who make movies, games and military training simulators will care.
What does Ioscielos mean and where did it come from?
Posted by: Mike Jones at July 17, 2006 12:54 PM
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