37-Issue 3
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Browsing 37-Issue 3 by Subject "Computer graphics"
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Item A General Illumination Model for Molecular Visualization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Casajus, Pedro Hermosilla; Vázquez, Pere-Pau; Vinacua, Àlvar; Ropinski, Timo; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo RopinskiSeveral visual representations have been developed over the years to visualize molecular structures, and to enable a better understanding of their underlying chemical processes. Today, the most frequently used atom-based representations are the Space-filling, the Solvent Excluded Surface, the Balls-and-Sticks, and the Licorice models. While each of these representations has its individual benefits, when applied to large-scale models spatial arrangements can be difficult to interpret when employing current visualization techniques. In the past it has been shown that global illumination techniques improve the perception of molecular visualizations; unfortunately existing approaches are tailored towards a single visual representation. We propose a general illumination model for molecular visualization that is valid for different representations. With our illumination model, it becomes possible, for the first time, to achieve consistent illumination among all atom-based molecular representations. The proposed model can be further evaluated in real-time, as it employs an analytical solution to simulate diffuse light interactions between objects. To be able to derive such a solution for the rather complicated and diverse visual representations, we propose the use of regression analysis together with adapted parameter sampling strategies as well as shape parametrization guided sampling, which are applied to the geometric building blocks of the targeted visual representations. We will discuss the proposed sampling strategies, the derived illumination model, and demonstrate its capabilities when visualizing several dynamic molecules.Item Landscaper: A Modeling System for 3D Printing Scale Models of Landscapes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Allahverdi, Kamyar; Djavaherpour, Hessam; Mahdavi-Amiri, Ali; Samavati, Faramarz; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo RopinskiLandscape models of geospatial regions provide an intuitive mechanism for exploring complex geospatial information. However, the methods currently used to create these scale models require a large amount of resources, which restricts the availability of these models to a limited number of popular public places, such as museums and airports. In this paper, we have proposed a system for creating these physical models using an affordable 3D printer in order to make the creation of these models more widely accessible. Our system retrieves GIS relevant to creating a physical model of a geospatial region and then addresses the two major limitations of affordable 3D printers, namely the limited number of materials and available printing volume. This is accomplished by separating features into distinct extruded layers and splitting large models into smaller pieces, allowing us to employ different methods for the visualization of different geospatial features, like vegetation and residential areas, in a 3D printing context. We confirm the functionality of our system by printing two large physical models of relatively complex landscape regions.