Geometry Collective

Announcing the Geometry Processing Worldwide Discord Server: discord.gg/MnTjR3sBsv, hosted by the CMU @GeomCollective! Anyone and everyone is invited to come discuss all things related to geometry, computation, + more! #GPWW

@OpenAI's new 4o image generation is pretty amazing. It also fails on some utterly basic tasks. Maybe a good metaphor for how easily we can be misled by algorithms based largely on fitting empirical data (i.e., machine learning) rather than deductive reasoning. @UsePenrose

If you’re interested in generalized signed distance functions but didn’t make it to our SIGGRAPH talk, I’ve recorded my presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=IzBY-j… Look for official code releases in the coming weeks!

Signed distance functions (SDFs) are fundamental tools in graphics, vision, and physics simulation. But how do you get a high-quality SDF from messy, real-world input? At #SIGGRAPH2024, we introduced a simple method for turning "broken" geometry into a well-behaved SDF. <🧵>

🔍Need efficient distance queries for 2D/3D meshes? Check out FCPW – a user-friendly library in C++ and Python with GPU support! 💻 Get started here: github.com/rohan-sawhney/… Also available on PyPI: pip install fcpw🐍

Signed distance functions (SDFs) are an important surface representation, which can be directly visualized via the “sphere tracing” algorithm. At #SIGGRAPH2024 we showed how to sphere trace a whole new class of surfaces, based on *harmonic functions* rather than SDFs. [1/n]

If you're at #SIGGRAPH2024, I will be giving a talk on "Repulsive Shells" tomorrow (Thursday) in the Geometry: Editing and Deformation session, which begins at 10:45am in Mile High 2A.

Need to solve PDEs, and struggle with meshing? Heard about "Walk on Spheres," but didn't know where to start? Check out the awesome intro course by @rohansawhney1 and @baileymmiller1, just posted from #SGP2024: youtube.com/watch?v=1u-5b4…

A quick tutorial on polyscope in Python, in just a few tweets from @BrunoLevy01 Bruno has been showing some great experiments this past week combining Polyscope with the excellent #geogram + Graphite, I love it!!

PSA: If you're making a poster for your #SIGGRAPH2024 talk, these are the dimensions (photo courtesy of Leona Caffey / @siggraph):

The talk, slides, and code for our SGP graduate school course on MCGP can be found here: rohan-sawhney.github.io/mcgp-resources/ We cover a lot of ground: Monte Carlo integration, differential equations, Brownian motion, and of course walk on spheres, which nicely ties all these topics together!

@JustinMSolomon Thanks for your efforts on both! Really making a huge difference in our community, and especially for a lot of young folks.

SGP ✅ 👨‍🏫➡️SGI

For better or for worse, the @GeomCollective is now also on Threads as geometry.collective: @geometry.collective" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">threads.net/@geometry.coll…

Pretty compelling evidence that spreading out SGP locations beyond Western Europe is good for the growth of our community:

Heads up that if you’re at #SGP2024 this week, we’ve created a channel on the Geometry Processing Worldwide Discord for folks to chat and coordinate! Even if you’re not at SGP, there’s a lot of great geometry processing talk happening here: discord.gg/Y8NwgQfwM4

@JustinMSolomon Thanks for sending her our way! 🍩

Zoë back at MIT after leaving us for grad school!

This morning has an ML flavor. We started with Robin Walters and Jung Yeon Park from @Northeastern to tell us about equivariant networks, and now Daniel Ritchie (@BrownUniversity) and Zoë Marschner (@CarnegieMellon) are teaching 3D deep learning. 💻🧮

@GCM_EPFL Beautiful stuff. Thanks for helping to keep the world dry! ☔️

Our paper Umbrella Meshes: Elastic Mechanism for Freeform Shape Deployment has received the 2022 ACM Siggraph Paper Award Honorable Mention: blog.siggraph.org/2022/07/siggra… More info at: go.epfl.ch/umbrella

Interested in animation? We've created artist tools that directly manipulate *contact areas between objects*, allowing intuitive modeling of contact-rich interactions & automatic pose optimization. Contact Arjun Lakshmipathy (andrew.cmu.edu/user/aslakshm/) for code!

Super proud and excited for my student Zoë Marschner, who is one of only 18 recipients of the @HertzFoundation PhD fellowship! 🥳🎉🪅 Zoë has already done some top-notch work in geometry processing, which you can check out here: zoemarschner.com

One of my all-time favorite paper titles is "You Can Find Geodesic Paths in Triangle Meshes by Just Flipping Edges" by @nmwsharp and @keenanisalive. The entire core method of the paper is described fully by just the title! We need more papers like this. nmwsharp.com/research/flip-…

@rbealpro @keenanisalive Thank you!

Very proud of my group @GeomCollective, for their consistent focus on quality in research. We have 5 papers at #SIGGRAPH2024, including two Best Paper Awards and one Honorable Mention. Only 5 and 12 such awards (respectively) are given out total, from a pool of ~840 submissions