Description

Mesh simplification intends to preserve the visual appearance of a 3D model while reducing its number of faces. Due to the rise of mobile computing and VR applications, mesh simplification becomes a critical phase in 3D modeling for reducing the rendering complexity of a model. A 3D model designer initially starts with a high-quality model and then simplify its faces using modern 3D software, such as Blender, Maya and etc.

However, aggressively using mesh simplification function in the software quickly leads to visible defects, for instance, holes in the grid, jagged edge, and other similar errors. Thereby a designer must carefully dealing with these result and sometimes manually fix these errors.

In this thesis, you will perform user-centered research to investigate elicitation process, uncertainty and ambiguity of human preferences while mesh simplification in 3D modeling.

Tasks

You should:

• Conduct extensive literature review regarding 3D modeling, human preferences, mesh simplification, and other related fields
• Be able to understand the fundamental ideas of existing mesh simplification functions in industrial software
• Design appropriate user studies and corresponding evaluation strategies or benchmarks separately for general users and expert designers
• Use existing or develop (if necessary) 3D program(s) to conduct the designed user studies
• Perform well-structured evaluation and summarizing all outcomes in a written thesis

Requirements

• Interest in 3D geometric modeling with a background in related software and a programming language
• Understanding the basics of human-computer interaction research approaches
• Concept development and designing appropriate user studies
• Independent scientific work, creative problem solving

Note that the thesis initially starts with biweekly meetings for literature and development discussion in the first two or three months and then switch to weekly meeting for user study and result evaluation discussion.

Interested?

Send your application with a transcript of records, examples of your designed models or programming projects (GitHub page is ideal) via email to Changkun Ou.

Initial Reading List

• Marks, J., Ruml, W., Ryall, K., Seims, J., Shieber, S., Andalman, B., Pfister, H. (1997). Design galleries. In Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH'97 (pp. 389-400). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/258734.258887
• Hoppe, H., DeRose, T., Duchamp, T., McDonald, J., & Stuetzle, W. (1993). Mesh optimization. In Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH'93 (Vol. 86, pp. 19-26). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/166117.166119
• Garland, M., & Heckbert, P. S. (1997). Surface simplification using quadric error metrics. In Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH'97 (pp. 209-216). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/258734.258849
• Ju, T., Losasso, F., Schaefer, S., & Warren, J. (2002). Dual contouring of hermite data. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 21(3), 339-346. https://doi.org/10.1145/566654.566586

Useful Link

• Information on Master Theses
• Thesis Template