The quest to make digitally rendering easy
“Everything is a shape,” said Ergun Akleman, Texas A&M professor of visualization, as he considered questions about his years creating digital modeling software.
“Everything.”
Residential structures? Matchboxes? Cars? Water? They’re all “just” shapes. All of ‘em.
Akleman is on a mission to make it easy to digitally model all manner of shapes, a heroic endeavor that could potentially be used for everything from designing the perfect coffee mug to predicting where cracks will cause a building will fail over time.
Prototypes and Problems
Before the digital age, any sort of shape that designers created, a model of a commercial building, or something much smaller and mundane — a fob for a key ring, perhaps — was drawn by hand, then rendered in hand- constructed models made of wood, foam, or whatever substance best fit what was being conceived or developed.
Physical renderings of these designs required gathering raw materials and either possessing the skill to create a model, or hiring someone to do it. Of course there wasn’t just one design and one model for a project — new models and renderings needed to be created to reflect each design change, a time-consuming and potentially costly process.
Digital technology offered the promise of simplifying and speeding up this workflow, but the complexity of “real- world” shapes and the lack of easy-to-use software was a daunting problem during the early days of consumer- grade computing, said Akleman.
Digital modeling would be practical if one could easily move, for example, a handle on a coffee mug or manipulate “holes” — such as doorways in a building, or virtually examine an object by turning it this way or that. But that software didn’t exist yet.
“When I first started digitally modeling objects it was difficult and complicated to do this,” said Akleman. “I wanted to be able to change things in an extremely simple way.”
With a background in mathematics and computer science, and funding from the National Science Foundation, Akleman and a team of computer scientists, software engineers, and computer graphics specialists created TopMod, an open- source application that was released in 2005.
An Instant Hit
TopMod was an instant hit with users.
“People came up with so many shapes!” said Akleman. “It was really beyond my imagination what users created. Then they shared the shapes with each other and discussed how they created the shapes. It was incredible work and very exciting to see what TopMod made possible.”
The Future of Digital Design
Since TopMod’s success, Akleman has been looking for ways to take the next step.
“I want users to be able to produce all possible shapes,” he said. “Not just a few shapes. All possible shapes.”
It’s an ambitious-sounding goal, but it’s one that Akleman is shooting for. Whether it be architects, medical researchers, clothing designers, or anything in between, designers in any field should have easy-to-use software that will help them create whatever shapes they need to, he said.
To that end, he and a team of mathematicians, software engineers and developers have their eyes on the next prize: shape modeling 4D software that will render time-based changes in objects.
“It’s a big step, but not a simple step,” said Akleman, who is part of a team of software developers seeking funding for their idea.
Rendering objects in 4D instead of 3D can be thought of as the difference between rendering a running person and water, he said.
“Put simply, if you’re modeling a person running, the action of running doesn’t change a person’s topology; there are certainly changes in the runner’s body, but there’s still two arms, two legs. The number and kinds of elements of a person in motion don’t fundamentally change.
“But if you’re modeling water, a 4D approach is the best way to render the changes water goes through,” he said. “A 4D application will show time- based changes in the amount of water, its shape as it crashes onto a beach, for example.”
Life-Saving Practical Application
In architecture, 4D modeling could also “see into the future” by rendering cracks that would eventually appear in a building after years of use. “Cracks can be very complicated, and might not even necessarily cause a building to collapse,” said Akleman.
And, as is the case with 3D rendering, Akleman is looking to create software that will allow users to easily make changes to shapes, and then show the effects of those changes through time.
