This Monday and Thursday the VII. Annual Meeting of the Boltzmann-Zuse-Society for Computational Molecular Engineering takes place in Kaiserslautern, organized by Martin Horsch. Basically it is a meeting for the groups from Stuttgart (VISUS, HLRS), Paderborn, Kaiserslautern and Dresden, to talk about simulation, analysis and visualization of molecular dynamics data. And to discuss our joint research and development projects. Of course, Joachim and I will be talking about current works with and on MegaMol. By the way: http://megamol.org

cpp4cg2015ex4

This semester the preparation and holding of my lecture eats away a lot of time. And, there is so much else I need to do, too. Luckily, I get help from my co-workers and student assistants. And, if I would not have my fun doing all this, I would have changed jobs a long time ago.

In my lecture, by the way, I teach programming in the language C++. The focus is on the language itself and on using it correctly. I use interactive computer graphics as scenario. And in the practical part of the lecture, my students can write a small computer game. I am very satisfied with the base code skeleton we prepared this year. And I am curious what the students will make of it in the last exercise.

It is now two weeks since Joachim Staib and myself attended the EuroVis 2015 in Cagliari, Italy. I thought it is about time I write about what we did there. Actually, it was a very successful conference for our computer graphics and visualization group from the TU Dresden.

https://youtu.be/uWTJqPGxcHg?list=PLJVN8WCNMX6YibzvBL5NLVv1iner41FbH

First off, Joachim gave a talk on our work on particle visualization with transparency and ambient occlusion. I write “our work” but he did a wonderful job making this project fly. He really earned the fame to be first author.

  • [DOI] J. Staib, S. Grottel, and S. Gumhold, “Visualization of Particle-based Data with Transparency and Ambient Occlusion,” Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 34, iss. 3, pp. 151-160, 2015.
    [Bibtex]
    @article{2015staib_aowt,
      journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
      title = {{Visualization of Particle-based Data with Transparency and Ambient Occlusion}},
      author = {Joachim Staib and Sebastian Grottel and Stefan Gumhold},
      affiliations = {CGV},
      pages = {151--160},
      volume= {34},
      number= {3},
      year = {2015},
      DOI = {10.1111/cgf.12627},
    }

DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12627

https://youtu.be/ANxK6-Ed9e0?list=PLJVN8WCNMX6YibzvBL5NLVv1iner41FbH

Then, I was giving a talk on one of the smaller workshops co-located with the conference. I presented work on visualization of flood simulation data. The focus is realistic rendering for interactive “experiencing” the data. My goal is rightly set by current AAA games. I am ready for the next round.

  • [DOI] S. Grottel, J. Staib, T. Heyer, B. Vetter, and S. Gumhold, “Real-Time Visualization of Urban Flood Simulation Data for Non-Professionals,” in Workshop on Visualisation in Environmental Sciences (EnvirVis), Cagliari, Italy, 2015, pp. 37-41.
    [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{2015grottel_flood,
      title = {{Real-Time Visualization of Urban Flood Simulation Data for Non-Professionals}},
      author = {Sebastian Grottel and Joachim Staib and Torsten Heyer and Benjamin Vetter and Stefan Gumhold},
      pages = {037--041},
      year = {2015},
      DOI = {10.2312/envirvis.20151089},
      editor = {Ariane Middel and Gunther Weber and Karsten Rink},
      booktitle = {Workshop on Visualisation in Environmental Sciences (EnvirVis)},
      address = {Cagliari, Italy},
      publisher = {Eurographics Association},
    }

DOI: 10.2312/envirvis.20151089

And, finally, my CGF journal publication on continuous-time parallel coordinates was invited to the conference as well. I already did write about that paper.

  • [DOI] S. Grottel, J. Heinrich, D. Weiskopf, and S. Gumhold, “Visual Analysis of Trajectories in Multi-Dimensional State Spaces,” Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 33, iss. 6, pp. 310-321, 2014.
    [Bibtex]
    @article {Grottel2014HDTraj,
      author = {Grottel, Sebastian and Heinrich, Julian and Weiskopf, Daniel and Gumhold, Stefan},
      title = {{Visual Analysis of Trajectories in Multi-Dimensional State Spaces}},
      year = {2014},
      journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
    volume = {33},
    number = {6},
    pages = {310--321},
      doi = {10.1111/cgf.12352}
    }

DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12352

So, altogether, I am perfectly happy with the conference. Now, it is just about not getting worse.

It’s now only one week left before I go to the EuroVIS 2015. I am going to give two presentations, one on an invited CGF paper on multi-dimensional trajectory visualization and one at the co-located workshop EnvirVIS 2015 about Urban Flood Visualization. My fellow co-worker will give another presentation on ambient occlusion for semi-transparent particles. So you can imagine, there is an awful lot to prepare. That said, there is a busy week ahead.

I may be in some aspects old fashioned. For example, I like to have my music locally on the devices I am going to play them at. So, I am grabbing my CDs and collecting everything as MP3s and Flacs on my hard disk. Then, of course, I have to deal with the MP3-tags, especially unifying them across the files. This is something, I wouldn’t need to bother if I would use an online service. Whatever.

After some try and error, I finally came across Mp3tag. It works and is nice to use when you are editing multiple files at once.

NuGet is a handy package system for Visual Studio. Originally meant for Dotnet libraries it was extended some time to support native C++ projects as well. The only catch is, that the packages need to be made especially for NuGet. There are some, but by far not all which one (I) needs for the daily work. Most problematic is that many packages do not support Visual Studio 2013. And that is even today, as Visual Studio 2015 is almost here.

So there is only one thing to do: join the fray! Well, I could stay out of it and continue to grumble about it, but let’s just keep that as plan b. So, here it is; my first NuGet package:

the AntTweakBar v1.16

(with kind support of the author)

And this will not be the last you’ve seen of me.

Next week the lectures at the TU Dresden start again. I am going to the lecture on C++ programming for computer graphics. This is the third year I will be giving this lecture. While I already have a decent stock of slides for the lecture to work with I will extend the content on 3D graphics (OpenGL). Together with a student assistant we are also completely renewing the practical exercises. This will be so good.

It is unbelievable nice to do nothing for some extended time. Obviously, I needed that.

And, in fact, I am looking forward to preparing the upcoming lecture term.

 

Today I am presenting another small tool of mine: the ShutdownPlannerGUI

ShutdownPlannerGUI.zipShutdownPlannerGUI.zip Simple GUI for planned Shutdowns of MS Windows
[188 KB; MD5: 45cb64eef13ea47e98a7dcde0773e6f1; More Info]

The basic idea is simple: it is a small GUI, slapped together in C#, around the Shutdown command-line utility. It is about the timer, specifying when the system is going to shut down. The GUI provides several text boxes to conveniently enter the time in hours, minutes and seconds. And that is it.