Ex-Masters Student
Graphics Jungle Lab


 

Rhythmic Canvas

Having finished my Masters degree over a year ago, I knew it would only be so long before my student webhosting at the University of Calgary would come to an end. A week ago, it did, and after a few days of downtime, the site has moved to a new domain name: www.rhythmiccanvas.com. So update your bookmarks and enjoy looking around - while not a lot has changed, I plan to be making some updates in the next little while.

Who is Martin?

Good question! A year ago he was the fellow sitting in the NE corner of Math Sciences 617A, likely working on a plant rendering project under the supervision of Dr. Premyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Dr. Brian Wyvill. Currently, he's one of the four graphics programmers working on volumetric rendering and visualization of seismic data for Veritas, a seismic company in Calgary, AB. If he's not there, he may be trotting the globe, tracking powder in the Rockies and Purcells, bouldering with the mountain goats, meandering through the worlds of Myst, or catching the latest episode of Corner Gas.

Over time he'll add more information to his Personal link to satiate your curiosity!

Recent Work

I have just completed my Masters thesis work on realistic modeling and rendering of plants. I have been focussing on subtle yet visually important phenomena such as translucency, venation patterns, and hairs. Check out the Courses links to view some of my previous coursework.

During the past few years I have been working with Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Henrik Wann Jensen to model and render hairs and fuzz on plants. Our resulting paper, Modeling Hairy Plants, can be found in the Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004 and is available for download here.

Oriental Poppy. Addition of hairs on plant models will greatly enhance their appearance, especially under backlit situations.
Lake Scene. Realistic plant rendering using vLab (modeling), Fuddle (plant distrubtion), and Dali (rendering).
Snowlily In a Breeze. Simple animation created with vLab (modeling) and Maya (animation and rendering).
Bon appetit! Macro and landscape nature photography.

Freeware

Do you use iPhoto to manage your digital photo collections? You may appreciate my small Applescript Studio application, iPhoto Diet, to eliminate duplicate images and undesired original copies in the iPhoto library. Useful for reducing the size of a library prior to burning a CD or while recouping hard drive space.

Available here for Mac OS X Jaguar/Panther and iPhoto.