Taichi Watanabe

Selected Papers from the SIGGRAPH Asia Education Program: Construction trial of a practical education curriculum for game development by industry-university collaboration in Japan

Games together with manga and anime as represented by Japanese technological advances are highly evaluated in other countries. In recent years, games have been developing at a fast rate and a deep understanding of the game development procedures is needed in order to keep up with the advancements in technology. Yet, there has been no consistent education program designed specifically for game production in the Japanese higher education institutions. In contrast to this, game education is on the rise among American and European Universities. A curriculum framework has even been created by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) with positive progress shown by cooperating with the industry. As very few efforts have been made so far in Japan to develop an education program for game development, there was no common ground where production methodology could be designed and taught. Due to this the industry developed its own unique production styles, and production methods became a trade secret, complicating the relationship between the universities and the industry. Current game development education in Japan consists mostly of lectures conducted by part-time teaching staff hired by several colleges. In response to this, at the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT), we have designed a curriculum in collaboration with Premium Agency, Inc. that aims to offer training in the practical aptitudes that are demanded by the game development industry. We have added lessons to the traditional faculty curriculum, combining lectures and exercises in a game development context, leading to the number of students that are acquiring knowledge in game development skills such as programming, CG and planning to grow year by year. As a result, the development of this game oriented curriculum has been strongly welcomed by the game industry.

Game jam based iterative curriculum for game production in Japan

In this paper, we introduce a game production curriculum to iterate multiple game development cycles in a limited period of time. In one semester, we executed a game development process three times, changing members every time. Students had the opportunity to gain experience, working with various different people; also, providing a time limit for the development process, they learned how to manage development time effectively. Furthermore, by implementing the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle [ASQ] in each development, students had the opportunity to find and solve problems during the semester. Using this framework, we worked on the following three educational problems: (1) Development that is mixed with students of diverse ages and educational levels (2) To be conscious about development time (3) Learn how to solve issues related to game development

Shape oriented line drawing in real-time 3DCG

In 2D animation and comics, the line quality of object outlines and contour lines are often varied to emphasize or exaggerate the shape of an object. One such technique is to vary the line thickness pending on the object shape. This technique is often used in sketching and drawing to give objects a greater sense of depth or dimension. When using toon rendering to simulate a 2D-esque effect in 3D animation, techniques that render object outlines of constant thickness, such as that proposed by [Saito and Takahashi 1990], are popular due to their ease of application. While existing methods such as that proposed by [Goodwin et al. 2007] allow for a certain level of dynamic line thickness through the use of shad-ing, they require long calculation times and are not suited for real time rendering.

Construction trial of a practical education curriculum for game development by industry/university collaboration

In recent years, a deep understanding of game development procedures has been needed in order to keep up with advancements in game technology. At the same time, game education is on the rise among American and European Universities[1][2][3][4][5]. Also, a curriculum framework has been created by the International Game Developers Association (IDGA) with positive progress shown by cooperating with the industry[6].

Effectiveness of Game Jam-based iterative program for game production in Japan

Abstract In this paper, we will introduce a game production program to iterate multiple game development cycles in a limited period. In one semester, we executed a game development process thrice, changing members every time. Students had the opportunity to gain experience, working with different people; also, by being provided a time limit for the development process, they learned how to manage development time effectively. Furthermore, by implementing the plan–do–check–act (PDCA) cycle [ASQ] in each development, students had the opportunity to identify and solve problems during the semester. Using this framework, we worked on the following three educational problems in Japan: (1) Mixed development with students of diverse ages and educational levels (2) Consciousness of development time (3) Understanding of each individual׳s strong and weak points Finally, we compared three types of programs (this program, Global Game Jam, and a mentor-based development program) in order to evaluate the aspects of game development that can be learned by them. We discussed how to develop a curriculum using a Game Jam framework. CR categories K.3.2 [COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION]: Computer and Information Science Education—Curriculum K.3.2 [COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION]: Computer and Information Science Education—Self-assessment.

Reproduction of the behavior of the wet cloths taking the atmospheric pressure into account

The property of cloth changes when it gets wet. Especially, wet cloth sticks to objects being touched. When expressing a wet cloth in computer graphics, pseudo representation is often used. As existing research, [Gascon et al. 2010] added a constrain to the part of cloth where it touches the base object. This constraint is a force which makes the cloth continue sticking to the position while the cloth is touching. In real-world situations, however, such sticking forces act even on the part which stays off the base.

Visual simulation of glazed frost

Glazed frost is a crystal clear ice and formed from supercooled raindrops that freeze when they hit object surfaces such as the ground and branches of trees. Simulation methods for formation of ice crystal, such as frost, on the surface of objects have been proposed by Kim et al. [Kim et al. 2004]. However, a supercooling state has to be considered for simulating freezing rain, and fluid simulation is required for reproducing the effect of raindrops running down on the ice surfaces. To our best knowledge, there has been no research presenting glazed frost by using a fluid simulation. We use the fluid simulation based on FLIP method [Zhu and Bridson 2005]. Hence, raindrops and obstacles are represented by particles which are used to calculate the advection term, and the update of velocity field are calculated by using grids except for advection term. We propose a method to create an animation of glazed frost formation by taking into account the heat transfer between particles and the outside grids.

Mesh Simplification Using Hybrid Saliency

This research presents a view-independent saliency model, which takes the effect of both color information and geometric information into account. The proposed method can simplify a mesh by dropping low-attention places while protecting the high-attention places. Multi-platform game contents are becoming a trend in the gaming field of CG in recent years. One of the problems in developing such game contents is the difference of the processing performance between the platforms. A content that runs smoothly on high processing-performance platform may not run smoothly on the lower-performance platforms. This problem can be solved by mesh simplification, which reduces the number of polygons in the mesh while preserving the overall shape, volume and boundaries as much as possible. Fewer polygons require less processing performance, and the simplified mesh can be processed smoothly even in low processing-performance platform. The proposed method simplifies a mesh in three steps. First, it takes a triangular polygonal mesh for simplification as input. Then, it calculates a view-independent hybrid saliency for each vertex of the input mesh. The hybrid saliency is evaluated from the curvature, the mesh saliency, the maximum, minimum, and average values of multiview image saliencies. Last, it simplifies the input mesh by dropping low hybrid saliency vertices. The experiments indicated that the proposed method yields a better result than existing methods.

Interactive Sketch Interpreter for Geometric Modeling

CAD software and similar modeling systems can show 3D object models created by designers, but these advanced 3D systems demand precise data about the 3D object, especially in the steps of inputting data and making free-form surfaces. Although it has become common to use CAD/CAM systems to increase the efficiency of the industrial design process, traditional sketching is often more efficient in the early stages of concept design. Since it is difficult to design a CAD system which can create 3D objects from a concept sketch directly due to ambiguous information, recently sketch systems have been introduced to bridge the gap between concept design and computer-based modeling programs, combining some of the features of a pencil-and-paper sketch. It has now become a big area of research of increasing the flexibility of 3D data input techniques for CAD systems. Concept Sketch is a concept design process for the designer. It is used to draw contours of products on paper by pencil step by step. In order to get 3D shapes, it is required to recognize these shapes from the concept sketch. Designers can not use or feel very uncomfortable to use these systems for realizing their idea sketches. This survey paper deals with a freehand sketch based geometric modeling for constructing complex 3D objects. In this talk, many useful sketch systems and methods are classified. The following sketch systems are shown: (1) A sketch-based modeling system based on descriptive geometry is proposed to make a model of a variety of 3D solid objects and surface objects. The main goal of sketch-based systems is to allow the creation of 3D models by using strokes extracted from user input and/or existing drawing scans. (2) The contour line method to propose a sketch interpreter system for designing 3D freeform objects. The essential idea is the use of freeform stroke as an expressive design tool. The Freeform stroke is classified into three types: outline (contour line), shading line and cross section line. The outline with shading lines are used to generate the basic rounded 3D shapes. The shading lines and cross section lines are used as control lines which are drawn inside the contour for modifying the basic 3D shape. (3) A method using a template topology library as an essential tool to reconstruct and modify 3D objects with sketch lines. 3D objects can be generated in a basic 3D shape reconstruction procedure, or modified in a 3D shape modification procedure. (4) A Sketch modeling of Implicit Surfaces by using cutting method and three orthographic views. We developed a cutting method using implicit surfaces based on a Cube. Characteristic point is blending function compare with our three proposed sketches interpreter system. (5) Digital sculpting with history management of strokes. This is a new digital sculpting system based on the history of stroke input. In these systems we are interested in interpretation, where the computer creates the 3D objects step by step. The designer can feel more comfortable to quickly evaluate their ideas for designing a new object compared with the traditional CAD system.

Visual simulation of aurora movement

This paper proposes a new modeling method for visual simulation of aurora. The proposed method generates an aurora animation based on the simulation of the electromagnetic field and emission principles. The proposed method has two major advantages (1) it can mimic the phenomena including splitting and rotation, which are observed in actual aurora, and (2) the color of aurora images generated by the proposed method closely matches the actual aurora. The proposed method can create realistic aurora animations.