Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

ALICE is a project-team in Computer Graphics. The fundamental aspects of this domain concern the interaction of light with the geometry of the objects. The lighting problem consists in designing accurate and efficient numerical simulation methods for the light transport equation. The geometrical problem consists in developing new solutions to transform and optimize geometric representations. Our original approach to both issues is to restate the problems in terms of numerical optimization. We try to develop solutions that are provably correct, numerically stable and scalable.

To reach these goals, our approach consists in transforming the physical or geometric problem into a numerical optimization problem, studying the properties of the objective function and designing efficient minimization algorithms. Besides Computer Graphics, our goal is to develop cooperations with researchers and people from industry, who test applications of our general solutions to various domains, comprising CAD, industrial design, oil exploration, plasma physics... Our solutions are distributed in both open-source software (Graphite, OpenNL, CGAL) and industrial software (Gocad, DVIZ).

Since 2010, we started to develop techniques to model not only virtual objects, but also real ones. Our “modeling and rendering” research axis evolved, and we generalized our results on by-example texture synthesis to the production of real objects, using 3D printers. In February 2018, Sylvain Lefebvre created the MFX team (Matter from Graphics); new results for the fabrication axis are described in a separate report.

As compared to virtual objects, this setting defines higher requirements for the geometry processing techniques that we develop, that need to be adapted to both numerical simulation and computer-aided fabrication. We study how to include computational physics into the loop, and simulation methods for various phenomena (e.g., fluid dynamics).