News
CIS Graduate Student Explores New Approach to Computer Generated Imagery.
February 21, 2019
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has become very common place in many
digital experiences today, including but not limited to video games,
movies, commercials, TV shows, etc. All of these digital experiences
today incorporate CGI technologies to one degree or another. A
particular focused area of inquiry within the broader field of CGI
is terrain generation. Terrain generation has many
different applications.
a sub-field with many different
applications such as planning transportation networks, visualizing
population migrations, conducting epidemiology research, training
self-driving cars, drones and more.
Many current applications and research models for terrain generation do indeed generate complex realistic artifacts, such as trees, rivers, coastlines, populations, and even cities. Unfortunately, most of these techniques are described and implemented separately. Techniques do not work together to generate a complete holistic view.The available software tools used to generate terrains have the drawback that they cannot work easily together.
For his Master’s Thesis, GVSU CIS graduate student Lawrence O’Boyle wrote Cruthu (Gaelic for “creation”), a framework that is modular and that allows users to interconnect the different components it offers in flexible ways. For Unix/Linux users, Cruthu is similar in spirit to the pipeline feature of the popular Bash shell. Lawrence’s thesis research was supervised by Dr. Robert Adams, and the thesis can be downloaded from GVSU’s Scholar Works.
Lawrence is currently working as the system administrator for the School of Computing’s computer labs. Lawrence plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the near future.