A 3D Curve Sketching System For Tablets

dominique_cimafranca writes "The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system. Apart from the large drawing area, the tablet software looks very intuitive to artists. From the site: 'The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.'"

Serial tautoloprone laminant curveoids

I recall from my multiliniear calculus course that the fundamental zeroid of the Draper function is orthagonal in [n-1/n] hyperspace to the semi-Euclidean plane of the minimal Pascal rectangle. So if you point at one point on the tablet, multiple points are mooted when the gesture constrains pretensioning on its hypothetical "theta" axis. In other words, poo.

Re:Serial tautoloprone laminant curveoids

That's the [N+1/N] you fool.

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Don't say that! Mr T-square is gonna open a can of Whoop Ass on us, for pity's sake!

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No, he'll just pity you. Pity you so hard you'll never see the light of day again. And then he will pity you even more for it.

Mr. T's pity is second only to a Chuck Norris roundhouse.

POP!

I think my head just exploded into candy...

As an illustrator and 3d modeler, I must say, that is simply the most awesome thing I have ever seen. I would go so far as to say that it is 'insanely great'. I also just happen to be buying a Wacom Cintiq 21UX in the immediate future. FORTUITOUS!

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is that the tablet that was used in the demo video? that tablet + ILoveSketch is a pretty slick package. i'm looking to buy a tablet of my own, but i'm probably going to have to settle for an Intuos 2 or one of the other non-LCD tablets.

i've been doing graphic design for a few years, but i never got around to buying a digitizing tablet. i've been thinking about it for a while now, but this application demo has pretty much sold me on getting one. i just need to figure out which model to purchase. i'm wonderi

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I don't think you are going to get a tablet PC that can touch a Wacom just yet. Also, I would suggest trying a Wacom before you buy, if possible. While many people think bigger is better (insert joke here), after actually using a Wacom, they usually find a smaller size fits their needs better. I've found the 6"x11" to be fine, while the 12"x12" was too big. The one you're talking about, the 12"x19" is actually about 25"x17", and almost 1.5" thick. That takes up a lot of desk space, and is probably too

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Yeah, as far as I can tell, it's a Cintiq 21UX that's being used. ($2000!!!)

12x19? I didn't know they made an Intuos2 that big. Certainly seems like overkill. I have a 9x12 Intuos3 Special Edition ($500) and it's pretty big.

As far as I know, even tablet PCs using Wacom 'Penabled' tech lack some of the finer points associated with their graphics tablets. They really need to make a 'digital sketchpad', a tablet PC with all the refinements you expect from a high-end graphics tablet. (It needs to be able

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In regards to a digital sketchpad, I would love one. I'm considering a Cintiq just because I don't know of any Tablet PCs that have both a great display (in terms of being a display and a drawing surface), and gobs of power required for intense graphics apps. And if Apple did it, well, the marketing just writes itself - they could call it just that, the Sketchbook, and it'd fit in with the naming convention of Macbook, iBook, etc.

Could be useful for video game artists

This seems like it could be very useful in bridging the gap between concept art and a fully rendered 3d model. I'll have to remember to point this out to a few of my artist colleagues at work and see what they think about it.

Of course, I'll probably have to warn them to turn off the sound first. Quick hint to the developers of this cool little toy: Artists get nervous when when programmers start talking about "single view symmetric epipolar method" and other very complicated terms. If you've ever worked with artists before, you know you're starting to get too technical when the eyes start glazing over. I then know to take a step back and try to re-phrase in non-tech.

All you programmers are now thinking "but... that's exactly what it's describing", and I'll just put my hand to my head and sigh. Different ways of thinking.

Don't even get me started about trying to get in the heads of game designers.

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The shift in the nature of the software to take advantage of this doesn't really seem worth it, when you could just make two or three sketches of a concept at different angles, put those as the background in your modeling suite, and rough it out to the concept, then refine.

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I just showed this to my 2 roomates who do most of their art on tablets pcs. Their first reaction was "where do i get this", their second was, "what the heck are they saying". So good call on the technospeak confusing the hell out of them.

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I would be interested to see a comparison of the speed of this system against the other different methods for artists to generate content. Some artists would create clay models of the character, have that baked, and then use a laser scanner or digital 3D pen to acquire a mesh. Others would draw sketches of the character viewed from different directions, then import these into a 3D modeller, set up three views and slowly tweak the control points until a match was achieved in a fourth view window (a 3D Expo t

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It would be an interesting experiment, but the big variable - and I think one impossible to judge with any scientific methodology - is how each method helped or hindered the artists' creative process. If this tool allowed them to quickly try out new concepts that would only otherwise be available to a more freehand 2d process... it would seem to have some promise. It's a little hard to tell from a short video whether this would be useful, because we saw a few very limited examples with what was obviously

Define "released"

The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system

I see a video and some links to bios and sample sketches, but no "released" software anywhere.

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I agree and can't find any available software anywhere referencing this project.

strange

I thought it was going to be a 3d system for creating 2d drawings.. that would have been useful.

As it is (from a 3d artists point of view) this is just a more intense way of doing the same things that are already done with traditional 3d, and in fact comes nowhere close to what you can do with a sculpting program like z-brush.

If it gave me a 2d page I could turn and draw on like a real piece of paper.. that would be cool.. super cool.

... but it doesn't

Cool.

The UI for open, save, delete, etc. seems gallingly stupid, just use the damn keyboard(yeah, flipping from corner to corner to turn pages will be realy intuitive when there are 500 of them...). The UI for drawing, though, looks amazing. Substantial amounts of the correct automatic stuff happening automatically, just really impressive translation of standard flat pseudo-3D sketching into 3D models. Most impressive.

Demo Presentation

Looks like they are part of the presentation & demo sessions at the UIST (User Interface Software and Technology) being hosted by ACM next week.

More details here:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2008/ [acm.org]

And a schedule of events:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2008/program/index.html [acm.org]

I hope to see additional project details and possibly some additional demonstration videos come from this event.

So...

...what are the odds of getting a tablet laptop without Vista these days?

This seems pretty sweet, but I'm more interested in taking a tablet out with me rather than sitting behind a desk. I recall tablets hog more RAM than a usual OS, especially with vector graphics, so I shudder to think of trying to run this on a tablet under Vista.

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I'm running a tablet PC with 2gb of ram under vista and it works just fine. I've had the opportunity to run both XP tablet PC edition and vista on this same laptop, and didn't notice a speed difference between the two in day-to-day tasks. Everything pretty much opens instantly (with the exception of anything by adobe) and I never have any slow-downs or crashes.

I'd install linux on another partition if anyone can recommend a distribution supporting tablet functionality on a fujitsu.

Something similar...

That looks very nice!
I was looking at some similar stuff recently. There's an older app with some of the same gestures, called Teddy [u-tokyo.ac.jp], (video here [youtube.com]), which was further developed to Smoothteddy [u-tokyo.ac.jp].

Here's hoping these interfaces will be further developed and reach mainstream, and that they will help artists that are good at drawing but bad at extruding, uv-mapping, etc. create some cool stuff.

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Good point. After all, all 3D modeling software in the world is made by the same cabal. All time they spend on one project is stolen from another. In fact, every time somebody puts together a 3D modeling demo, another bug gets added to Maya, just to annoy you.

Seriously. You think Maya has annoying bugs, that's nice, go submit a support request or something. This is an utterly separate issue, similar only in that both of them are software for creating and manipulating 3D models.

Rocks, as in "there's a rock in your shoe"?

Blender rocks?

Blender's user interface is so bad that I can't imagine what the designer was thinking. Seriously. It's almost as if he hated end-users and decided that the only way he could express his hate was to make a program that appears superficially usable but caused as much pain and frustration possible when people tried to learn it.

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That program doesn't have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff. But if you can manage to scale it, it's a very powerful and efficient program. The interface is both really bad and really good.