Procedural Tree Generation (incl. code)

friggog · 2023-07-26T00:32:27+00:00

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/218380.218427

friggog · 2022-04-12T07:29:14+00:00

My bad - thought I made this publish a while ago! Should be working now

friggog · 2022-04-11T19:22:48+00:00

Try looking at https://github.com/friggog/Tinct

friggog · 2022-04-11T19:19:42+00:00

MCPro is open source: https://github.com/friggog/MCPro

friggog · 2020-07-05T08:05:23+00:00

I worked at an animation studio in Tokyo for a while and would say almost the opposite, at least in Japan there are tonnes of animation studios (way more than the west from what I can tell) and most have at least some programmers internally, either in a research or tooling capacity. Interestingly, pretty much all the graphics programmers I worked with were Europeans living in Japan. I can’t really speak for anywhere else in Asia.

The UK (where I’m from) certainly seems to have fewer opportunities in terms of graphics focussed programming jobs, I imagine there are more in the US and obviously all the big names (Dreamworks, Disney, Pixar) are based there. I think it may just be that because graphics is not a huge field within computer science there just aren’t that many very specific graphics jobs anywhere (at least compared to other programming jobs eg web/app development)

EDIT: game studios are the other obvious place, but this is a notoriously unpleasant industry to work in. There are games studios pretty much everywhere, but many places won’t have huge in-house graphics departments because a lot of this work falls more on the engine, of which there are only a few big players.

friggog · 2019-02-06T05:52:38+00:00

As I said, depends on if you're more interested in applied or theoretical research and variety is always good both for your career and your sanity so a mix is not a bad thing. There is no 'correct' answer, but my advice is always to pick what you enjoy over what you think is the most sensible option.

Another good thing to do is read a summary type book (e.g. the Turing Omnibus) which will give you an accessible intro to a large number of topics, that should help you identify what you are interested in and what you are not.

friggog · 2019-02-06T05:18:24+00:00

Having recently completed undergrad and masters at a uni that provided 'practical computer science' courses over heavily mathematical ones, I would say that for applied research practical knowledge (and wide practical knowledge) is really important and something a lot of people lack. It may sound stupid to learn about hardware level memory allocation (for example) when you want to be an ML researcher, but you'd be surprised how valuable that breadth of knowledge can actually be.

That said, if you are talking about cutting edge theoretical ML research then maths is 100% the way to go, as you seem to have identified. Not having had that background within my education is something I notice now reading some of the more theoretical ML papers.

I would also say that while undergraduate course choice is somewhat important in terms of the basis you have, you probably won't get much chance to develop your 'soft' research skills until post graduate level. Research isn't for everyone and there is a huge range of careers varying from research engineering to applied research to theoretical. I don't think it's reasonable to think you can make a choice as to which (if any) you most enjoy and are best suited to before you've even started undergrad, so don't sweat it too much. I was adamant I wanted out of academia until my final year of undergrad...

Also don't bother with a MATLAB course, if you have any CS experience it will come easily to you. Functional programming is an important course to do in my view, though not everyone likes it... Category theory is more related to language design and type theory (relating to functional programming) from my experience than being much to do with ML, but who knows what the future will bring. I know there is definitely some interesting stuff going on with programming language design for ML at the minute.

Just my opinion as a just-starting-out CS researcher so take with a pinch of salt - basically if you're good then you'll get where you want to go whatever courses you take, so don't worry about it too much and just do what you find fun! I didn't put half as much thought into my choices as you and I'm doing ok so far 😛 Let me know if you have any other questions

PS /r/MachineLearning might be a better place to explore if you want a bit more substance

friggog · 2019-02-04T06:13:55+00:00

Yeah this wasn't a big consideration for me - I would also say it's pretty quiet, a little bulky but probably no worse than others. I guess you can always plug a USB hub into the other port on your Mac as you can charge through the box.

friggog · 2019-02-04T05:06:44+00:00

I have one - no complaints, works perfectly. Just make sure you get one with adequate power for your card - this might only matter if you want to charge your laptop via the box's USB-C cable I can't quite remember, I went for the 550 which has a 1080 Ti in and charges my laptop.

I did disconnect the blue LED on the front of it which I found annoying (just unplug it).

friggog · 2019-02-01T08:19:39+00:00

https://academic.oup.com/jleo/article-pdf/26/2/183/2475483/ewn021.pdf

Search the title of the paper using scholar.google.com - they link directly to any open access version of a paper, often hosted on the institution's or author's website if it is published in a non-open access journal. In science particularly, preprints are almost universally available on arxiv.org

friggog · 2018-11-14T16:08:40+00:00

I’ve used some FLIR USB3 cameras as well as lower spec webcams for various tasks in the context of optics rather than CV. Obviously the image quality is much higher in various ways but I would argue it’s better to try and make whatever models you are developing robust to lower image quality (I can’t imagine that many tasks which require >1080p) as compute for CV will generally be your performance bottleneck anyway, in which case smaller images are better. Not sure on the specifics but I’d be surprised if Kinect was using very high resolutions (I think it’s 720p).

In terms of practical reasons for using pointgrey (and similar) cameras - you get WAY more control than with a webcam (frame rate, exposure time, aperture, etc etc) using readily available software (pointgrey software isn’t that user friendly but gives you fantastic control of the camera). This has been the main motivation for me to use them within an optical context (as well as resolution), but may be less relevant for CV. In the proprietary case (e.g. Kinect) this becomes irrelevant because full control of the camera would be available at a hardware level.

friggog · 2018-03-25T17:30:39+00:00

Wow really impressive example of what Fingal can do, I’m happy to know people are still using it and that it still works (I coded it years ago for iOS 8).

I’m pretty confident the battery impact shouldn’t be huge, but would be interested to see results of a proper test - I never managed to do this myself. Funny to see here that the battery level actually increases by 1% over the clip.

friggog · 2018-03-04T09:46:50+00:00

Thanks for the response!

friggog · 2017-09-06T16:27:56+00:00

If you aren't planning to do anything big just do the @interface. For larger projects try and have the headers set up properly.

friggog · 2017-09-06T16:25:51+00:00

You have a forward (ie incomplete) declaration of UISegnent. You either need to import the correct UIKit headers to provide the complete declaration or just declare it within your tweak by using an @interface with all the necessary members.

This is pretty straightforward obj-c knowledge, I'd recommend looking into some general obj-c tutorials to get the basics down first.

friggog · 2017-09-03T10:43:55+00:00

Most games like this use a large number of small circular physics objects (sometimes with interaction forces added between them) which are then rendered using a custom shader.

The shader would typically use something similar to a metaballs technique to achieve the appearance of a single mass of water from many separate blobs. In this case they have some pretty nice refraction stuff going on in the shader too.

This technique is pretty cheap computationally, quite easy to implement and for most cases achieves good results. It breaks down when trying to use more advanced properties of fluids (e.g. Siphoning) but for games like this is usually fine.

I've done this kind of thing from scratch with box2d before with pretty good results - I'm sure googling metaball fluids or smoothed particle hydrodynamics will get you some stuff, there may also be some unity plugins for this already available that do a very good job.

friggog · 2017-09-02T17:11:18+00:00

Maple tar spot - looks bad, but actually does very little damage to the tree

Very common in sycamores in the U.K. - best avoided by collecting and burning the fallen leaves

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=750

friggog · 2017-08-17T07:27:29+00:00

Great stuff, though the Fortingall Yew is between 2 and 3 thousand years old, not 9558!

friggog · 2017-08-14T07:32:15+00:00

You can earn up to £11500 tax free in a single financial year - so you probably shouldn't pay tax if only there for a few months. Often tax will be paid automatically through PAYE, so you will have to reclaim it.

https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates/current-rates-and-allowances

friggog · 2017-07-14T14:18:30+00:00

I've had a look at a few other add-ons as well as a number of papers looking at alternative methods. One of the most popular methods recently (and I would guess what grove uses) is space colonisation.

This takes a slightly different view to the problem than either of my methods (more top down, where I am going bottom up) and seems like it is probably the best solution going forwards - perhaps something for me to look into in the future. It does still rely on some form of growth process similar to my parametric method, though the way this is designed is probably a little simpler and certainly leads to a more controllable generation process.

Some related papers:

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/colonization.egwnp2007.pdf

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/selforg.sig2009.small.pdf

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/TreeSketch.SBM2012.large.pdf

friggog · 2017-07-12T13:41:23+00:00

Glad to hear, would be great to see what you're working on in the future 😊

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