It's been 2 weeks since the semester began, and I'm excited that there are so much to learn!
It was surprising but propelling that Professor Eftychios D. Sifakis came for a talk just after one intro class. I really appreciate the 45-minute wrap-up session right before the talk. It gave me an idea of how the calculation of simulations works behind the scene. Interestingly, the day before the class, a friend told me about a course he took during undergrad, which was about how to distribute work from CPU to GPU, because GPU has many small algorithm unit that can work simultaneously. I've also taken a course, to build a pipeline for a simple CPU, which took me so much energy that semester. So I could feel the pain of researchers who try hard to enhance the calculation performance. It is indeed a challenging task, and I was also amazed by the diversity of topics to discuss in the course of TA.
During the talk, although things stopped making sense once Professor Sifakis began to explain the formula, I was impressed by the research achievement demo during the introduction, especially the one about virtual surgery. It's said that the simulation showing surgery steps only takes several hours to calculate, while it takes a year for an animator to render the same animation. This is especially important for surgery simulation, because every second counts. Although some classmates mentioned that it might need some future work, I think it's a great achievement.
In the next class, we had some discussion about traditional and modern animation techniques. In my opinion, there is really no superior techniques. Although in this course, we focus on the technologies supporting the animation production, we have to bare in mind that animations are not here to showcase the high-end technologies. They are art pieces that have their own purposes to serve, not restricted in entertaining, educational, and medical purposes. For different situations, there should be different suitable techniques. As engineers, we are used to defining better technique as faster, more efficient, less manual operations etc. This is simply not the case here. Even "more natural" is not a standard for better animation technique, because sometimes artists want to embody unnaturalness in their work.
I'm looking forward to learning more to support the artists' masterpieces!
