Shape Modeling and Geometry Processing

DevelopableBunny
course no.
252-0538-00
semester
Spring 2022
lecturer
Olga Sorkine-Hornung
assistants
Jing Ren, Alexandre Binninger, Lingchen Yang, Floor Verhoeven (on leave)
lecture
Wed 10-12; CAB, G 61, livestream
video recording
ETH video portal
exercise
Fri 11-12; CAB, G 61
forum
Moodle
ECTS credits
8 credits

announcements

 
09.02.22
Course webpage updated. Welcome!

overview

camel sketch

Recent advances in 3D digital geometry processing have created a plenitude of novel concepts for the mathematical representation and interactive manipulation of geometric models. This course covers the fundamentals and some of the latest developments in geometric modeling and digital geometry processing. Topics include surface modeling based on polygonal meshes, surface reconstruction, mesh improvement, discrete differential geometry, interactive shape editing, skinning animation, architectural and structure-aware geometric modeling, geometry for 3D computational fabrication.

Course objectives

The students will learn how to design, program and analyze algorithms and systems for interactive 3D shape modeling and digital geometry processing.

Course work and performance assessment

There will be 6 mandatory programming assignments. A code framework will be provided that allows you to experiment with various algorithms without having to bother much about software infrastructure. The weight of the homework assignments in the final grade will be 100%. There will be no written exam this year.

Prerequisites

Introduction to Computer Graphics or Visual Computing or a similar course, experience with C++ programming. Some background in geometric computing is helpful, but not necessary.

schedule and course notes

Note: Course notes and homework materials are only accessible within the ETH network (addresses 129.132.*). Use VPN to access from outside.

The course schedule is tentative and will be adjusted along the way.


23.02.22
Introduction.
Shape representations.
25.02.22
Intro to libigl.
[Exercise 1 handout]

02.03.22
Geometry acquisition. Meshes.
04.03.22
Exercise 1 - Q&A

09.03.22
Surface reconstruction.
11.03.22
No exercise session
[Deadline Exercise 1]
[Exercise 2 handout]

16.03.22
Normal estimation and PCA.
Discrete differential geometry - Curves, part I.  
18.03.22
Exercise 2 - Presentation

23.03.22
Discrete differential geometry - Curves, part II.
Discrete differential geometry - Surfaces, part I.
25.03.22
Exercise 2 - Q&A

30.03.22
Discrete differential geometry - Surfaces, part II.
Mesh smoothing.
Curve smoothing MATLAB demos.
01.04.22
[Deadline Exercise 2]
[Exercise 3 handout]

06.04.22
Parameterization I.
08.04.22
Exercise 3 - Q&A

13.04.22
Parameterization II. Remeshing.
15.04.22
Easter holiday.
[Deadline Exercise 3]
[Exercise 4 handout].

20.04.22
Easter holiday.
22.04.22
Easter holiday.

27.04.22
Inter-surface mapping, matching and functional maps.
29.04.22
Exercise 4 - Presentation

04.05.22
Introduction to mesh editing. Variational surface based deformation I.
06.05.22
[Exercise 5 handout].
Exercise 4 - Q&A

11.05.22
Variational surface based deformation II. ARAP surface modeling.
13.05.22
Exercise 5 - Presentation
[Deadline Exercise 4]

18.05.22
Space deformations. Skeletal animation and skinning.
20.05.22
[Exercise 6 handout]
Exercise 5 - Q&A

25.05.22
Current topics in geometry processing research at IGL.
Developable approximation via Gauss image thinning.
Urban Modeling
27.05.22
[Deadline Exercise 5]
Q&A

01.06.22
Guest lecture by Prof. Mario Botsch on avatars!
03.06.22
Q&A

10.06.22
[Deadline Exercise 6]

homework assignments

For the purposes of this class we will be using GitHub. You can find all instructions on the repository's webpage, please follow them carefully.

Note: Course notes and assignment slides are only accessible within the ETH network (addresses 129.132.*). Use VPN to access from outside.


Exercise 1: Mesh "Hello World"

In this exercise you will familiarize yourself with the provided code framework and perform some basic operations on a mesh.

Due Date :
11.03.2022, 10:00
Slides:
Exercise Session 25.02.22
Assignment:
Assignment 1

Exercise 2: Surface reconstruction

In this exercise you will compute a water-tight surface mesh by fitting an implicit function to point cloud.

Due Date :
01.04.2022, 10:00
Slides:
Exercise Session 18.03.22
Assignment:
Assignment 2

Exercise 3: Normals and curvature

In this exercise you will experiment with various fundamental discrete differential quantities and implement mesh smoothing flows.

Due Date :
15.04.2022, 10:00 
Slides:
Exercise Session 01.04.2022
Assignment:
Assignment 3

Exercise 4: Mesh parameterization

In this exercise you will parameterize a mesh by minimizing four different distortion measures, with fixed or free boundaries. Visualize the distortion by color coding.

Due Date :
13.05.2022, 10:00
Slides:
Exercise Session 29.04.2022
Assignment:
Assignment 4

Exercise 5: Detail-preserving mesh editing

In this exercise, you will implement an algorithm to interactively deform 3D models. You will construct a two-level multi-resolution surface representation and use naive Laplacian editing to deform it.

Due Date :
27.05.2022, 10:00
Exercise Session 13.05.2022
Assignment:
Assignment 5

Exercise 6: Harmonic skinning weights computation and skeletal character deformation

In this exercise you will take part in a project about skeletal-based deformation and animation. You will have to read the project description, understand and implement it. You can obviously use libigl and you can reuse any of the code from the previous exercises.

Due Date :
17.06.2022, 10:00
Exercise Session 27.05.2022
Assignment:
Assignment 6


YouTube channel - related research results from IGL