code
art
Undergraduate Honors Thesis
May 2012
UT CS honors students complete a thesis as part of their undergraduate career. My thesis, Physically Based Modeling of Interactive Plants, was done under professors Donald Fussell and (second reader) Calvin Lin. The goal was to produce a fully interactive simulation of a soft-body tree or plant which appeared realistic in its animation (the time domain), as opposed to looking convincing in a screenshot.
In retrospect, as a research work I generated little quantitative data and spent too much time hand-rolling my own physics instead of examining prior work. Despite these shortcomings, the animation was convincing, the defense went well, and the thesis was selected for the department's runner-up best-undergraduate-thesis-award of 2012.
Find it here in this page of reports, or locally: [ TR-2083.pdf, 2.39 MB ].
Demo
[ demo.zip, 1.52 MB, Windows 32-bit ]
A demo where you can grow, cut, burn, and rain on a physically simulated tree. Comes with defense presentation slides (made with deck.js).
Extensions
By feeding accelerometer data into the physics simulation, this same technique was used on iOS to produce an app featuring a plant that swayed realistically in response to the shaking of the device.
