3D Modelling From a Sketch

hargettp writes "Happened to be skimming through the December BoingBoing and I noticed this link to research into 3D modelling by interpreting sketches. Basically, with a pen and tablet and a good Java applet, a user can start digitally modelling 3D structures about as easy as if they were molding clay with their bare hands. It was the demonstration video that made my jaw drop. Impressive!"

Comments

Great way to ruin a webserver

[Anonymous Coward]

Post an avi file on slashdot...Great going! I hope you warned them this was happening!

old news

[fireteller2]

Very old news. "Teddy" was developed by Takeo Igarashi at the University of Tokyo, and presented at SIGGRAPH 1999. 8-13-99 Schedule

Re:old news

[Michael Crutcher]

I think this a successor to "Teddy" called "SmoothTeddy".

As the linked page doth say:
SmoothTeddy is a successor to Teddy and Chameleon

You know, like maybe he's been working on it for a while and stuff.

Slashdotted already

[Anonymous Coward]

And then people complain that we don't read the articles!

It has to be pr0n!

[worst_name_ever]

It was the demonstration video that made my jaw drop.

Hmm, now why am I suspicious of a link to a video called "smoothteddy.avi"? Oh yeah, because this is Slashdot.

maybe a use for tablet pcs

[anthony_philipp]

maybe this will give some purpose to tablet pcs. sounds pretty sweet, but it was already /.ed so i couldnt read it. kinda dissapointing. either that or the link was bad.

Re:maybe a use for tablet pcs

[NanoGator]

"maybe this will give some purpose to tablet pcs."

Us digital artists would already like to have Tablet PCs. We like drawing. I may end up with when when the right combination of price and power comes along. Tablets are good but having the feedback right under the stylus would be quite useful.

I almost thought of that

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Hmmm, a markup language based on pen strokes rather than text tags. Pretty obvious really. (After someone else tells you about it :-)

Google Cache for Karma

[hugesmile]

Google Cache to the rescue. What do I win?

Open source 3D modelling

[Lord Satri]

Open source 3D for GIS : vterrain.org

See also openscenegraph.org

Both can use Remote Sensing data.

Re:Open source 3D modelling

[theMerovingian]

Wow, another GISer on Slashdot (not too many).

Terragen makes attractive 3D layouts. It is both free and easy to use.

It is essentially useless for geospatial analysis (I haven't messed around with it in a couple of years, so who knows), but it is remarkably easy to make some cool terrain, add vegetation, and brew up some clouds on the horizon.

Sounds Like SketchUp 3D

[N8F8]

I was researching 3D home design tools for my dad and came across a neat too called SketchUp 3D that sounds similar.

SketchUp has a unique interface that allows 3D forms to be created, viewed and modified quickly and easily. The core of its simplicity is an interface that allows you simply to draw the edges of the desired model in 3D space, just as they would using a pencil and paper. Intelligent inferencing capabilities automatically determine the nature of the lines and "fill" shapes to create 3D geometry. SketchUp is used by all kinds of designers in many different industries. It is quick to learn, fast to use and hard to forget.

Pathological cases

[200_success]

So, what happens if you feed it an M. C. Escher drawing? Or a drawing of a Klein bottle?

Re:Pathological cases

[hugesmile]

It basically does this.

See Sketchup

[G4from128k]

Although geared toward architectural sketching, SketchUp might serve some of these needs. (Disclosure: I've not used the software, but I do walk past their office on a near-daily basis).

Sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like it might have a lot in common with the Priceton 3d model search engine covered on slashdot a while back.

3d sketch applications, formz and sketchup

[bstil]

Old news to architects.

FormZ (www.formz.com) has had simple 3d sketching capabilities for years. SketchUp (mentioned in previous posts) is one of the most user-friendly tools available today. However, most Sketchup functionality already exists in formZ. SketchUp just makes sketching (1) fun, (2) easy, and (3) look like pencil sketch lines or cartoon lines.

Another 3d creation system

[Anonymous Coward]

This one using Squeak (Smalltalk) [Google Cached]

well

[zboy]

I'm not really sure about what was orignially posted, but in some ways it does sound an awful lot like ZBrush..I've seen it demo'd at the macworld expo on a few occasions and its a pretty cool looking piece of software

Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torrents

[FreeUser]

It was a 48 megabyte AVI file! Nobody got a chance to see it.

That really is inexusable on slashdot's part. They should have at least posted a .torrent, or used open cache. Now none of us can see the video, and the poor guy has probably had his site shut down by his providor (at least temporarilly).

Grumble

[iamdrscience]

When will people learn that linking to a video from a Slashdot article is almost always a bad idea? Think about it, 40MB+ times 100,000+ people is easily into the area of multiple tens of Terabytes! That's abso-fucking-lutely nuts!

If you really want to have people see a video, at least get a friend to setup a bit torrent tracker for it in advance or something, then the site will at least have a chance.

reminds me of a neat sketched out physics sim

[RevAaron]

Saw a video a few months back of new research (teddy is old) having to do with using sketches to draw out a physics simulation. written in Java. IIRC, done at MIT's Oxygen lab. Anyway, it was incredible- the guy draws a ramp. Draws a box at the top of the ramp, adds wheels. hit go and the whole thing is played out at 1 G in the way it would here on earth. I would knife someone to get a hold of that. Ok, maybe not that, but yeah, it'd be great.

Re:A Night At Sir Haxalots

[grub]

Damn straight. Reading /. at -1 is like driving through Cracktown in a covertible that's stuck in first gear. There's a whole culture "down here" :)

Apt summary

[cgenman]

It was the demonstration video that made my jaw drop.

It was also the demonstration video that made the server drop.

Why not use clay?

[skazatmebaby]

I don't understand; if it's as easy as modeling in clay, why not use clay? The tactile feedback while using clay has to be much more than using a pen tablet. There is technology that can scan something in 3D.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned...

Re:Why not use clay?

[HansF]

Basicly you're right. Using clay would be the most 'natural' way to do it.
Unforunately, if you want to do it in clay, you would have to find a way to digitse it.
That means you need a 3d-scanner of some sort (here, here, here).
Needless to say, these can be very expensive.
Ofourse serious /. geeks would build it themselves.
On the other hand if you want to stay with the clay option, go for stopmotion. It worked for Aardman!

There is a PS2 game that uses something like this.

[darkmayo]

Magic Pengel : The Quest for Color
You draw a doodle and the game will turn it into a 3d sprite that you fight with.
anyways here is a URL from Gamespot about this

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/strategy/colorquestt en tativetitle/

I saw this at Siggraph

[spitzak]

He was also an excellent speaker, very entertaining. He had used his program to draw characters from the movies shown in the Electronic Theatre during the show.

The program I thought was brilliant. It is what user interface should be, not a thousand menus and "toolbars" but an empty window that you click on and it "does what you want". Too bad there is no sign of such interfaces showing up in real-world applications, either open or closed...

Re:I saw this at Siggraph

[Cthefuture]

It is what user interface should be, not a thousand menus and "toolbars" but an empty window that you click on and it "does what you want". Too bad there is no sign of such interfaces showing up in real-world applications, either open or closed...

Hmmm... There are several highly useful applications that sport exactly (well, close it it... they are more powerful than Teddy) that type of interface. They are the "secrets" of the 3D modelling world and once you use them you'll wish everything else worked like them.

Mirai and Nendo are two commercial offerings and Wings 3D is a free modeling app that has a similar interface. Dispite all the Maya press, Mirai was used for some critical parts of LOTR.

Izware (aka Winged Edge Technologies; aka Nichimen; aka Symbolics; aka ...) is the company that makes Mirai and Nendo. They have always been a strange company with very poor marketing and management skills so not many people know how great their stuff is. The company is always in a bizarre state of flux. For instance right now their main page says "We'll be right back" with no other links at all (it's been like this for ages; more than a year).

Wings 3D fits between Nendo and Mirai. It's better than Nendo but doesn't offer all that Mirai does. However, it's free and open-source.

The key to the useful UI is the context sensitive menus. All complex applications should work this way because it narrows down the possible actions to what you're working on. Instead of having hundreds or thousands of menus and buttons to push (*cough* 3DSMAX *cough*), you just have simple context menus based on what you have selected. It's a superb interface for managing complexity.

Plus the help system is built right into the interface.

Re:I saw this at Siggraph

[symbolic]

There's one catch - "doing what you want" is not always the easiest, nor the fastest way to do something. For example, what if, instead of just drawing a line, I want to draw a straight line. Suddenly, I need some kind of function that will constrain the movement along one axis. The alternative is to spend oodles of time trying to tweak a line until it's straight enough. What if I want to start out with a geographic primitive? Am I supposed to build one from scratch? Once I have that, what if I need to scale a part of it? Should that be done manually? Let's say I'd like to duplicate it and the flip it across an axis (often used for creating identical left/right portions of object)? Do I spend gobs of time doing this manually?

Tools have their place- and often, if used correctly, they are there to help us produce superior results, and save significant amounts of time in the process. Just like an empty window, they aren't a substitute for talent and artistic skill, but they can sure provide ways to automate the purely tedious aspects of 3D modeling.

while the video is unavailable

[butane_bob2003]

try the application itself. I was going to try it, but it requires windows for some of it's native rendering code (looks like direct x calls).

Artform Curvy 3D

[GeLeTo]

Check out Atrform's curvy 3d . It is quite similar to teddy but much more advanced. You can create very complex shapes with just a few strokes. The gallery and tutorials are very impressive.

It is still a toy

[cabodine]

I have seen this demoed at CMU it was cool but for the most part it was useless, just a toy. I do have a back ground in 3D so I know something of the subject. Any one looking into 3D animation or modeling for a hobby would be bored with this in 10 minutes. You have no control over fine details, it is worse then trying to sculpting clay with boxing gloves on. If there is a program out there that looks like it can make it so easy to make a 3d model then it falls into one of two groups niche or toy.

Niche; being that it works great on one thing, programs that can take a set of photo pictures into a 3D model.

Toy; like smooth teddy. Microsoft had a 3D program back in the day it was so basic it was more a tool / demo of what Windows 3.1/95 could do , this was before they owned Softimage.

That is my two cents.

Alias Sketch

[simpl3x]

there is already a purpose! and in conjunction with Alias design tools there is some integration, and more I would expect in the future. As a Mac person primarily, i am often put off by Steve's blanket denunciation of platforms (Newton) and technology (interconnectedness--Appletalk vs TCP-IP). I use my tablet to design packaging conncepts, which i export to TIFFS, and incorporate them into documents for clients. I would love a high power Mac tablet pc like device, but i doubt that will happen soon. even on the Windows side, the tablet pc's are generally underpowered for tasks like 3d.

This reminds me of Magic Pengel

[ProppaT]

Gamers out there might remember a game that game out about a year ago on the PS2 called Magic Pengel. It reminds me quite a bit of this project.

In this game, you used a variety of different brushes to draw a monster. You had different options, such as picking a "head" brush to signify the object you were drawing was part of the monsters head, etc...but, for the most part, the game just saw the lines you were drawing. The AMAZING part of this game was that it would take your 2d sketch and, for the most part, flesh it out in 3d. Not only that, it would also fully animate the model through a built in algorithm.

The impressive part was how well this worked. Not only did it do what it was supposed to do but, in most cases, it actually realistically animated the monster. It's a little cutesy, but you guys who are into this kind of thing should check it out!

Using the program

[MilenCent]

I downloaded SmoothTeddy when I first saw it on boingboing and have been playing with it a little. It's nice being able to create 3D images so flexibly, but there are bugs in the system. The interface has many elements of gestures (delete a shape by drawing a line from it to a trashcan, cut it apart by drawing a line across it, mirror it by drawing a line from a shape off into the air). However it's written in Java and it shows. It's more of a technology demo than something that can be used for real work at the moment. The program's only export format is to Alice, a combination 3D modelling/programming system (well... that's technically true at least, heh). The guy's page said that there's a commercial product in Japan that uses the Teddy technology, but that it's Japanese-only.

Ignoring the bugs (many of which cause the program to freeze if an incorrect stroke is drawn), there are some cool elements to this. Most things you can draw end up looking almost exactly like a big pillow. You can draw objects on the pillow that intersect it and then adjust their location on the pillow's surface. When it gets where you want it you can "merge" it with the pillow. The program tries to create smooth meshes wherever it can, and making sharp corners is almost impossible without creative use of the cutting tool.

Verdict: fun to play with if you have a good tolerance for bugs and don't mind that you won't be able to easily get your work into another program.

smoothteddy.avi.torrent (=

[algeliten]

From me, to you. But I don't except the server to survive a real slashdotting, so behave.

the video

MetaCreations Canoma

[GoRK]

MetaCreations had a product called Canoma that you'd import a photo or two, describe the 3d scene in the photo with basic modelling, then it would create a 3d textured representation from the photos. It didn't make really really wonderful scenes or anything, but the stuff you could do with it in about an hour were incredible.

Adobe purchased the product from MetaCreations and it's not being sold anymore. Perhaps it will come out again in the future to compliment their horrible Atmosphere product.

Also, Java sucks.

~GoRK

Re:Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torre

[p3d0]

Maybe people who post 48MB files on their website should smarten up and use Bittorrent themselves. Even if they don't get slashdotted, it's a wise move if they expect more than a few people to want the file.

Re:Mirror ?

[mskfisher]

Mod parent AC up, contains valid torrent link for the video (maxing out my T1 as we speak:

http://alge.nlc.no/smoothteddy.avi.torrent

Re:Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torre

[jjc2222]

You have to ask yourself what the intended audience and expected traffic of the website are. It's not RedHat posting .isos of its distribution. It's not a movie studio putting out a trailer that it wants to be seen by everyone. It's a university researcher who put up a website to give the curious someplace to go when they hear about his research. In fact, it's likely that he doesn't give a hoot about Slashdot. So why should anyone expect him to handle the Slashdot DDOS that comes his way? I expect that he's too busy working on his interesting research to deal with administering a bulletproof website.