Friday, June 16, 2006

Real-time hair animation

I used the Verlet integration and relaxation method described by Thomas Jakobsen in "Advanced Character Physics" [1] coupled with the animation techniques suggested by Chang, Jin, and Yu in [2] to make a fast hair simulation. My resulting video [3] was captured in real-time. The program can actually be sped up significantly by placing bounding boxes around individual quads, vertices, and segments; however, I ran into bugs when I tried to do this, so I left that optimization out for now. The results are interesting because they indicate that in video games, hair can be animated in real-time with relative ease. The source code has been placed in the public domain.
(Video) (Writeup) (Source Code)

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Automatic Python imports with autoimp

I got sick of writing "import X" in Python. So, I created the public domain module autoimp, which imports all modules automatically:
>>> from autoimp import *
>>> os.stat('.')
>>> Image.open('test.bmp')
>>> pylab.plot([1,2],[3,4])
>>> scipy.linalg.eig([[1,2],[3,4]])
>>> ...
Thus one no longer needs to write "import X". It would take too long to load every module when one writes "from autoimp import *", so the imported modules are actually proxy objects which lazily load when they are first used.
(Module Website)