Kolja Kähler

Games = Art + Tech + ❤

Kolja

  • Bouncing Ball Physics

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    To revive my Blender skills, I’ve been tinkering with setting up a simple bouncing ball animation. How do you keyframe this properly, without running a physics simulation? There are tons of tutorials on the web on basic bouncing ball demos, but few go into details about what a physically plausible bouncing ball trajectory would look like. As it turns out, with an ideal bouncing ball, there are only a few…

  • Smoke Simulation

    Smoke Simulation

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    • Working prototype
    • C++ / Qt / OpenGL / GLSL
    • Fluid dynamics

  • Volumes and surfaces

    Volumes and surfaces

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    • Research prototype
    • C++ / Qt / OpenGL / GLSL
    • Volume visualization
    • Geometry processing

  • Qt and OpenGL programming in Python

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    Qt is a well-established framework for developing GUI applications in C++, and it has good support for OpenGL. It is relatively cumbersome, though, to set up a project for just a simple, experimental application. Moreover, even though Qt and OpenGL are portable, carrying over your project from, say, your Linux box to a Windows PC is not completely seamless, due to different compiler configurations, etc. Being a Friend of Python,…

  • Ocean water simulation

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    At Scanline VFX, we were doing a whole lot of CG water for the movie “Megalodon – Hai-Alarm auf Mallorca”. I leave it to you to rate the movie, but, hey: the project got me a credit on The Internet Movie Database. My part in this was the R&D on ocean water surface simulation. I ended up doing a variation of the FFT-based approach put forth by Jerry Tessendorf, and combined…

  • Facial Animation and Modeling

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    Facial animation is, despite all advances on the technical front, still a challenge and a rewarding research subject. This might be the one-line summary of my PhD thesis, the outcome of my time at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken. In a few more words, I developed an anatomy-based modeling approach in conjunction with a physically-based animation system. The title of my thesis is “A Head Model with Anatomical Structure…

  • Fun with the Fourier Transform

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    This text is a highly subjective collection of topics around the Fourier transform, focusing on issues often left out in textbook treatments. If you already have a basic understanding of what the Fourier transform is, I hope these notes can provide further insight. fouriertransform.pdfDownload

  • Vergleich von Volumenmodellen

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    Kolja Kähler Masterarbeit, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 2009. This text is in German. medphys-masterDownload

  • 3D Facial Animation – Recreating human heads with virtual skin, bones, and muscles

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    Kolja KählerVDM Verlag Dr. Müller e.K., 2007; Paperback, 172 pages. ISBN-13: 978-3836444804

  • A Head Model with Anatomical Structure for Facial Modeling and Animation

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    Kolja KählerPhD thesis, Universität des Saarlandes, 2003. Dissertation_Web.pdfDownload