Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

The EVASION project addresses the modeling, animation, visualization and rendering of natural scenes and phenomena. In addition to the high impact of this research on audiovisual applications (3D feature films, special effects, video games), the rising demand for efficient visual simulations in areas such as environment and medicine is also addressed. We thus study objects from the animal, mineral and vegetal realm, all being possibly integrated into a complex natural scene. We constantly seek a balance between efficiency and visual realism. This balance depends on the application (e.g., the design of immersive simulators requires real-time, while the synthesis of high quality images may be the primary goal in other applications).

From its creation, EVASION mostly tackled the modeling, animation, visualization and rendering of isolated natural objects or phenomena. A very challenging long term goal, that may be not reachable within the next few years but towards which we should tend, would be to simulate full, complex natural scenes combining many elements of different nature. This would enable us to test our algorithms on real-size data and to achieve new applications such as the interactive exploration of a complex, heterogeneous data set from simulation, or of a visually credible natural scene. Being able to animate this scene during exploration and to interact with the simulation taking place would be very interesting. The three objectives below set up several milestones towards this long term goal.