The goal of this thesis was to propose algorithms for procedural generation of realistic three-dimensional tree models and implement them as a library. This library uses a set of 92 mostly numerical parameters as an input and enables to export generated model into 3DS or OBJ file. It's an objective library, written in C++ language and designed mainly for MS Windows platform. Proposed algorithms are able to generate specific biologic species of broadleaf and coniferous trees.

This study examined Stanislavski's system as it was explained in his three books, An Actor Prepares, Building A Character, and Creating A Character. The study then examined the applicability of the Stanislavski System to the theaters of Bertolt Brecht and Absurdist theatre as represented by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

Aspects of Engaging Problem Contexts From Students' PerspectivesTamara Kay Gandolph StarkDepartment of Mathematics Education, BYUMaster of ArtsToo many students have negative feelings towards mathematics which is causing them to disengage in their classrooms. This has led to student under-achievement. This study attempts to better understand how teachers can help students to reengage with mathematics by using more engaging contexts to develop mathematical content. The study began with the characteristics realistic, worthwhile, enjoyable or motivating as a framework for posing engaging problem contexts, which were synthesized from the current research literature. As students discussed what made contexts engaging, my understanding of what engaging problem contexts looked like expanded. The characteristics realistic and worthwhile were combined. Students felt contexts were more realistic and worthwhile when the contexts were authentic, purposeful and related to their everyday lives or a potential career situation. Furthermore, students felt context was enjoyable when it was interactive or included a good story. Finally, students discussed their frustration with repetition within problem contexts. Even if certain types of problems were engaging at first, if they saw them over and over again, they became unengaged. Students wanted to see a variety of new ideas and different kinds of contexts. This study better informs teachers and curriculum writers on what to include/exclude to make contexts more engaging for students.

This thesis evaluates two different approaches of using panoramic street view images for creating more photo-realistic 3D city models comparing to 3D city models based on only aerial images. The thesis work has been carried out at Blom Sweden AB with the use of their software and data. The main purpose of this thesis work has been to investigate if street view images can aid in creating more photo-realistic 3D city models on street level through an automatic or semi-automatic approach. Two different approaches have been investigated in this thesis work: using the street view images for texturing already generated 3D building models and using the street view images directly for reconstructing 3D city models. Data was collected over the study area of KTH, Stockholm, Sweden and the models were created with the two software TerraPhoto, used for texturing, and Smart3DCapture, used for reconstruction. The created models were analyzed and compared with the models based on only aerial images and the two approaches were compared to each other. Through using also street view images when creating city models the models are shown to become more photo-realistic representations on street level compared to the models based on only aerial images. The two tested approaches create very different 3D city models in terms of what is visible in the final model, a textured buildings model or a fully reconstructed environment, and also contains different amount of involved manual work. The textured models contain only the buildings and tend to look very flat because the street images are being projected onto flat building walls whereas the reconstructed models reconstructs everything being visible in the images, trees, cars etc., and create a full scale 3D city model. There are however limitations associated with using street view images when modeling cities since they only contain information on the ground level and no information about roofs or higher parts of the city environment and the street view images therefore need to be used in combination with aerial images. Using the street view images for reconstructing city models showed some complications in terms of wavy facades, bumpy roads and objects such as trees being inaccurately modeled. The texturing approach creates less visually pleasing models since objects such as trees and lighting poles are being projected onto the facades. The models based on aerial images look more visually appealing compared to when also using the street view images but lack the resolution be considered as photo-realistic on street level. This thesis work has shown that there is potential in using street view images when creating photo-realistic 3D city models on street level even though it is not yet a semi-automatic or automatic approach. / Denna rapport beskriver två olika tillvägagångssätt för att använda panorama gatubilder för att skapa mer fotorealistiska 3D stadsmodeller jämfört med att enbart använda sig av flygbilder. Arbetet har genomförts i samarbete med Blom Sweden AB som har tillhandahållit programvaror och data i form utav bilder. Det huvudsakliga syftet med studien var att se om gatubilderna kan användas för att skapa mer fotorealistiska 3D stadsmodeller på gatuplan genom ett automatiskt eller halv automatiskt tillvägagångssätt. Två olika tekniker undersöktes: använda gatubilderna för texturering av befintliga 3D byggnadsmodeller och att använda gatubilderna för att direkt rekonstruera 3D stadsmodeller. Data samlades in över studieområdet KTH, Stockholm, och anpassades innan 3D modellerna skapades i programvarorna TerraPhoto, användes för texturering, och Smart3DCapture, användes för rekonstruering. Modellerna blev sedan analyserade och jämförda med modeller baserade på enbart flygbilder och sedan var de två teknikerna jämförda med varandra. Genom att även använda gatubilder vid skapandet av 3D stadsmodeller har det visats att modellerna får ett mer fotorealistiskt utseende jämfört med modeller som är enbart baserade på flygbilder. De två tillvägagångssätten skapar olika typer av modeller i avseendet av vad som finns synligt i modellerna, en texturerad byggnadsmodell eller en helt rekonstruerad miljö, samt att olika mängder av manuellt arbete är involverade i de olika tillvägagångssätten. Den texturerade modellen innehåller enbart byggnader och tenderar till att se väldigt platt ut eftersom gatubilderna blir projicerade på byggnadsfasaderna medan den rekonstruerade modellen innehåller allt som finns synligt i bilderna, träd, bilar etc. och rekonstruerar en 3D stadsmodell som även innehåller den omkringliggande miljön. Det finns dock begränsningar i användandet av gatubilder och den främsta är att de är tagna på gatunivå vilket innebär att det inte finns några bilder över varken tak eller högre delar av stadsmiljön och gatubilderna behöver därför användas i kombination med flygbilder. Att använda gatubilder för rekonstruktion visade sig innebära problem i form av ojämna fasader, gropiga gator och att objekt som träd blir felaktigt modellerade. Den texturerade modellen skapar visuellt mindre tilltalande modeller som ser väldigt platta ut och med objekt projicerade på fasaderna. Stadsmodellerna som enbart är baserade på flygbilder ser visuellt bättre ut jämfört med när även gatubilder används men den låga upplösningen gör att modellerna inte kan ses som fotorealistiska på gatuplan. Det här arbetet har visat att det finns potential i att använda gatubilderna för att skapa fotorealistiska 3D stadsmodeller på gatuplan även om det ännu inte är ett halvautomatiskt eller automatiskt tillvägagångssätt.

Ray tracing is widely used technique for realistic rendering of computer scenes. Its major drawback is time needed to compute the image, therefore it's usually parallelized. This thesis describes parallelization and ray tracing in general. It explains the possibility of how can be ray tracing parallelized as well as it defines the problems which may occur during the process. The result is parallel rendering application which uses selected ray tracing software and measurement of how successful this application is.

No description available.

No description available.

My final thesis exhibition, Fashionable Art, opens up a link between art and fashion. I used clay as my primary medium to create hyper-realistic handbags in the style of Trompe l'oeil. I am interested in placing art in fashion settings and fashion in art settings. In the show, I placed many purses on pedestals for a gallery setting, in a glass case for a purse shop setting and also placed large photos in a fashion photo shoot setting. I am concerned with creating an environment that celebrates the handbag from just an accessory to an art object. By using clay as my primary media, the purse becomes a more permanent representation. I am able to freeze in time a small piece of our cultural timeline. I am interested in creating these hyper-realistic works because I want the viewer to be led into thinking these are real purses and to explore the idea of fashion being more than just a piece of clothing or accessory, but also the history and affect it has on each of us, big or small.

Newbery books are a reliable representation of quality children's literature. They have not previously been formally evaluated by the family structures represented in the books. This content analysis considered 87 contemporary realistic fiction Newbery winner and Honor books since the 1930s that portray families in English-speaking, western settings. The family structures portrayed in these books were compared with the family structure categories of the decade in which each book is set. Percentage comparisons revealed that the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s do not represent the actual family structures of their time period. After the Age of New Realism began in the mid 60s, the family structures in the books more closely matched the family structures of their decade, but several discrepancies remained.

The human hands are one of the most complex organs of the human body. As they enable us to grasp various objects in many different ways, they have played a crucial role in the rise of the human race. Being able to control hands as a human do is a key step towards friendly human-robots interaction and realistic virtual human simulations. Grasp generation has been mostly studied for the purpose of generating physically stable grasps. This paper addresses a different aspect: how to generate realistic, natural looking grasps that are similar to human grasps. To simplify the problem, the wrist position is assumed to be known and only the finger pose is generated. As the realism of a grasp is not easy to put into equations, data-driven machine learning techniques are used. This paper investigated the application of the deep neural networks to the grasp generation problems. Two different object shape representations (point cloud and multi-view depth images), and multiple network architectures are experimented, using a collected human grasping dataset in a virtual reality environment. The resulting generated grasps are highly realistic and human-like. Though there are sometimes some finger penetrations on the object surface, the general poses of the fingers around the grasped objects are similar to the collected human data. The good performance extends to the objects of categories previously unseen by the network. This work has validated the efficiency of a data-driven deep learning approach for human-like grasp synthesis. I believe the realistic-looking objective of the grasp synthesis investigated in this thesis can be combined with the existing mechanical, stable grasp criteria to achieve both natural-looking and reliable grasp generations. / Den mänskliga handen är en av de mest komplexa organen i människokroppen. Eftersom våra händer gör det möjligt för oss att hantera olika föremål på många olika sätt, har de spelat en avgörande roll i människans utveckling. Att kunna styra händer är ett viktigt steg mot interaktion mellan människor och robotar, samt skapa realistiska simuleringar av virtuella människor. Virtualla handgrepp har tidigare mest studerats för att generera fysiskt stabila grepp. I detta papper behandlas en annan aspekt: hur man genererar realistiska grepp som liknar en människas grepp. För att förenkla problemet antas att handledspositionen är känd och endast fingerkonfigurationen genereras. Eftersom hur realistiskt ett grepp är inte är lätt att beskriva i ekvationer, används istället data-driven maskininlärningsteknik. Detta papper undersöker tillämpningen av djupa neurala nätverken (Deep Neural Networks) för att generera grepp. Två olika representationer av former i 3D (punktmoln och bilder med djupinformation) och flera alternativa nätverksarkitekturer utvärderas med hjälp av en databas av mänskliga grepp samlad i en virtuell verklighetsmiljö. De resulterande genererade greppen är mycket realistiska och mänskliga. Även om det ibland förekommer något finger som penetrerar objektet, liknar den allmänna positioneringen av fingrarna den insamlade mänskliga datan. Denna goda prestanda gäller även för föremål i kategorier som aldrig tidigare setts av nätverket. I arbetet valideras också effektiviteten av ett data-drivet tillvägagångssätt baserat på djupa neurala nätverk för människoliknande syntes av grepp