[HN Gopher] Stanford Bunny
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       Stanford Bunny
        
       Author : dcminter
       Score  : 101 points
       Date   : 2021-05-25 12:18 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | riffic wrote:
       | better than that damned teapot.
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | The teapot was actually designed with Bezier surfaces. That
         | makes it a whole different animal.
        
           | tinus_hn wrote:
           | The teapot is a design, the bunny is a scan. That is the most
           | important difference.
        
             | dahart wrote:
             | What do you mean exactly? The teapot was "scanned" from a
             | physical model, not designed from scratch. I'm quoting
             | "scanned" because it was a manual process, and it'd be fair
             | to say there was a little bit of design involved. But the
             | primary distinction you made here between design and scan
             | isn't really accurate without more qualification or
             | explanation. You can see pictures of the original physical
             | teapot model and the scan data (drawings) on the WP page
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
        
         | paulpauper wrote:
         | the teapot was done 2 decades earlier. much more impressive
         | technologically. think about trying to display pixelated
         | graphics in 3d on 70s tech. mind blown.
        
       | anonu wrote:
       | Reminds me of Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
        
         | toxik wrote:
         | I think it's sad that Lenna had to go, with vague arguments of
         | sexism. She's a photo model. Most photo models are women,
         | because that's the reality we live in. I would have thought it
         | cute that my (tiny) country is represented in these contexts,
         | but no, she was a beautiful woman and that's sexist to use as a
         | test subject.
        
           | saagarjha wrote:
           | Without passing any judgement, I think it's important to note
           | that she is a nude photo model. The image is a cropped
           | Playboy centerfold.
        
           | jimmaswell wrote:
           | I wonder how much of the push against Lenna was veiled
           | jealousy.
        
       | flakiness wrote:
       | I had no idea about Easter when I downloaded and tweaked the mesh
       | model as a collage student. It was too foreign to me as a non-
       | Christian county (Japan) resident. I dreamed to get to see that
       | "special" bunny someday. Now live in U.S. the same-looking bunny
       | is everywhere and I've lost the interest getting one. Still, from
       | time to time I wonder which bunny it exactly was and if I can
       | find one, in the mob.
       | 
       | Tangentially related, I bought a teapot from Melitta on e-bay and
       | am still using it. It's not "that" one, but it shares some of the
       | taste from the brand. The teapot has a piece of uniqueness,
       | unlike the bunny.
        
         | anonu wrote:
         | You mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
        
           | lapetitejort wrote:
           | OP could also be referring to Russell's Teapot, although I
           | think that model stopped production in the 70s.
        
           | ink_13 wrote:
           | It turns out those are still made by the original factory in
           | Germany: https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne
        
             | tralarpa wrote:
             | That's interesting. The article says that, until recently,
             | the company didn't know that their teapot is so famous.
        
       | laddershoe wrote:
       | Man, does that thing bring back memories. I did my PhD in
       | computer graphics (though I no longer work in that field) -- I've
       | written several papers and read more than I can count. That bunny
       | is iconic and still shows up in some absurd number, although it's
       | considered a trivially simple model now. Even so, it can find
       | ways to bite you; there are holes in the base can cause problems
       | with some algorithms (sure you can find watertight versions...
       | but that's cheating ;)
       | 
       | Fun times.
        
       | SavantIdiot wrote:
       | Hugh Hoppe, from Microsoft, wrote some fundamental progressive-
       | mesh code that he showed at SIGGRAPH '97 using this model.
       | Instead of the code having to choose from different model
       | resolutions (like the original four bunny models), the algorithm
       | would allow DirectX to reduce the vertex count based on the
       | rendered size of the object (1 pixel only needs 1 vertex!) to
       | save compute cycles.
       | 
       | I wonder if geometry compression is still a thing given the
       | performance increases of GPUs. I haven't done 3D driver work
       | since DirectX 5....
        
         | flakiness wrote:
         | For someone who's moderately interested:
         | http://hhoppe.com/lapped_stonebunny_siggraph_cover.html
         | 
         | Glad to see he's still "the mesh guy", wondering what he's
         | doing at Google. http://hhoppe.com/#publications
        
         | corysama wrote:
         | Continuous LOD research dropped off dramatically when GPUs got
         | vertex shaders. At that point, having the CPU touching the
         | vertex data at all became more expensive than it could be
         | worth.
         | 
         | Instead, 3 or 4 static LODs have been the way to go. Those
         | static meshes can be individually well optimized. There are
         | surprisingly few good options for auto generating static LODs
         | even today...
         | 
         | Mesh Shaders are opening up whole new opportunities that are
         | only starting to be explored. You get far more general purpose,
         | compute shader like features. But, you have to work in small
         | packets. Funny enough, they are a lot like PlayStation 2 vector
         | unit programming made modern. That design really was ahead of
         | it's time. But, the fundamental physics advantages of SIMD
         | working on a small chunk of SRAM are as valid as ever.
        
         | Causality1 wrote:
         | It pleases me that someone named Hoppe picked a rabbit for the
         | demo.
        
           | SavantIdiot wrote:
           | Ha! In 24 years I never made that connection.
        
         | plafl wrote:
         | Not for GPUs AFAIK but still related:
         | https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/
        
         | Philip-J-Fry wrote:
         | It's funny you say that because that's effectively what Unreal
         | Engine 5 is doing with it's Nanite technology. Also released in
         | early access today.
         | 
         | I do wonder what the problem was that needed to be solved
         | before we got Nanite. Everyone knew that automatically
         | optimising the geometry for the size on the screen was doable.
         | Maybe it was a storage limitation?
        
         | wetmore wrote:
         | Very much still a thing, e.g. for reducing the poly count of a
         | mesh before running it through a procedure to spit out gcode
         | for 3d printing or milling.
        
         | dahart wrote:
         | Yeah, geometry compression is definitely still a thing. The
         | main reason is that the relative gap between compute speed and
         | memory bandwidth is still growing. It's pretty common now to
         | bump into situations where redundant computation is faster than
         | reading saved results from memory. Compression is perhaps
         | ironically or surprisingly getting more important as GPU perf
         | increases...
        
       | dzign wrote:
       | And its friends, Utah teapot, Cornell box and Susanne, the
       | Blender monkey.
        
         | Daub wrote:
         | The Utah teapot, or the 'teapotahedron' as it is sometimes
         | termed.
        
           | genpfault wrote:
           | The 6th Platonic solid[1]
           | 
           | [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Six_P
           | lato...
        
         | sp332 wrote:
         | And the tree
         | http://web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/stanford/thetree.html
         | 
         | I know the tree is different, but I mention it because they put
         | out some software, named Dryad, that let you explore the latent
         | space of tree parameters - leaf shape, branch angle, etc. And
         | the default tree was one that resembled the mascot. The
         | software was discontinued and I guess the standard Stanford
         | Tree model never took off.
        
       | LegitShady wrote:
       | Ive always used benchy the boat.
       | 
       | www.3dbenchy.com
        
       | nonsen wrote:
       | I'm sure I ate one of these as a child.
        
         | FriendlyNormie wrote:
         | That explains a lot of things.
        
         | teachingassist wrote:
         | The Lindt bunny does look similar but I guess it's lower
         | resolution ;-)
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-26 23:01 UTC)