All the
World's
A Stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Real time graphics and animation on GPU: amorphous effects, water,
fur, skin deformation
Knowledge based Character Synthesis
CG Production Tools: computation models and workflows
Direct-able Urban Crowd Behavior
Machine learning in Games
Motion Editing
Interactive Stories for Babies
Available Opportunities
There is a lot of interest and funding
opportunities in the area of gaming and media now. If you are
keenly interested in any of the topics above, and have a good
track record, you may email me your resume and letter of
intent (<300KB, simple text preferred) for the position of:
Research Fellow (Ph.D. or 10+ years of
relevant technical experience)
Research Assistant (Masters or four
year bachelors in Computer Science/Engineering)
Ph.D. Candidate (Masters or four
year bachelors in Computer Science/Engineering)
Please do not send any bulky attachments. You
should send web links instead. Note that Ph.D. candidature has
to be first approved by the University and you are required to
meet all its requirements and pass the necessary exams.
Only applications with good portfolio and academic track record
will be seriously considered. For Research Fellow and Research
Assistant positions, pls. state your current and expected
salaries.
Projects
Real time Muscle Deformation (2007)
Existing anatomy based articulated models use complicated networks of springs
and expensive wrap deformation-like methods, making them unusable in games.
We have successfully attempted drastically simplified spring dynamics and
weighted skin deformation (similar to smooth skinning to skeletal joints).
Our method can be easily adapted to existing character production pipelines,
and produce a variety of shape and motion for the same character mesh.
Published in CGVR' 07.
Real time Ontogenetic Modeling of
Amorphous Phenomena (current)
Earlier work on non-real
time dust rendering has been extended to real time smoke,
dust and fire with the aid of vertex and pixel shaders
using Shader Model 3.0. By approaching the surface
shading problem as a hybrid procedural fractal noise
function and image post-processing, we have managed to
achieve a wide variety of appearances by adjusting just
a few parameters. Status: currently under submission.
Students: Koh Kok Weng, Goh Cheng Teng
Real time Ontogenetic Modeling of
Shallow Water Interaction (current)
Earlier work
on non-real
time water splashing has been extended
to work seamlessly with the 2D wave equation, a fast
fluid physics computation that has been mapped to the GPU by NVidia. Amongst extensions are arbitrary shaped
ripples and splash funnels, and automatic floating
object animation. The latter is derived from the fluid
simulation vectors, and accumulated into an offset
texture that is read back by a vertex shader, just
before drawing floating objects. Status: currently
under submission.
Students: Julius Ang Sze Vin (currently at EA
Singapore)
Real time Skin Deformation for
Animated Crowds (2005-2006)
This research explores skeletal deformation calculations
on the GPU for crowds of articulated figures. It
compares a few strategies for efficient reuse of such
calculations on clones. We further propose ideas that
will reduce chances of detecting such duplication. We
have achieved a realistic crowd population of 1000
animated humans at interactive rates. Published in
Multimedia Modeling 2007.
Students: Zhou Junyu (currently at EA
Singapore) site |
paper
Real time Fur Rendering with Shells
and Curves (2004-2006)
This research proposes a real time fur system for games
and interactive media, covering styling, representation
and rendering. We combine Lengyel’s overlapped textures
with geometric curves to better capture the essence of
fur style and motion, apart from filling up large
volumes in real time. Most of the geometry and rendering
computations have been mapped to the GPU. We have
achieved aesthetically pleasing results for animated
grassy terrains and furry creatures, implemented on
commodity PC graphics cards at interactive rates of
10-15 frames per second. Status: currently under
submission.
Students: Ng Chongming (currently at G-Gadget
Singapore),
Goh Cheng Teng,
Lim Chin Teck (currently at Lucasfilm Animation
Singapore),
Chio Binghuan (currently at EA
Singapore)
Ontogenetic
Modeling of Dust and
Water Splashing with Renderman (1998)
By shading
only the surfaces of regular primitives and overlapping
a few such primitives, we can create the illusion of
volume. Thus costly particles and volume rendering can
be avoided. Instead, meta-particle systems control the
shape, lifetime and overall appearance of dust clumps
and water splash units. Additional primitives for splash
and ripples are created and distorted with displacement
and surface shaders. The reflection is created using
environment mapping tricks, to avoid costly ray tracing.
Published in Journal of Visualization & Computer
Animation.
Golam Ashraf, Wong Kok
Cheong, Dynamic Time Warp Based Framespace
Interpolation for Motion Editing, Graphics
Interface 2000, Montreal, Canada, May 2000.
Golam Ashraf, Wong Kok
Cheong, Dust and Water Splashing Models for Hopping
Figures, Pacific Graphics '98, Sixth Pacific
Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications,
Singapore, October 1998.
Golam Ashraf, M. N.
Chong, Performance Analysis of H.261 and H.263 Video
Coding Algorithms, IEEE Proceedings of
International Symposium on Consumer Electronics
(ISCE'97), Singapore, Dec. 1997
Here
is a formal write-up on my teaching methods and experiences
after my first semester in NUS: Active Learning and Critical Thinking in a Game Development
Course, Experiments in Pedagogy, Selected Papers from Professional Development Programme
(Teaching) NUS,
Vol. 1, pg 1-8, Jan. 2006
Aw Xin-Wei (05)
Chia Wen Jie, Alvin (05)
Chio Binghuan (05)
Chua Bee Peng (04)
Goh Cheng Teng (05)
Ho Wu Yee (04)
Lee Chin Li, Paul (05)
Leow Su Jun (05)
Ng Chongming (05)
Steven Halim (04)
Tan Lei (05)
Tong Derong, Andre (05)
Zheng Haojie (05)
Due to ideosyncracies of our CGI server, pls. ensure you have JRE 1.5 or above for content to show up properly. Java updates available here.
Ashraf loves stage theater, especially when he is acting in
over-the-board-larger-than-life roles. Much of his directorial
instincts are drawn from his acting experience, since he
started off at the ripe old age of three. He weaves together
knowledge gathered
from street theater (Badal Sircar – Kolkata), puppetry &
clay modeling (Shyamli Khastagir – Shantiniketan, Bengal),
and a variety of computing concepts (animation, parallel
processing, data management.). He relies on common sense, simplicity, and
detailed analysis of
characters and plots. Evolving texture and back stories give
an extra edge of realism to his plays. He likes to
meticulously plan lighting, set design, personnel and prop movement.
He often relies on advanced
visualization and scheduling technologies to minimize
overheads during tech-runs. He has constructed
interactive visual backdrops for performances and finds it
an exciting area for further exploration.
After completing his undergraduate degree, Ashraf started
Nautanki, a quality annual drama event managed by his
group (Precocious Puppets). He has successfully led students from
the three Singapore universities: NTU, NUS and SMU;
to publicly showcase popular/original plays in
Singapore between 1999-2005.
Singapore maintains its rich green heritage in the form of nature reserves bordering
reservoirs and mangrove hinterlands. On the left is one of my first explorations in
mixing audio and imagery, using material sampled from a trip to Peirce Reservoir.
The presentations below use a refined version of this UI, and are driven entirely
by textual metadata.
Presented below is a montage of photos shot in several
countries over the last couple of years. I shoot with a
semi-professional digital camera (Canon Powershot S1 IS) that
gives me manual control over zoom, exposure and focus. It is
easy on the hands and very compact... ideal for shooting elusive
creatures on rugged terrain... I'd rather keep my cover and
foothold, than lug a 10kg telescope.
Depending on your link bandwidth, each montage may take a while to load, so just click the link and leave the montage window open.
I love traveling... especially far from the
madding crowd... to mountains, forests, beaches, lakes, fjords,
glaciers, waterfalls, villages... okay, you get the picture. My
travel philosophy... drive between destinations (with full car
insurance), leave enough time to hike at each stopover, plan
your own itinerary, avoid packages, live in youth hostels (so
you meet exciting folks and get best local info), travel light,
carry your favorite snack from the local grocery store before
you leave country, carry generous amounts of crepe bandage
(sprains), panadol, insect repellant, flash light (when you have
missed the last train and get stuck in the mountains) and a hot
water bag... I do sound like a granny... but let me tell you, I
have never been over-prepared in any of my sojourns. A desperate
3 hour walk down the world's steepest cog rail in pitch dark
(Zermatt, Matterhorn), both ankles sprained within 1 km down Mt.
Ruapehu, gushing nose in the blistering winds of Seven Sisters
(Rocky mountains), near-death-car-skid in a gravelly dusk at
Queenstown.... yeah, nature has been fairly kind with me.
:)
A lot of my
earlier journeys don't have good pictures as I used to have an
analog video camera... thankfully I have switched to a Canon
digital camera now, and find it a much more convenient way to
capture memories.
Travel list
India: Kashmiri Himalayas (Srinagar/Dal
Lake, Sonemarg, Gulmarg, Jammu), Madras (Golden Beach,
prehistoric temples), Puri/Orissa (sea beach),
Darjeeling/West Bengal (sight of Mt. Kanchenjunga and Mt.
Everest), 1980-1994
Bhutan: scenic drive to the capital
Thimpu as a child
USA: Indianapolis, New York, Detroit,
Chicago, covering Lake Michigan and Niagra Falls, 1998. Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Boston, 2007
Studied in St. James School, Calcutta, one of
the top schools in India. Developed a love for
theater and computing. Participated in many
extracurricular activities including elocution,
debating, and puppetry [1979-1994]
Awarded SIA-NOL scholarship for undergraduate
degree in Computer Engineering at NTU, Singapore
[1994-1998]
Awarded Caldecott Production International award
for Outstanding Graphics project for his
Renderman-based dust and water splashing models
[1998]
Awarded full scholarship for Ph.D. on automatic
analytical correspondence and interpolation between
human motions [1998-2001]
Worked on several movie production tools and
pipelines in support of a movie production in
Singapore. These included fur rendering, dynamics
based animation, and parallelization of graphics
pipelines. [2001-2004]
Joined School of Computing, National University
of Singapore as a teaching track faculty member.
Developed the Game Development and Interactive Media
curriculums from scratch, with emphasis on active
learning. Top students are working in various game
and media companies like EA Singapore, Lucasfilm
Animation Singapore, NexGen, G-Gadget, Capcom,
etc.[2004-]
Current research in real time amorphous effects
and fur mapped on the GPU has excited the local
media industry. Working with partners to port
research to consumer products. Applying for funding
for CG production pipeline and Game Character
research. [2004-2006]
