Often, I get some of my best ideas in the morning, when it’s quiet, closing my eyes and envisioning my thoughts. By the time I’ve had my coffee and ready to walk out the door, they may not be as apparent, if at all. If I were hardwired to a computer, my thoughts could be reviewed and analyzed, adding an additional dimension to assessing their applicable value.

Though it may not be currently possible to store and retrieve actual thoughts from a hard drive, content that is stored and retrievable is derived through a conscious thought process. Computer graphics applications allow for a visual analysis of the data for use in multiple areas. This issue takes up four.

Alex Herrera, Senior Analyst at Jon Peddie Research introduces readers to Real-time Rendering software solution MachStudio Pro developed by StudioGPU, giving CG artists resources to narrow the gap between creating and reviewing work in progress through high quality real-time rendering.

Murat Kurt, together with co-authors László Szirmay-Kalos and Jaroslav Křivánek, has submitted the third in a series of related articles entitled “An Anisotropic BRDF Model for Fitting and Monte Carlo Rendering” proposing a new physically plausible, anisotropic Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function for fitting and for importance sampling in global illumination rendering.

Tung-Ju Hsieh, Assistant Professor, National Taipei University of Technology writes about how computer graphics can translate earthquake data as visual renditions of occurrences over time, providing an enhanced understanding of the field measured seismic data sets.

This issue I have taken the liberty to submit an article to share a web based solution for collecting student art work for reviewing, assessing and archiving with an article entitled "Using an Internet Based Process to Assess Student Art Skills".

In addition, Mark Chavez, Assistant Professor, at Nanyang Technological University has been gracious in accepting a request for a “Members at Work” article. The piece he has submitted is entitled “From the Animation Industry to Academia and Research”, truly a captivating contribution, of which one of his images was used for this issue's cover.

Happy reading,

Hans Westman
Editor

ACM SIGGRAPH "Computer Graphics" newsletter ISSN: 0097-8930