Oscar Argudo

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Polytechnic University of Catalonia

Human and animal presence in natural landscapes is initially revealed by the immediate impact of their locomotion, from footprints to crushed grass. In this work, we present an approach to model the effects of virtual characters on natural terrains, focusing on the impact of human locomotion. We introduce a lightweight solution to compute accurate...

The creation of truly believable simulated natural environments remains an unsolved problem in Computer Graphics. This is, in part, due to a lack of visual variety. In nature, apart from variation due to abiotic and biotic growth factors, a significant role is played by disturbance events, such as fires, windstorms, disease, and death and decay pro...

High-end Terrestrial Lidar Scanners are often equipped with RGB cameras that are used to colorize the point samples. Some of these scanners produce panoramic HDR images by encompassing the information of multiple pictures with different exposures. Unfortunately, exported RGB color values are not in an absolute color space, and thus point samples wi...

Glaciers are some of the most visually arresting and scenic elements of cold regions and high mountain landscapes. Although snow-covered terrains have previously received attention in computer graphics, simulating the temporal evolution of glaciers as well as modeling their wide range of features has never been addressed. In this paper, we combine...

We present an interactive aeolian simulation to author hot desert scenery. Wind is an important erosion agent in deserts which, despite its importance, has been neglected in computer graphics. Our framework overcomes this and allows generating a variety of sand dunes, including barchans, longitudinal and anchored dunes, and simulates abrasion which...

Mountainous digital terrains are an important element of many virtual environments and find application in games, film, simulation and training. Unfortunately, while existing synthesis methods produce locally plausible results they often fail to respect global structure. This is exacerbated by a dearth of automated metrics for assessing terrain pro...

The automatic generation of realistic vegetation closely reproducing the appearance of specific plant species is still a challenging topic in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a new approach to generate new tree models from a small collection of frontal RGBA images of trees. The new models are represented either as single billboards (sui...

Despite recent advances in surveying techniques, publicly available Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of terrains are low‐resolution except for selected places on Earth. In this paper we present a new method to turn low‐resolution DEMs into plausible and faithful high‐resolution terrains. Unlike other approaches for terrain synthesis/amplification (f...

The visual enrichment of digital terrain models with plausible synthetic detail requires the segmentation of aerial images into a suitable collection of categories. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for segmenting high-resolution aerial images into a user-defined set of categories distinguishing e.g. terrain, sand, snow, water, and diffe...

We present an efficient method for generating coherent multi-layer landscapes. We use a dictionary built from exemplars to synthesize high-resolution fully featured terrains from input low-resolution elevation data. Our example-based method consists in analyzing real-world terrain examples and learning the procedural rules directly from these input...

The use of virtual prototypes and digital models containing thousands of individual objects is commonplace in complex industrial applications like the cooperative design of huge ships. Designers are interested in selecting and editing specific sets of objects during the interactive inspection sessions. This is however not supported by standard visu...

State-of-the-art approaches for tree reconstruction either put limiting constraints on the input side (requiring multiple photographs, a scanned point cloud or intensive user input) or provide a representation only suitable for front views of the tree. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for synthesizing and rendering detailed trees from a...

We discuss bi-harmonic fields which approximate signed distance fields. We conclude that the bi-harmonic field approximation can be a powerful tool for mesh completion in general and complex cases. We present an adaptive, multigrid algorithm to extrapolate signed distance fields. By defining a volume mask in a closed region bounding the area that m...