Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The virtual worlds found in computer-generated films and computer games are populated by characters, objects, and landscapes that are created by skilled digital artists. Although computational tools are available to create simple virtual scenery in the form of hills, trees, and mountains, the creators of virtual worlds want fantastical effects. In the movie Cars, for example, the world was designed with a car-centred aesthetic: flowers resembled tailfins, and mountains resembled hubcaps. Virtual worlds are populated by strange, alien scenery and by the remnants of antiquity: gnarled trees bristle with spirits, and ruined temples sprawl hidden behind every hill. This project will extend the range of computer-generated scenery to include stylized natural scenery and historical human-made artifacts. Computers will create trees which resemble human faces when seen from precisely the right angle, and mountains which reveal ancient writing when the sun shines from exactly the right direction. They will produce sculptures, architectural adornments, mosaics, and all manner of other artworks. The computational tools created by this project will allow artists to create ever more vivid, complex, and engaging virtual worlds for the digital entertainments of the future.