6 ms·

Stanford Bunny

121 points by dcminter 5y ago

SavantIdiot 5y ago
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....
- wetmore 5y ago
  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.
- Causality1 5y ago
  It pleases me that someone named Hoppe picked a rabbit for the demo.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Ha! In 24 years I never made that connection.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  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?
  - rasz 5y ago
    That whole UE5 demo runs close to 1 triangle per pixel, its pure graphical masturbation. The problem is GPU power.
- flakiness 5y ago
  For someone who's moderately interested: http://hhoppe.com/lapped_stonebunny_siggraph_cover.html 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 http://hhoppe.com/#publications
- dahart 5y ago
  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...
- corysama 5y ago
  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.
- plafl 5y ago
  Not for GPUs AFAIK but still related: https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/ https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/
- boulos 5y ago
  > Hugh Hoppe Hugues (though most people pronounce it fairly close to “Hugh’s”, so maybe that’s what stuck for you?)
dzign 5y ago
And its friends, Utah teapot, Cornell box and Susanne, the Blender monkey.
- Daub 5y ago
  The Utah teapot, or the ‘teapotahedron’ as it is sometimes termed.
  - genpfault 5y ago
    The 6th Platonic solid[1] [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Six_Platonic_Solids.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Six_Plato...
- sp332 5y ago
  And the tree http://web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/stanford/thetree.html 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. Edit: I can't find it available for download anywhere, so I put my copy on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/stanford-dryad https://archive.org/details/stanford-dryad It will take some tweaking to get it to run on newer Windows versions. You can see the Stanford Tree model right in the center of the screenshot on the right here: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/dryad-010908.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/dryad-010908.ht...
- figomore 5y ago
  There is also Armadillo and Happy Buddha from Stanford.
nonsen 5y ago
I'm sure I ate one of these as a child.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  The Lindt bunny does look similar but I guess it's lower resolution ;-)
- FriendlyNormie 5y ago
  That explains a lot of things.
LegitShady 5y ago
Ive always used benchy the boat. www.3dbenchy.com
laddershoe 5y ago
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.
riffic 5y ago
better than that damned teapot.
- phkahler 5y ago
  The teapot was actually designed with Bezier surfaces. That makes it a whole different animal.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    The teapot is a design, the bunny is a scan. That is the most important difference.
    - dahart 5y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
      - jreese 5y ago
        The page you link to even talks about it being a model rather than a scan: > It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot > The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.[3] It was one of the first to be modeled (using bézier curves) rather than precisely measured.
        dahart 5y ago
        Yes that's correct. It wasn't scanned in the typical meaning of "scan" at the time, by digitizing the vertices of a triangle mesh. But it also wasn't an original design from scratch - which is what calling it a "design" seems to imply. The Bezier curves were plotted out to match the reference model, the Melitta teapot, so it was in a sense, a manual eyeballed scan. Calling it a "design" as something in opposition to a scan just seems a bit misleading. There is some overlap of those two terms with the Utah Teapot. The shape wasn't an original design, just the topology and representation were, and the digitizing process was manual and approximate, right?
flakiness 5y ago
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 5y ago
  You mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
  - ink_13 5y ago
    It turns out those are still made by the original factory in Germany: https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne
    - tralarpa 5y ago
      That's interesting. The article says that, until recently, the company didn't know that their teapot is so famous.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    OP could also be referring to Russell's Teapot, although I think that model stopped production in the 70s.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Also Tangentially related... What is the bunny in the moon doing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit
anonu 5y ago
Reminds me of Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
- toxik 5y ago
  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.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    I wonder how much of the push against Lenna was veiled jealousy.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    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.
    - toxik 5y ago
      Indeed, and I also think it's important to note that it's a picture from the 70's, an era known for relaxed sexual morals, and particularly in Sweden. The Lenna picture is not something I care deeply about, but the overall trend of post-hoc censoring cultural expressions because some people MAY find them distasteful is letting the bullies win.
optimalsolver 5y ago
I wonder what rabbits think of their representation in human media.
boulos 5y ago
(Posting top-level so it isn’t missed several layers down) For folks that are interested in this kind of thing, Frank Crow’s 1987 article “The Origins of the Teapot” [1] has some great stuff in it (including a small scan of Martin Newell’s graph paper for calculating the points). [1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cg/1987/01/mcg1987010008/13rRUygT7ct https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cg/1987/01/mcg1987010...

121 points by dcminter 5y ago

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....

wetmore 5y ago
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.
Causality1 5y ago
It pleases me that someone named Hoppe picked a rabbit for the demo.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Ha! In 24 years I never made that connection.
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
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?
- rasz 5y ago
  That whole UE5 demo runs close to 1 triangle per pixel, its pure graphical masturbation. The problem is GPU power.
flakiness 5y ago
For someone who's moderately interested: http://hhoppe.com/lapped_stonebunny_siggraph_cover.html 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 http://hhoppe.com/#publications
dahart 5y ago
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...
corysama 5y ago
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.
plafl 5y ago
Not for GPUs AFAIK but still related: https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/ https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/
boulos 5y ago
> Hugh Hoppe Hugues (though most people pronounce it fairly close to “Hugh’s”, so maybe that’s what stuck for you?)

dzign 5y ago

And its friends, Utah teapot, Cornell box and Susanne, the Blender monkey.

Daub 5y ago
The Utah teapot, or the ‘teapotahedron’ as it is sometimes termed.
- genpfault 5y ago
  The 6th Platonic solid[1] [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Six_Platonic_Solids.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Six_Plato...
sp332 5y ago
And the tree http://web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/stanford/thetree.html 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. Edit: I can't find it available for download anywhere, so I put my copy on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/stanford-dryad https://archive.org/details/stanford-dryad It will take some tweaking to get it to run on newer Windows versions. You can see the Stanford Tree model right in the center of the screenshot on the right here: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/dryad-010908.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/dryad-010908.ht...
figomore 5y ago
There is also Armadillo and Happy Buddha from Stanford.

nonsen 5y ago

I'm sure I ate one of these as a child.

teachingassist 5y ago
The Lindt bunny does look similar but I guess it's lower resolution ;-)
FriendlyNormie 5y ago
That explains a lot of things.

LegitShady 5y ago

Ive always used benchy the boat. www.3dbenchy.com

laddershoe 5y ago

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.

riffic 5y ago

better than that damned teapot.

phkahler 5y ago
The teapot was actually designed with Bezier surfaces. That makes it a whole different animal.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  The teapot is a design, the bunny is a scan. That is the most important difference.
  - dahart 5y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
    - jreese 5y ago
      The page you link to even talks about it being a model rather than a scan: > It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot > The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.[3] It was one of the first to be modeled (using bézier curves) rather than precisely measured.
      - dahart 5y ago
        Yes that's correct. It wasn't scanned in the typical meaning of "scan" at the time, by digitizing the vertices of a triangle mesh. But it also wasn't an original design from scratch - which is what calling it a "design" seems to imply. The Bezier curves were plotted out to match the reference model, the Melitta teapot, so it was in a sense, a manual eyeballed scan. Calling it a "design" as something in opposition to a scan just seems a bit misleading. There is some overlap of those two terms with the Utah Teapot. The shape wasn't an original design, just the topology and representation were, and the digitizing process was manual and approximate, right?

flakiness 5y ago

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 5y ago
You mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
- ink_13 5y ago
  It turns out those are still made by the original factory in Germany: https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne
  - tralarpa 5y ago
    That's interesting. The article says that, until recently, the company didn't know that their teapot is so famous.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  OP could also be referring to Russell's Teapot, although I think that model stopped production in the 70s.
kurthr 5y ago
Also Tangentially related... What is the bunny in the moon doing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit

anonu 5y ago

Reminds me of Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

toxik 5y ago
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.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  I wonder how much of the push against Lenna was veiled jealousy.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  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.
  - toxik 5y ago
    Indeed, and I also think it's important to note that it's a picture from the 70's, an era known for relaxed sexual morals, and particularly in Sweden. The Lenna picture is not something I care deeply about, but the overall trend of post-hoc censoring cultural expressions because some people MAY find them distasteful is letting the bullies win.

optimalsolver 5y ago

I wonder what rabbits think of their representation in human media.

boulos 5y ago

(Posting top-level so it isn’t missed several layers down) For folks that are interested in this kind of thing, Frank Crow’s 1987 article “The Origins of the Teapot” [1] has some great stuff in it (including a small scan of Martin Newell’s graph paper for calculating the points). [1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cg/1987/01/mcg1987010008/13rRUygT7ct https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/cg/1987/01/mcg1987010...