For anyone who doesn't know, splines are more or less mathematical
representations of curves.  I always feel ferrets are a lot like splines
because they are so flexible.  In January, I took a course on splines and
for my final project, I decide to do surface pasting (basically modeling
objects by "pasting" "bumps" on each other with some sort of condition to
make it smooth).  My goal was to model a ferret (actually, I wanted to
model a ferret, made an articulated skeleton for the model, and do an
animation of ferret war-dance, but that was just a leeetle too ambitious).
The point is that I have to write a 3D surface pasting editor from scratch
to do this.  My prof called my project "ferret pasting".  I came up with
something that resembles a ferret (not enough time to do a better job), but
my prof liked it (and I got a bonus mark by bring Dief in!).  The ferret I
model was Sprite, my albino -- it's a lot easier to model a ferret that's
just 1 colour :).
 
This term, somebody from the graphics lab showed me a poster he did called
"Better Pasting Through Quasi Interpolation".  On the left-lower corner was
a picture of my ferret model.  This was a huge poster that was displayed in
2 computer conferences in europe in summer - Curves & Surfaces'99 and
EuroGraphics'99.  I thought this was pretty cool!  So it wasn't a terribly
good model, but I still wanted to share this with the ferret community, I
don't know of any 3D computer model of ferrets (if anyone can point me to
some I'll be delighted to see them).
 
To view a picture of the model in the poster:
   http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/Projects/Splines/pasting/images.html
 
The resolution wasn't turn up so this is not as smooth as it can be.  You
can also see another picture and my project report at:
   http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~ssiu/cs679/ferretpasting.html
 
To find out more about surface pasting:
   http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/Projects/Splines/pasting
 
I've been bugging the guy to get a copy of the poster on the web but he's
having trouble converting it to page size, if people really want to see,
let me know and I'll bug him more.  Keep in mind that the ferret is just in
the corner and you probably won't care about the content of the rest of the
poster.
 
Please feel free to ask me about my project, or to make suggestions on how
to incorporate ferrets into my master thesis (I don't have to find a topic
till next may, so I'll be taking suggestions for a long time).
 
All this is at the university of waterloo in canada.
 
Selina & her 6 Little Splines
 
// ***********************************************
// Selina, Birch, Dief, Sprite, Storm, Sand & Bear
// http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~ssiu
[Posted in FML issue 2864]