Last week I wrote about how simple is to create a eye-pleasing rendering in few clicks, but it turns out that things are even better! 😮

The ray-tracing capability in ParaView is really slick. Many commercial applications offer similar rendering solutions, but what I find peculiar of ParaView is that in just 10 clicks you can go from the very default rendering, to good looking animation. As I spent more time with it, I found that the benefit are not limited to photorealistic renderings.

Few weeks ago I was scrolling LinkedIn and I bumped into a beautiful rendering featuring an acoustic modal analysis

Here is the original post by Undabit, in which the founder claimed that he used Paraview to render the animation 😱. This post was so successful that (yesterday) VTK released a blog post covering this awesome work and turned it into a high-level tutorial. So that’s where I started.

To data-oriented design follows data-oriented optimization, that is: reason about a problem in view of the data you’re going to transform and seek optimization opportunities.

Today I want to look at a finite element analysis (FEA) in which 80% of the time goes into collision detection. Particularly in the final stage of it, where we first test primitives for collision, and finally we compute reaction forces for those primitives in contact. These functions are crucial and challenging for many applications, from robotics to computer graphics, but in FEA we need a greater degree of accuracy. This triggers high-computing costs, but let’s see if we can reason about the problem and improve the current state of the art.

Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Tech (Sort Of)

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

— Cicero, De oratore

Cicero argues about the infinite power of words and explains what it takes to be an excellent oratore. He unrolls the methods and emphasis that practicing the art of public speaking is that it takes to move people’s heart. Despite these words are over 2000 years old, then wisdom remains and people like me struggle to put Cicero’s advises to practice. However I recently found a tool that help me and I wanted to share my story.