Computer Vision News - January 2017

software or designing mechanical parts of a robot. It’s kind of hard to pin it down. I actually enjoy the variety. I like to rotate, and I never get bored. I design a circuit board. I send that design to manufacturing. While I wait, I design a mechanical part in EQUINOX- 3D. I send it out to Shapeways or some other 3D printing service. Then I work on the software, and I kind of cycle through it. I love this. I was also always interested in medical science so I have been studying anatomy for a few years. Whenever my code is compiling or I run a simulation and my computer is busy, I pull up ZygoteBody which is in excellent website to study anatomy. I learn a couple of muscles, then my compile is finished. Then I go back. I’d like to ask about EQUINOX-3D now. What are the advantages of EQUINOX-3D over Maya or Modo? The main advantage is efficiency, speed, and deep integration of a very flexible rendering infrastructure. EQUINOX was the first modeler that had a fully integrated ray tracer. Unlike in other applications like Maya, you have a separate window for the ray tracer, the photorealistic render. In EQUINOX, you can switch any window to ray tracer, and it overlays the wireframe so you can select objects, you can see the highlighted wireframe, you can see all of the 3D widgets, and work directly inside an interactive ray-traced view. You can actually work on the ray traced window, instead of having a separate preview. There were two great releases from EQUINOX-3D in 2016. Can you tell us what we can expect in 2017? The next version of EQUINOX-3D is coming out in January 2017 and I have a long list of about 20 new features. Whether I do them all depends on how many I can polish. It’s one thing to have a feature working so that you can use it. It’s a whole other story to make it stable enough to give it to other users. I have at least 50 new features in the pipeline, but maybe 10 of them will make it into the new release. One of the things that is very powerful in EQUINOX is that you can create a 3D curve and just roughly match it to a surface. Then you can do an "Extrude along" surface of another curve. Then you can snap the result onto the surface. This is how you cut the windows out from a car or airplane model for example. There are an infinite number of use cases for snapping a curve on a surface, from making a road follow a mountain to cutting pieces out of a robot’s skull to make maintenance doors or the holes for the eyes. That feature is getting a lot better. It will allow you to have a single Extrude along surface tool with multiple path 6 Computer Vision News Guest Guest Gabor is also a FAA certified private pilot. Here he puts on a parachute in Livermore, CA before an aerobatic maneuvers flight in a L-29 jet “ Efficiency, speed, deep integration ”