The other day I was helping my mother to tidy my parent's junk room when I found all the documentation of my PFC (a kind of dissertation needed in Spain to get your bachelor degree). The whole stuff was a non-working CD, a VHS tape and the book itself.
At that time I was quite interested in computer graphics and I tried to do my project in the graphics department of my University. This department was (and still is) a group called GIGA, Spanish acronym for Advanced Computing Graphics Group. After some initial doubts I finally decided to continue an unfinished project of the group. The GIGA had collaborated with CHE (a governmental company that deals with water issues in my home region, its name comes from the river that crosses Zaragoza, the Ebro river) and the group had achieved from them some valuable information:
An altitude map file. The file was a 40 megabyte file with the altitudes of the Ebro basin terrain measured every 100 meters (the file was a altitude mesh of squares which sides are lengthened by 100m).
Satellite images of the same basin (6 CDs). The quality of the images was more or less a point of color every 5 meters.
I know that now, in the google era, this information is a real shit but 15 years ago all of this was a data of enormous worth. The GIGA group had developed a quick application to make a video for a CHE presentation in which you virtually cruised throughout some places of the basin. The idea of my tutor (Francisco José Serón) were mainly three points:
Developing, using some interpolation methods, a software that let them to create a more dense mesh.
Improving the flying application because it had been done just for the presentation. I suppose my other tutor (Juan Antonio Magallón) spent long nights to finish the job.
Making some study for finding water (rivers, lakes,..) in the satellite images. Finally this point was not done (only some comments and not a thorough job).
Of course only the second point was truly interesting to me and the reason why I wanted to work with GIGA but it was an all or nothing. The flying application used GTK for window management (menus, buttons,...) and OpenGL for drawing. The mesh was painted and the satellite images were used as textures. I switched from plain C to a C++ application and I tried to make a more structured code. During developing another collaboration came up, GIGA was in touch with a woman who was making a thesis about fire spreading. Of course the idea of a video or images about a fire spreading over some place of the basin quickly emerged.
And that is the reason for this entry. I have already lost my project, because all of it (code, altitude mesh, some texture images -the small ones-,...) was in the broken CD (I am trying to bring it back to life but I think it is a waste of time) but I want to preserve the video, some photos I still have and a poster I did. As I have already said in some occasions this blog is the perfect place to put things I do not want to lose.
Here I present some of the photos I still have, only a few cos the majority of them are lost inside the CD. The poster I configured about my project is also here.
Wire image with a long step in the mesh
Wire and texturized image with a long step in the mesh
Texturized image with a long step wire mesh
Wire image with a more dense mesh integrated
Wire and texturized image
Texturized image
Poster of my PFC
Fire spreading photo
Fire spreading photo 2
Fire spreading texture for tile 23/77
Fire spreading texture for tile 23/78
Finally the video, which was done later in a second collaboration with the fire spreading thesis. My application generated the main scenes but the script and all the making of the film was done by Diego Gutierrez, another guy of the GIGA group. Thanks to Edu for digitizing the VHS tape.
It is amazing how things change in less than 15 years. Enjoy!
PS: I sent an email to one of my tutors cos I do not know for sure if I can publish this information (video and images) or not. I have received no answer so I decided to continue. Please use comments or contact me if I am really not allowed to share these data.
Interesting PFC. I really loved the GIGA PFCs as they were the most visually beautiful. Of course, they were almost visual.
Watching the video a lot of unanswered questions arise: Did you take the wind ant the relative humidity of the terrain into account? Why did the fire didn't spread further than the closest hill? Maybe you only worked with a very simple simulation acording to the height, and that's why the fire doesn't go down. And the most important question: where were the firemen?
Finally, Lord's paths are unscrutinizable: as yours, my PFC doesn't fit with my actual job...
I cannot answer the details of how the fire spreads, my part was only drawing the data. The spreading part was a thesis of another person I never contacted personally. It is only my idea (and remember it was long time ago) but I think she did not work with wind conditions, she only took the combustibility and the slope of the terrain into account (and that can be the reason the fire never jumps to the other side of the mountain).
For me, the moral is that when two great guys work together (Diego and you), the result is an amazing history! Very delayed congratulations for your PFC.
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