Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Jul 7

The position is fully funded for three years and will begin in November 2025. The main workplace will be in Pisa in my Lab.
For any questions, application support, or further details, feel free to contact me at: [email protected]

Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Jul 7

We are pleased to announce an open PhD position at the CNR-ISTI
We are looking for a motivated PhD student with a background and interest in 3D Graphics, Geometry Processing, and Machine Learning.

**Deadline: 18 July 2025**

phd-ai-society.di.unipi.it/applications/
(pag 19 of the call: AI for 3D)

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · Jun 26

This letter has now reached almost 500 signatures, with many of my heroes, tool builders I have leaned on, professors who taught me, and others who made this field what it is.

If keeping this field accessible and egalitarian is important to you, add your signature in the link.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · Jun 18

Computer Graphics as a field avoids gatekeeping. Practitioners come from many disciplines, origins and beliefs.
SIGGRAPH has historically carried this practice.

I am thus outraged at the decision to hold SIGGRAPH Asia 26’ at a venue unsafe to many.

Adding my signature. I encourage you to do too:

Open Letter to the SIGGRAPH Leadership

RE: Call for SIGGRAPH Asia to relocate from Malaysia and commit to a venue selection process that safeguards LGBTQ+ and other at-risk communities. To the SIGGRAPH Leadership: SIGGRAPH Executive Commit...

docs.google.com

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Jun 21

Signed. Definitely this is something that needs to be shared more...

Keenan Crane @keenancrane.bsky.social · Jun 20

Folks in the #SIGGRAPH community:

You may or may not be aware of the controversy around the next #SIGGRAPHAsia location, summarized here www.cs.toronto.edu/~jacobson/we...

If you're concerned consider signing this letter docs.google.com/document/d/1...
via this form
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Keenan Crane @keenancrane.bsky.social · Jun 20

Folks in the #SIGGRAPH community:

You may or may not be aware of the controversy around the next #SIGGRAPHAsia location, summarized here www.cs.toronto.edu/~jacobson/we...

If you're concerned consider signing this letter docs.google.com/document/d/1...
via this form
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Justin Solomon @justinmsolomon.bsky.social · Jun 18

I signed and encourage colleagues to do the same.

Venue selection is fraught. Inevitably attendees will encounter visa issues, distance, expense, local politics, and other challenges. This venue, however, is simply unsafe for LGBTQ+ researchers, and the leadership's defensiveness is unacceptable.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · Jun 18

Computer Graphics as a field avoids gatekeeping. Practitioners come from many disciplines, origins and beliefs.
SIGGRAPH has historically carried this practice.

I am thus outraged at the decision to hold SIGGRAPH Asia 26’ at a venue unsafe to many.

Adding my signature. I encourage you to do too:

Open Letter to the SIGGRAPH Leadership

RE: Call for SIGGRAPH Asia to relocate from Malaysia and commit to a venue selection process that safeguards LGBTQ+ and other at-risk communities. To the SIGGRAPH Leadership: SIGGRAPH Executive Commit...

docs.google.com

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · May 27

Great to see old (25y old!) tricks surfacing again!
doi.org/10.1111/1467...
Palette encoding of normals was a thing before shaders :) We run this stuff on a NVIDIA Riva 128 🤣

Real Time, Accurate, Multi‐Featured Rendering of Bump Mapped Surfaces

We present a new technique to render in real time objects which have part of their high frequency geometric detail encoded in bump maps. It is based on the quantization of normal-maps, and achieves e....

doi.org

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · May 23

Please help us understand what experts expect from digital
reconstructions of ancient color!
We're running a short (10 min) anon survey for professionals in archaeology, art history, architecture, conservation/restoration, museums, and digital humanities.
👉 forms.gle/aEhYwGiveiNi...

Please Share!

Various examples of color reconstruction on ancient statues

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · May 14

More info on the project (code etc.)
vcg.isti.cnr.it/publication/...

Optimizing Free-Form Grid Shells with Reclaimed Elements under Inventory Constraints
Andrea Favilli, Francesco Laccone, Paolo Cignoni, Luigi Malomo, Daniela Giorgi
Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2025)

Optimizing Free-Form Grid Shells with Reclaimed Elements under Inventory Constraints | Visual Computing Lab

We propose a method for designing 3D architectural free-form surfaces, represented as grid shells with beams sourced from inventories of reclaimed elements from dismantled buildings. In inventory-cons...

vcg.isti.cnr.it

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · May 14

We propose a computational framework for designing #freeform grid shells using reclaimed structural elements, explicitly addressing inventory constraints such as element lengths and availability without compromising design flexibility or structural integrity.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Optimizing Free‐Form Grid Shells with Reclaimed Elements under Inventory Constraints

We propose a method for designing 3D architectural free-form surfaces, represented as grid shells with beams sourced from inventories of reclaimed elements from dismantled buildings. In inventory-con...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · May 14

Happy to share that our paper, "Optimizing Free-Form Grid Shells with Reclaimed Elements under Inventory Constraints", will be presented at #Eurographics 2025!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L05g...

Optimizing Free-Form Grid Shells with Reclaimed Elements under Inventory Constraints (EG 2025)

YouTube video by VisualComputingLaboratory Isti

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · Apr 21

I had two NSF grants terminated last week, for a total of just under $1M. The largest one had just started and its goal was to provide users with more context and information on the content that they see on social media.

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Internet Archive @archive.org · Apr 17

📢 The Internet Archive needs your help.

At a time when information is being rewritten or erased online, a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels threatens to destroy the Wayback Machine.

Tell the labels to drop the 78s lawsuit.

👉 Sign our open letter: www.change.org/p/defend-the...

🧵⬇️

Defend the Internet Archive.
Protect the Wayback Machine.
Tell the music labels: Drop the 78s lawsuit.
Sign our open letter on change.org

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Mar 7

Another viable solution for publishing "heavy" 3D models efficiently and simply on the web is the #3DHop framework that relies on the open source nexus multiresolution streaming 3D engine 3dhop.net
It handles hi-res 3D models (100Mtris) also on low-bandwidth, on plain web server.

3DHOP - Home

3dhop.net

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · Feb 3

TUM AI Lecture Series - The 3D Gaussian Splatting Adventure: Past, Present, Future www.youtube.com/live/DjOqkVI...

TUM AI Lecture Series - The 3D Gaussian Splatting Adventure: Past, Present, Futur (George Drettakis)

YouTube video by Matthias Niessner

www.youtube.com

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Dec 10

Final note, we also presented one incoming innovative tool for the 3D decomposition and analysis of the branches of corals. A cute mesh-processing problem mixing skeletonization, pruning, and clipping that will be integrated in MeshLab...

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Dec 10

The effort for a research lab to maintain, improve and distribute an open source tool over the years is not small. But the sheer joy that you get when you see #TagLab widely used on the field in many reef monitoring projects is priceless.

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Dec 10

Happy to report the success of our beloved #TagLab at #ReefFutures! Gaia Pavoni and Massimiliano Corsini are presenting the latest advances of our AI-powered, open-source segmentation tool for large ortho-images generated through the photogrammetric pipeline.

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Dec 3

And sometimes we are still working on this stuff...
vcg.isti.cnr.it/publication/...

Vorogrid: A static-aware variable-density Voronoi mesh to design the tube structure tessellation of tall buildings | Visual Computing Lab

In the context of tall building design, the tube concept represents one of the most performing systems. The diagrid is the widespread type of tube system and consists of a diagonal grid of beams that ...

vcg.isti.cnr.it

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Dec 3

Great post from the nervous systems guys!
Two small additional notes:
- Anisotropic CVD's beside being nice, are also quite interesting from a structural point of view vcg.isti.cnr.it/publication/...
- to actually generate nicer decompositions it is useful to add a further shape optimization step

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Reposted by Paolo Cignoni

Jacco Bikker 🎦 @jbikker.bsky.social · Nov 26

Eric Haines posted on realtimerendering:

* GPU-Zen3 is out. We know that, but...
* Someone wrote a ray tracer in Minecraft. :)
* Someone ran Doom on E coli cells. =)

Yeah...

www.realtimerendering.com/blog/seven-t...

Real-Time Rendering Resources

realtimerendering.com

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Nov 22

Indeed! Tetrahedral visibility sorting was not trivial (sorting centers of tetrahedra works only if the mesh is a Delaunay one and you sort the centers of circumsphere of the tetrahedra)

Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Nov 22

Definitely not a shame! It was stuff published on minor venues more than 25 years ago!

Curiosity, how the sorting for compositing is handled efficiently now? It was a real pain and was necessary for materials that are also emissive (needed for approximating scattering)...

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Nov 22

I can't help but applaud something that reminds me of my PhD days! 😀
>25y ago I worked on the same ideas, definitely on different graphics hardware 😅

iris.cnr.it/bitstream/20...

iris.cnr.it

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Paolo Cignoni @aloopingicon.bsky.social · Nov 22

BTW a open source implementation of the algorithm was already available inside MeshLab...

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