About
Applying for Ph.D.
I'm looking for PhD opportunities in top US schools to continue my research. If your lab conducts research in the related topics like Sketching, Digital Painting, HCI or NPR, and has an available PhD position, contact me with my email address 1500013714 (at) pku (dot) edu (dot) cn.
Moreover, I would appreciate if you recommend this tutorial to your collaborators.
About the tutorial and research
A good CG research work has novelty, while a seminal work also helps other researchers, engineers, and artists pursue novelty. I wish to accelerate this process with this tutorial for my upcoming Ph.D. application. Meanwhile, it's a practice of my mentor, Li-yi Wei, a Jedi master's views on being a good educator and source code along with papers.
Blender Grease Pencil (GP) greatly inspired my research. It wouldn't be possible without those generous helps in learning the code from members of GP, especially Falk David and Clément Foucault.
SoP
Overview
I am applying for a Ph.D. program in Computer Science (CS) to continue my study of digital painting. As my first-author paper, Ciallo: The Next-Generation Vector Paint Program suggests, I'm interested in Computer Graphics (CG), particularly developing digital paint software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustration.
My research has already made a critical breakthrough in this topic. I wish to progress further during my Ph.D. career and attract more researchers to work on it. To achieve that, I'm developing a tutorial website (yeah, the one you are looking at) to teach the brush rendering from my research and integrating it into Blender.
What I prepared in detail
In the project Ciallo, I designed the algorithms and developed the program individually, and later wrote and published the research paper under the supervision of Li-Yi Wei. The features I developed, GPU brush rendering and vector fill, have been anticipated by CG researchers, engineers, and artists for almost two decades, That's why our paper reviewers are okay with a bit of exaggeration ("the next-generation") in the title. I'm now integrating my research into Blender Grease Pencil (GP), which greatly inspired my research .
Before I started working on the Ciallo, my initial goal was to fix several GP's rendering bugs. They turned out far more than simple bugs, but the algorithms causing the bugs were under-researched. It was reckless for me, a naive young man with zero CS research experience, to try solving them, but the results could not be better. The courage comes from where I started to learn CG: doing something truly beneficial for digital painting.
Why digital painting
I've been using graphics design software for digital painting since high school. Meanwhile, I love playing video games and watching Japanese animation (anime), both of which rely on graphics design software. However, with limited career guidance, I should have asked for more help finding the path I love and excel in high school. Randomly, I majored in Psychology at college, where I did a poor job.
Luckily, I never gave up finding and was determined to pursue my true passions, game and anime, as a career after graduation. At the time, there were infinite possible ways to contribute to the game or anime industry. I chose to research digital painting, which I was already familiar with and passionate about. Also, significant research in digital painting can truly benefit artists producing great artworks and influence the industries.
Career Plan
Therefore, my career goal is to be a researcher and educator and keep contributing to the industries. Many low-hanging fruits are waiting for our CG community to explore and discover, starting from where I have made the breakthrough. I can only handle some of the relevant work individually. That's why I want to guide and inspire more researchers and engineers to work on them during my academic career. To begin with, I've created this tutorial series to help everybody learn my research. I'm looking forward to assisting my collaborators working on the same research topic in the future.