Going to the #SIGGRAPH2026 Fast Forward Session? Here's a much better way to keep track of talks you want to see: keenancrane.github.io/siggraph-pap... Tap the talks you want to go to, then share (as Markdown) or save directly to your calendar. Also flags conflicting times. ⚠️

#SIGGRAPH2026 attendees: I made a better webpage for the Technical Papers schedule. You can search, filter on keywords, and scroll through linearly (rather than opening a zillion folds) + add to calendar: keenancrane.github.io/siggraph-pap... Can also download a flat JSON & CSV of talks & times.

Giving a talk in the @Stanford SCIEN seminar this Wednesday (1/3) at 4:30pm: scien.stanford.edu/index.php/ev... The topic is “normal coordinates”: a shape representation little-used outside of mathematics—but which turns out to have nice applications in geometry processing & learning.

The wonderful Nicole Feng, defending her PhD thesis on generalized distances & winding numbers. So proud of her, and very excited about all the places she will go. nzfeng.github.io (Also that text outline shaded by the surface is some galaxy brain diagramming. 🤯🧠🌌)

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is three hours before the paper deadline.

Fantastic video from @SciShow about our work that turns any shape into fair dice: youtu.be/-gp7AbYD9NI?... Get all the details on Hossein Baktash’s page here: hbaktash.github.io

How to Make Fair DnD Dice from ANY Shape

YouTube video by SciShow

youtu.be

“Fair dice” might make you think of perfect cubes with equal frequencies (say, 1/6 on all sides) 🎲 But “fair” really just means you get the frequencies you expect (say, 1/4, 1/4 & 1/2) We can now design fair dice with any frequencies—and any shape! 🐉 hbaktash.github.io/projects/put...

Nicely produced clip by Matt Wein and Marylee Williams about our recent dice design project at @scsatcmu.bsky.social and @adobe.com youtube.com/shorts/jD0ag... 🎲 🎥 🐉 🪙

Rethinking Fair Dice

YouTube video by CMU School of Computer Science

youtube.com

I got tired of mashing together tools to write long threads with 𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 and ℳα†ℏ—so I wrote La𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑡! It converts Markdown and LaTeX to Unicode that can be used in “tweets”, and automatically splits long threads. Try it out! keenancrane.github.io/LaTweet/

“Everyone knows” what an autoencoder is… but there's an important complementary picture missing from most introductory material. In short: we emphasize how autoencoders are implemented—but not always what they represent (and some of the implications of that representation).🧵

I can't* fathom why the top picture, and not the bottom picture, is the standard diagram for an autoencoder. The whole idea of an autoencoder is that you complete a round trip and seek cycle consistency—why lay out the network linearly?

I don't have a strong opinion about whether video models “understand the world.” But I do think the first bar should be checking whether you can recover consistent geometry from video—not whether it makes accurate predictions of physics.

#geogram + #graphite + #blender Python scripting = robust CSG directly available in Blender ! Everything is a numpy array.

Awesome work by two awesome former students. 🦖🏁

Nicholas Sharp@nmwsharp.bsky.social · last yr.

Logarithmic maps are incredibly useful for algorithms on surfaces--they're local 2D coordinates centered at a given source. Yousuf Soliman and I found a better way to compute log maps w/ fast short-time heat flow in "The Affine Heat Method" presented @ SGP2025 today! 🧵

Working on a Walk on Spheres tutorial for #SIGGRAPH2025, and love the ads I'm getting served. 😂 Stay tuned for more…👣

Quick “teaser” for a fun #SIGGRAPH2025 project, led by Hossein Baktash, on optimizing a shape to have the desired rolling statistics. Basically we can turn arbitrary objects into fair dice, or make dice which capture the statistics of other objects—like several coin flips.

Making good on this promise—in the fastest turnaround time ever—my collaborator Etienne Corman has just posted MATLAB code for #RectangularSurfaceParameterization here: github.com/etcorman/Rec... (C++ version is still in the works…)

Keenan Crane@keenancrane.bsky.social · last yr.

Code and other information coming soon; for now you can read the paper here: www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Pro... And find some supplemental information—including pseudocode—here: www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Pro...

Meshes with 90° angles are super useful, providing asymptotically faster convergence for finite element simulation, and optimal shape approximation (when aligned with curvature). Amazingly, no past quad meshing method could guarantee 90° angles under refinement—until now. #RSP

Very happy that Jiří Minarčík will join our research group at @cmu.edu, the Geometry Collective, as a Fulbright visiting scholar! 🥳 Jiří is a world expert in space curves, and one of the core contributors to Penrose (penrose.cs.cmu.edu). Check out his beautiful work here: minarcik.com

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...

Very happy to receive a SIGGRAPH 2025 Best Paper Award (Honorable Mention) for our RSP algorithm, which dices surfaces into near-perfect rectangles. Such meshes are useful for everything from retopology, to microfluidic simulation, to textile design, to architectural geometry.

Shout out today to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or anyone else who helps raise a kid. It didn’t really click until I was a dad: without parents, human civilization ends. Only with good parents does the future look bright. So, give a nod to anyone putting in the work.

Mesh intersections is hard ! Three years of agonizing pain summarized in my article that just got accepted to ACM Transactions on Graphics dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... The implementation and the expansion-based arithmetic kernel are available in geogram: github.com/BrunoLevy/ge...

Hey @nervousjesse.bsky.social @nervousjessica.bsky.social, how come you don't sell a waste basket (or recycling bin) in your shop? Would be a welcome alternative to conventional wicker or wire baskets. (Maybe modeled after lysosomes or peroxisomes?)

Generative art circa 2004. Inspired by Piet Mondrian and rendered in acrylic. (Currently on display at my grandmother’s house)

More in-depth article, on Ars Technica, about our recent dice design/rigid body project led by Hossein Baktash at CMU: arstechnica.com/science/2025... You can find the full paper and 3D printable STL files on Hossein's webpage here: hbaktash.github.io

Your next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo

Statistically, “the real behavior of a rolling object is largely a function of its geometry.”…

arstechnica.com

Terrific new work in designing fair dice with arbitrary shapes, by Hossein Baktash at CMU: • www.newscientist.com/article/2482... • hbaktash.github.io/files/rollin...

Anyone interested in 3D printing some funky dice—like a "fair dragon" which can land in three different ways, or a single die equivalent to to 2D6? We've now put printable STL files online: www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Pro... More info here: hbaktash.github.io

Keenan Crane@keenancrane.bsky.social · last yr.

Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025: What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10). Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes? That's exactly what we do! 1/n

Great writeup by @stokel.bsky.social about our #SIGGRAPH paper on dice design (and rigid body analysis), led by my awesome PhD student Hossein Baktash: hbaktash.github.io

Chris Stokel-Walker@stokel.bsky.social · last yr.

My latest for @newscientist.com looks at a cool idea that can make fair dice from any shape www.newscientist.com/article/2482...

Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025: What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10). Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes? That's exactly what we do! 1/n