Radomír Měch

Principal Scientist, Imagination Lab

San Jose

Radomír heads the Procedural Imaging Group at Adobe Research. He leads a mix of research teams, senior individual contributors, and one invaluable technical artist. The researchers span areas of 2D and 3D design, image processing, modeling, natural media simulation, generative models (GANs), and HCI. His areas of research are procedural modeling, with a particular focus on interaction with procedural models and casual modeling, rendering, 3D printing, and image evaluation algorithms. Currently, he is focusing on adding intelligence and personalization to design features and workflows.

Radomír believes that Adobe Research has an efficient and enjoyable model for producing magic features for our products. Many of Adobe Research’s projects start with internships. A typical researcher is involved in 2-6 internships each summer investigating new ideas. Many of those internships lead to university collaboration and results in high quality publications. The close ties with academia allow the researches to keep up to speed with latest academic results but also attract top talent in terms of interns and full time hires. Each researcher has also projects that are in further stages, where the investigation is followed by building a prototype that can be shown to product teams, or the prototype is already successfully sold and the researcher, with possible help from the tech transfer engineer, transfers the technology into a product.

Radomír’s role is to lead his team and to help the members to define and drive strategies and research themes for the group and the lab, to help team members to choose their projects, and promote the projects as they reach the demoable stage. Since the inception of his group in 2008 his team has shipped many technologies, including

3D modeling and rendering:

* Repousse – 2D curve inflation in Photoshop 3D CS5, with improved inflation engine in CS6.

* Super bevels and new adaptive extrusion engine in Photoshop CS6

* Ray-tracer in Photoshop 3D (CS4, improved in CS5, new enhancements in CS6) and in After Effects CS5

* Multitone 3D printing in Photoshop CC 14.2

* 3D Filters in Photoshop CC 2015

* Blendshape Transfer for Fuse CC

Simulation:

* Simulating bristle tips in Photoshop CS5

* Bristle brush in AI CS5

* Mixer brush in Photoshop CS5 and Color Lava Photoshop iPad app

* Procedural water color simulation on ipad – Adobe Eazel for Photoshop CS5.5

* Continuous stroking model in Adobe Sketch 2014

* Kubelka-Munk Pigment Model in Adobe Sketch 2014

* Water color simulation in Adobe Sketch (also showcased at Ipad Pro launch in the fall of 2015)

Graphics design:

* Beautiful strokes in Illustrator CS5, more features in CS6, and CC, and in FlashPro CC2014

* Pattern scripts for Photoshop 14.2

* Tree, Flame, Picture frame filter in PS CC2014 (15.2)

* Comic Kit and Cloth Texture Generator filters for Ps

Image editing:

* Selection Editing, PSe, Orion, Photoshop

* Level-Set based Selection Editing (PSE13, Photsohop Mix 2014)

* Crop Suggestion in PSE 2014, Ps Mix 1.4

* Saliency estimation in Photoshop Mix 1.3, 2.0

* Automatic Content-Aware Stylization in PSE14

[Normal Map from Legacy Image, Photoshop 13.1]

[Enhanced scripted patterns in Photoshop CC (dynamic UI)]

[Aesthetic Path builder, Magic Brush (data driven brush model), Magic Style (robust image color and tone transfer), Magic Crop, Magic Cutout Maker, Magic Vectorizer for Creative SDK Labs]

Radomír’s projects:

Procedural modeling, casual modeling and 3D printing

Before Radomír became a manager in 2008, and while his team was growing, he had time to built a procedural modeling framework. The goal of the project was to allow users to create new procedural brushes or other tools in our applications.

The system first shipped in Flash Authoring and then in Photoshop CS6, enhanced in CC 14.1. With Daichi, the procedural artist on board, he and his team shipped more advanced Deco filters in 14.3 (including image frame, flame and tree filter). Radomír continues to enchance the framework, for example by adding support for iOS, since it provides means for Daichi to deploy new features and for others to quickly prototype new tools. For example, the procedural watercolor simulation shipped in Eazel was prototyped in Deco. See below for more details on the system.

Radomír is a big proponent of 3D casual modeling. In general, he would like to make it easier for people to create and modify 3D content. With the increase popularity of 3D printing and Virtual Reality there will be an increasing need for 3D content. Conversely, being able to easily create 3D content will aid the adoption of 3D printers and virtual reality. Procedural modeling is one of the possible means towards easy modeling and Radomír have explored several projects on making it easy to author and control procedural or parametric models.

He has also been a proponent of 3D printing. He has been part of the initial push for 3D printing at Adobe and has worked on several projects, several resulting in publications (link to Bedrich), some only in patents (http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150413-adobe-steps-further-into-3d-printing-industry-with-print-smoothing-patent.html), and some made it to product (multitone 3D printing as experimental feature in Photoshop CC 2014).

As an avid photographer, he was also interested in developing some features for Lightroom. With help from two researcher’s from the Media Intelligence Lab,Radomír has developed in house technology over past few years for automatic image cropping, to enhance the image composition or for zoom in, for image saliency, for evaluation of image aesthetics and for album curation – selecting representative images from image sets.

These are exciting projects for Radomír as a researcher since he is learning new skills and as a customer who needs such features.

Other projects that shipped and to which he has contributed directly are the procedural splat based water color simulation on iPad (Eazel), the ray-tracer in Photoshop, 3D extrusions in Photoshop, Multitone 3D printing in Photoshop (for smoothly mixing two colors in FDM printers), or pattern scripts in Photoshop.

Many other internship or collaboration project resulted in a publication. The list of publications below can give you an idea of the variety of topics.