Professor Max’s research interests are in the areas of scientific visualization, computer animation, and realistic computer graphics rendering. In visualization he works on molecular graphics, and volume and flow visualization, particularly on irregular finite element meshes. He has rendered realistic lighting effects in clouds, trees, and water waves, and has produced numerous computer animations, shown at the annual Siggraph conferences, and in Omnimax at the Fujitu Pavilions at Expo ’85 in Tsukuba Japan, and Expo ’90 in Osaka Japan. He is a member of ACM Siggraph, IEEE Computer Society, and Eurographics.
Dr. Max was director of the NSF supported Topology Films Project in the early 1970’s, which produced computer animated educational films on mathematics. He has worked in Japan for 3 and a half years as co-director of two Omnimax (hemisphere screen) stereo films for international expositions, showing the molecular basis of life. His computer animation has won numerous awards. His research interests are in the areas of scientific visualization, volume and flow rendering, computer animation, molecular graphics, realistic computer rendering, including shadow and radiosity effects, and image-based rendering.
Recent student research has concerned animation of water flow, image based rendering, hierarchical volume rendering, shadow computations from multi-layered z-buffers, flow visualization, interactive protein structure visualization, contour surface compression, and hardware-texture-assisted radiosity.