When computer engineer David Ebert travels for business and pleasure, he seeks out the nearest hiking trails, favoring those with dramatic vistas and breathtaking terrain. His favorite spot of all being the Canadian Rockies. Along with his favorite hat, he also always carries a camera to satisfy a longstanding love of nature photography.

David Ebert, a computer graphics visualization specialist, hikes whenever he can, his favorite spot being in the Canadian Rockies, where he is pictured. While on the trail, he partakes of another hobby, nature photography " particularly of mountains and clouds. The photos sometimes find their way into his cloud visualization work.

Ebert, the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of a prestigious homeland security center at Purdue, began hiking and taking photographs of nature as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University. In the 20 years that have elapsed, he has amassed hundreds of images of breathtaking mountain scenery. In many of them, clouds blanket alpine valleys, blow off mountain summits, or spread like fish scales across an open sky.

This is no accident. It is a strategic melding of personal art and professional science. Since graduate school, Ebert has been exploring algorithmic representations of how to simulate natural phenomena like wood and water, cloud and fog, and the textures and patterns of lighting. As a computer graphics and visualization specialist, his research explores the effective communication of information like clouds through graphics rendering, modeling, abstraction, animation, and perceptualization.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the beauty and complexity of nature and that led me into both photography of nature and my research,” he says. “On the graphics and visualization side, everything that I do is about how to convey information from an image and generate the image; on the photography side, it is focused on representing and capturing that information. Sort of the converse.”

Ebert’s cloud and steam simulations have appeared in television commercials and films, including the 2005 Disney movie “Valiant.” He teamed with a filmmaker while at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for a class that matched fine arts with computer graphics. And he does what he calls “hobby research” on movie special effects. Each of his creations has a unique footprint that Ebert can easily recognize — “I’ll see a commercial and say, ‘Hey, that’s my steam!’”

Ebert has long been fascinated by the intersection of art and science. As an elementary school student in Sandusky, Ohio, he made wine for a science project, inspired by the vineyards that surrounded his hometown and the draw of chemistry. As an adult, he remains fascinated by the science of winemaking and puts his imagination to the test in the kitchen.

Ever the engineer, Ebert likes creativity with a sharp focus. As director of Purdue’s Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE), a department of the Homeland Security Center of Excellence, he is developing specialized software to help homeland security and emergency personnel respond to and manage a variety of calamities, from disease outbreaks to economic crises.

In his own laboratory, Purdue Rendering and Perceptualization Lab (PURPL), projects include illustration and photography-inspired visualization of flows and volumes, a challenge that fellow engineer Leonardo da Vinci took on centuries ago. He also borrows directly from art, applying stippling techniques and medical illustration for best effect.

“Simulating handdrawn illustration techniques can succinctly express information in a manner that is communicative and informative,” he explains. “By combining the principles of artistic and scientific illustration, we explore several feature enhancement techniques to create effective, interactive visualizations of scientific and medical data sets.”

Over the years, Ebert has worked in and out of the entertainment industry. In 2000, during a sabbatical year at Stanford University, he joined forces with the video game company Electronic Arts to help with real-time modeling and rendering technology in products designed for PlayStation 2. Although Ebert, who doesn’t play video games, saw it as a job, several of his graduate students were elated when the company gave him its library, which includes such popular titles as Tiger Woods, Madden Football and Medal of Honor.

No matter the project, art is an integral piece of Ebert’s success.

“To be successful, you need to have an appreciation of aesthetics and design or you may come up with a great algorithm (or photograph or glass of wine) that no one will use,” he says. “It has to be well designed.”

The rest of this article on other engineers can be read here.