Difference between revisions of "Project7Fall11Summaries"

Eternal Woodland (Anthony Medeiros, Trevor Pottinger)

Project Description

You find yourself in a forest. The plants are very interesting looking and you notice they all are uniquely different but strangely realistic. As you travel through the Eternal Woodland time slows giving the forest time to expand an infinite distance. You begin to question reality. Can this be real? Am I lost? Can you escape the Eternal Woodland? Time can’t tell.

Planned Effects

We plan on using Liedenmeyer-Systems to draw the trees and then we will add an ambient occlusion shader to make the trees appear more realistic. Should time persist, we will draw the trees procedurally and allow for more free realming of the Eternal Woodland.

Since ambient occlusion is only interesting when objects are overlapping and there is a lot of them on the screen, we will have density parameterized in the drawing of our trees, If we have time to make a forest, using procedural drawing, we will have the density of the forest also parameterized.

Creative Efforts

We will spend our time making the trees look unearthly but still being biologically feasible. To the common viewer, the trees should look eerie, yet somewhat familiar, because they will be based off of willlow and eucalyptus trees (Should be basing off models that are around such as dragon trees etc.). Our goal will to have different colors, but appear soft, and earthy like all trees do. We plan on doing this by having grammars as an input. Random generation of the forest will be seeded by random variations in the grammar for each individually spawned tree.

Since the shader simply works or doesn’t, the creative efforts there will be to figure out accurate amount of sampling, and possibly different weights. Then, since as long as the shader is being implemented, adding phong shading (should time persist) should make the trees appear more realistically round. During our research of ambient occlusion we came across different methods for computing it, and our creative efforts could also be spent on comparing the different methods.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

We learned a great deal about the rendering pipeline, and the vast possibilities that emerge when a texture is rendered in real-time.

The main difficulties of this effect was debugging, due to the limited commands that can be used in GLSL, and calculating values in different coordinate spaces.

Lindenmayer System Trees

Determining when to draw the leaves was slightly more difficult than the rest of the effect.

Controls

• w, a, s, d :- standard movement controls
• [, ] :- shrink, or grow the forest respectfully
• mouse :- click and hold to move camera

Procedural Victorian City (Cathy Hughes, Zhanzhan He)

Theme and Story

We created a procedurally generated Victorian-inspired city which can be explored through means of a first person character control system. Specific Rendering Effects

The world has a park filled with trees and bushes generated by L-Systems surrounded by buildings generated using procedural modelling. We seed the world generation using a string supplied by the user, similar to games such as Minecraft. If the user finds a world they particularly like, it can be reproduced by supplying the same seed.

The buildings are randomly sized boxes with various numbers of randomly sized windows and doors, as well as a slanted roof of varying pitch and orientation. The number of stories of the houses are also randomly generated.

We created a 1st person control scheme similar to that seen in video games. The user is able to walk around and explore the world using the w-s keys to move forward and back, a-d to rotate side to side, and q-z to rotate up and down.

Creative Efforts

We used seamless repeating textures for our buildings (including thatched roofs, stone and timber-framed walls, and brick chimneys) and appropriate colors for our plants to convincingly convey our Victorian theme.

We also made the world as non repetitive as possible. We achieved this by generating different varieties of trees and plants using different L-System rules and randomizing their placement. We also have a library of textures for walls, roofs, doors and windows of buildings from which we select randomly to improve the amount of variation.

The park also features a fountain which shoots L-System generated water and is surrounded by wooden park benches.

To improve the realism of the world, we render it in a bounding box or with a texture to represent the sky and use the built in OpenGL lighting.

Feature Summary

• Randomly textured buildings
• Randomly sized and shaped buildings
• Bracketed 3D L-Systems
• Stochasitic 3D L-Systems

A Day in the Forest (Eric Anderson, Huy Tran)

The general idea would to create a moving sun that would hover over a simple forest of basic trees. As the sun moves over the environment, it would expose shadows of the trees and other objects that would be seen. Because the sun would be "orbiting" around the environment, it would also create a pseudo night/day effect. The trees of the environment would be created using a basic L-system whereas the shadow effects would be implemented using simple shadow mapping.

Controls

• p: toggle shadow mapping

Features

• Using shadow mapping to create realistic shadows for trees
• Using L-System to create a forest of trees
• Rotating sun(direct light) that orbits the environment, creating a day/night effect.

Winter Woods Maze (Shannon McPeak, Chris McFarland)

Hidden deep within the snowy forest ruins lies a secret treasure... can you find it?

For our final project, we made a maze that takes place in a forest setting during the winter. The story behind our project is that someone is lost in forest ruins looking for a hidden treasure. The objective of the maze will be to find the treasure chest that is hidden somewhere in the maze. The walls of the maze are composed of stone and covered in vines and the floor of the maze is covered in snow. There are large dead looking trees within the maze (since it is winter, the trees have no leaves) and there is also a fog effect. The player is able to navigate with the standard WASD/mouse controls ('a' and 'd' allow the player to strafe). This allows the player to look around in their environment. The mouse look up and down is limited to a fixed range to simulate how far you can tilt your head back.

For our technical features, we procedurally generated both the maze itself and trees within the maze. The tree trunks have branches that vary in their orientation. Lastly, we implemented collision detection with the walls so that the player is not able to go through them. The player is able to slide along walls.

For our artistic efforts, we focused on creating an appealing winter atmosphere. We attempted to make our maze artistically stylized rather than photorealistic. The mood of the scene is meant to be mysterious.

Technical Features Summary