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

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