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This section is under re-development. It is not finished, and not fully functional. The current
development stage is pre-alpha and as such, not every feature is even implemented yet.
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Planet-Black0psEnd of the old, start of the new
At long last, the final assignment of the third year was handed in. The forseeable future seems open to all sorts of development, in my time, for my purposes, without any looming deadlines for some write up, or small application in another programming language to ’solve’ a task I am not interested in.
The dissertation was ok - it had a lot of potential, but I cannot say I am happy with the outcome so far. The demo crashed during presentation to both supervisors, and the results of the terrain appeared far poorer than when I was writing up the conclusion documentary. Overall not too good, but the end of the dissertation does not mean the end of that project - obviously I will not be writing up pages and pages of research, implementation planning and conclusions - no. It is time for the fun stuff - uninterrupted development. The project has a lot of potential, at least personally, for creating resources procedurally. During research, the book - “Texturing & Modeling - a Procedural Approach”(David S. Ebert, Ken Perlin et al.) offered the temptation to explore more of what noise-based techniques can do, other than produce rather powerful featureful terrain.
Accidentally, my Fractal Brownian Motion implementation produced a heightmap which resembled a concrete texture from Duke3D, and also a rather blurry grass texture in place of the alpha map. There was not much more that needs to be done to start tweaking sliders to adjust colour ranges to noise values in order to produce textures procedurally.The same toolset could easily be used for generating the terrain, but hopefully much better than the dissertation’s snapshot of the application.
In honesty, when I first started the project, my interest laid solely with producing terrain. During the first few meetings, I had not heard of Perlin Noise, or Multifractals, and thus, did not start off with an interest in this area. However now, I leave university hopefully with the degree (in case it ever comes in useful, but more on this perhaps another day), and the desire to carry on with procedurals, at least to develop them to be an invaluble tool. Being graphics-based, it is a good approach to take this to shaders, and to three dimensional textures.
If you guessed a nice, Voxel terrain engine from the last paragraph, then you would be correct. GPU Gems 3 has a nice article on Voxel Terrains - I have been hard pushed to find much more on the topic, so maybe I should change that, and also demonstrate it with OpenGL - also doubling up as a nice Geometry Shader tutorial.
The future seems bright and free at the moment - just, with a loom of whether or not missing two assignments will still be sufficient to get the degree, if only to leave university trully behind.
The dissertation was ok - it had a lot of potential, but I cannot say I am happy with the outcome so far. The demo crashed during presentation to both supervisors, and the results of the terrain appeared far poorer than when I was writing up the conclusion documentary. Overall not too good, but the end of the dissertation does not mean the end of that project - obviously I will not be writing up pages and pages of research, implementation planning and conclusions - no. It is time for the fun stuff - uninterrupted development. The project has a lot of potential, at least personally, for creating resources procedurally. During research, the book - “Texturing & Modeling - a Procedural Approach”(David S. Ebert, Ken Perlin et al.) offered the temptation to explore more of what noise-based techniques can do, other than produce rather powerful featureful terrain.
Accidentally, my Fractal Brownian Motion implementation produced a heightmap which resembled a concrete texture from Duke3D, and also a rather blurry grass texture in place of the alpha map. There was not much more that needs to be done to start tweaking sliders to adjust colour ranges to noise values in order to produce textures procedurally.The same toolset could easily be used for generating the terrain, but hopefully much better than the dissertation’s snapshot of the application.
In honesty, when I first started the project, my interest laid solely with producing terrain. During the first few meetings, I had not heard of Perlin Noise, or Multifractals, and thus, did not start off with an interest in this area. However now, I leave university hopefully with the degree (in case it ever comes in useful, but more on this perhaps another day), and the desire to carry on with procedurals, at least to develop them to be an invaluble tool. Being graphics-based, it is a good approach to take this to shaders, and to three dimensional textures.
If you guessed a nice, Voxel terrain engine from the last paragraph, then you would be correct. GPU Gems 3 has a nice article on Voxel Terrains - I have been hard pushed to find much more on the topic, so maybe I should change that, and also demonstrate it with OpenGL - also doubling up as a nice Geometry Shader tutorial.
The future seems bright and free at the moment - just, with a loom of whether or not missing two assignments will still be sufficient to get the degree, if only to leave university trully behind.