Computer Graphics Project Journal
(Winter Term 2003)

Project Description (a.k.a What is this, you ask?)

Also done for cs488:

  • Puppet screenshot from poseable puppet (A3)
  • Final Raytraced scene for Raytracer (A4)

    -- may 15 --
    I just ran my final program and did a bunch of screen captures on different tracks, terrains and views from riding the train to give an idea of some of what I created.

    -- april 1 --
    Well I fixed up my clouds so they are far more cloud-like and less flat-grey. Took a bunch of twiddling with what I passed my noise function and how I weighted the various calls. I still cannot figure out how to get tile-able noise. Following the algorithm on the webpage that supposedly explained it resulted in a bizzare blocky, yet not tile-able look. I also fixed the flickering that the clouds had when you rotated, by turning off depth testing when drawing the clouds. It does look a bit stupid that the clouds continue straight to ground rather than appearing to go off into the distance. This would require quit a rework to fix though.

    -- march 31 --
    UPDATE:(1:47am)
    Added some icons to the side to let you know what your current direction and track piece are like. They change colour if you are in the different modes (label begin, label end, remove piece).

    Mostly worked on docs yesterday (which were due today). This evening I add a graphical track design UI. It's pretty simplistic and does pretty much no error checking, but it generates valid track files. (for some reason one of the grid lines is not showing up on this image, but if you click view image in your browser it should display correctly).

    -- march 29 --
    UPDATE: (10:25pm)
    Working on a new terrain.

    UPDATE: (9:11pm)
    Added a needle to the speedometer.

    Been doing various fixes today. Made smoke move correctly when going up and down bridges. Changed camera movement so you can rotate around the scene with certain restraints.

    -- march 28 --
    UPDATE: (2:40 am)
    Got shadows working. very very ugly. oh well.

    Naming my textures so you have more interesting menu choices than "brown stone", "grey rock", etc. Still don't have names for Mossy or Slate. You can see all the possibilities and their names here.

    -- march 27 --
    Close up view of the water.

    -- march 26 --
    Fixed texture mapping of water and added texture mapping of terrain as an option. Different textures can be selected from the menu. You can see some of the other textures here.

    -- march 25 --
    UPDATE:(1:26am)
    Want to add a speedometer. So far just have the basic background for it. I should probably leave it until I get other more important things done.

    UPDATE:(7:02pm)
    made my menu parse the directory so newly created files will be added to the menus. Also added timer to animation so that user can slow down/speed up the train. I'll have to test it at school to get the timing down.

    UPDATE:(2:59pm)
    I added a menu system so that you can load different tracks and terrains from within the program rather than restarting. Also put the toggle-able features on the menu.

    Smoothed out the animation around curves and fixed the train riding mode so that the camera moves smoothly around corners.

    -- march 24 --
    Didn't get as much work done this weekend as I would have liked. Roleplaying Saturday night until 5:30am didn't help. Got motion blur working today and finished up my perlin noise generation. I need to do some adjustments to it to make it tile-able though.

    -- march 22 --
    UPDATE: (6:33pm) cloud display working. I haven't written a perlin noise generator but I wrote all the code to take coherent noise and make it look like clouds and then alpha blend (is that a verb?) it onto the sky.

    Got texture mapping working and transparency for the smoke.

    and refined my fisher-price people a bit. I think they are very cute.

    -- march 21 --
    Finished up static collision details. You can now place fisher-price style people on the tracks who scream when the train runs over them. I know, it's morbid, but hey, there's a humour portion to the subjective marks! Stefanus (who is also in graphics) suggested that when I get texture mapping I should put the prof's face on the people .... I have to wonder if his motives in suggesting this were entirely altruistic ;)

    -- march 20 --
    UPDATE: (3:01pm)
    Working on drawing my L-system trees. Can't get things to line up if I have two axes of rotation for branches, so the trees are flat from the side, but look pretty good straight on.

    Spent a lot of time stirring pointer soup last night trying to find a bug in my particle system. Found it right away this morning. So now I have smoke (well, not really, at the moment they're just triangles, but the particle system works).

    -- march 19 --
    My terrain was much faster at school, especially when I switched to glColorMaterial calls. I am working on letting the user ride the train around the track. Works well except for on curves (my perrenial problem).

    -- march 18 --
    (1:47am) Not much to show for today. I did my revised proposal which is due tomorrow. Not much change to that except my new objective (Perlin Noise generated clouds). I fixed up the sync on the sound for collisions and added a whack of error-checking on the track layout parser. I played about with the terrain a lot, trying to make it faster by removing glMaterial calls, but turns out it'll probably be fine if I run it on the machines at school (thankyou Chris!). I shifted the terrain so there's more depth in view rather than wasting a lot of it behind the camera. The only thing to show is a new map that is more mountainous:

    -- march 17 --
    UPDATE (2:30am): can't seem to make myself go to bed... added some more realistic shaded sky.

    UPDATE (1:51am): got the terrain looking nice, using a display list but it's still slow as molasses. I think tomorrow I'm going to have to try to use vertex arrays. Wasted a lot of time trying to use smaller heightmaps but it just didn't look any good.


    UPDATE: trying to move heightmaps to a display list and I have a funny bug:
    got heightmaps working so now I can specify terrain. I have to play a bit with the animation because it does not follow the curves very nicely.

    -- march 16 --
    UPDATE:
    I can now run the train around the track in a rudimentary fashion.


    woohoo! I realised my track layout was broken, so I rewrote it and realised it was still broken. Then I returned to the original simpler layout and fixed the way the track was displayed, I finally have the figure 8 working correctly! (you can faintly see the grid lines that I ended up drawing to sort out how the pieces tile).

    -- march 15 --
    working on displaying track layout from a file ... figure 8 doesn't quite work yet...

    -- march 13 --
    Since graphics (cs488) has consumed my life this term and is likely to continue to do so, I thought I would document my progress on the final project. A beginning ...

    yeah, it's pretty boring so far, but for something more interesting take a look at my puppet or the final scene from my raytracer.