Thursday, December 18, 2014

Earth 3058 (Final Video Update)

Our project has come to an end! Dexter, Matt, and I had a lot of fun with the story line and just making the entire project come together. We definitely branched off of our initial idea of a Sylvan Scene but our new idea was just so much cooler! We ended up implementing particle effect, moving objects along a piecewise Bezier curve, procedurally generated terrain, and procedurally generated plants with L-system. Our creativity was really put into our story and trying to make our scene as realistic as possible but by still creating some mutations to fit our story/theme.

Here's a background story to our video:

Earth 3058, or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Homogeneous Coordinates"
In the year 2058, the Earth was ravaged by a nuclear war. Despite the chaos, the annual SIGGRAPH conference was still convened that year. Graphics professionals pooled their efforts to create a new GPU, name the "Jurgen Drive," which had the power to transform actual 3D objects into 4 dimensional space. Using the mathematical magic behind homogeneous coordinates and fictional science, the SIGGRAPH elite were able to project themselves and millions of innocent survivors into the 4th dimension, in the hopes of restarting humanity on another world. They believed the transformation was irreversible, but they had no choice other than to abandon 3D universe.
Until today.
Now, a thousand years later, we've finally figured out how to build an inverse Jurgen Drive! We've equipped a probe with this technology and sent it back into the 3rd dimension, in order to determine the feasibility of recolonizing the Earth.
Here's a live feed:
Confirming our suspicions, Earth is still stuck in nuclear winter. Scans indicate sudden surges in wind speeds and spontaneous blizzards.

Fortunately, many creatures seem to have survived the fallout, including the eagle. Preliminary observations suggest that the eagle's flight pattern follows a concatenation of cubic Bezier curves. Further observation will need to be made to determine the sampling method.

We've detected an abundance of plant life, which seems to have evolved spherical leaves. One explanation may be that these round leaves maximize the amount of light collected by the plant, in an effort to capture light reflected off the snow layer.

Our ground-penetrating sonar has revealed significant, seemingly random, seismic activity. It appears the sheer weight of all the snow has cause tectonic micro fractures, which can cause the snow to shift at any moment. Given the amount of variability in the Earth's surface, we suspect much of the ruins that were not flattened during the war have long since eroded away.

Our video shows the probe exploring Earth 3058:




Dexter Friedman, Matthew Woo, Bhagya Sharma

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A Sylvan Scene to Earth 3058 (Update 2)

Dexter, Matt, and I have been continuing work on our project and have made a lot of progress but have also made some changes to our original idea. We had originally planned to do a very detailed nature scene and within the last week we decided to change our scene to still nature-y but something with a creative twist. We decided to do a semi post apocalyptic world, Earth in the year 3058, with the idea of being in 4D for humanity and how nature has been mutated to look like it does in our scene (we have a really exciting story to go with our idea for our presentation tomorrow).
Dexter spent his time creating an awesome procedurally generated terrain, which procedurally regenerates with a key press. Matt has been working on the tree you see in the picture using the procedurally generated plants with L-systems technique. I have been working on the snow (particle effect) and working on moving the eagle along a Bezier curve. We’ve been focusing a lot on making sure our frames per second stays at a high-ish number and try to make our scene as unique & innovative as possible. 






Dexter Friedman, Matthew Woo, Bhagya Sharma

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The Sylvan Scene (Update 1)

Team Members: Matthew Woo, Dexter Friedman, Bhagya Sharma
We've decided to a do a sort of Sylvan Scene, creating a park/nature scene with detailed flora, varying terrain, possibly a lake, with maybe some stonehenge looking rock sculptures, and rain falling from the sky.
We're hoping to implement the following features: Procedurally modeled terrain, procedurally modeled plants with L-systems, particle effect, and procedurally modeled buildings. If we have time we may also implement Bump Mapping, Displacement mapping, and maybe moving the camera with a piecewise Bezier curve.
Our creative efforts are being spent on making the scene as realistic as possible.


We've got a tree trunk, a bit rain, and some terrain! Matthew did some work developing the L-systems and Dexter is working on the procedurally modeled terrain. The terrain is still flat but he's working on implementing algorithms to make height adjustments. Bhagya is working on the particle effect for rain. We've also got a nice nature skybox texture.