In this fourth article on the Scape terrain editor, the actual brush-based editing pipeline is described from beginning to end, which uses either the CPU or the GPU to update the areas affected by a user's brush strokes. Besides many pipeline optimization details, it also covers Scape's direction noise feature.
This is the third article in the series on Scape, a GPU-based terrain editor, picking up where I left off in the previous article on procedural noise techniques. In this article, I'll discuss two novel procedural noise-mixing algorithms that are capable of generating terrain types that seem to be heavily eroded.
This is the second article in a series on the Scape terrain editor, covering the first (and simpler) half of the procedural algorithms behind Scape's brushes, including its optimized pixel shader Perlin noise and the more common turbulence functions used internally to edit heightfields on the GPU.
Scape is a heightfield terrain editor I developed as part of my thesis work at W!Games in 2008. It allows the user to sculpt large terrains using procedural brushes in real-time, using GPGPU techniques for the bulk of the work. In this first article on Scape, its (procedural) terrain rendering techniques are explained.
Super Nova is a 'planet' generation experiment gone berserk. Rendering almost half a million particles on the ever-changing surface of an extremely perturbed sphere while flying around and through it creates a quite interesting visual display. Freely available as a screensaver for Windows.
Armed Mine is a creature I created for Doom 3 that uses procedural animation to drive motor-controlled physics joints. Animation-driven physics gives a lot of flexibility, but can be difficult to get right. Especially when the engine doesn't support this out of the box. Read how the Doom 3 physics engine was extended and the Armed Mine was implemented.
Find out how the horse's tail physics simulation for W!Games' game 'My Horse & Me' was developed from prototype to final product, going from a many-strand technique to a more optimized skin-and-bone skeletal animation system.
Although the repeated games used in the field of game theory are relatively trivial, they do allow for strategy analysis, comparison and optimization within a well-defined framework. This article reviews existing learning strategies like Q-learning and leader strategies like Godfather and Bully, extends the latter to improve on their weaknessess, and presents detailed tournament results.
To be able to see SIRDS images of moveable 3D objects (like those from the Magic Eye books), I developed an interactive and customizable SIRDS viewer, capable of generating rotatable SIRDS of 3D models at high frame rates. If you're interested in how they work, how the viewer was implemented, or just want to try it out, read on!
CamBall is a virtual ball simulation that uses a cheap webcam, simple 2D physics, the OpenCV library and some creativity to augment a webcam's images with a virtual ball you can grab and throw around in real-time. Read about the used computer vision and physics techniques, see the video, or simply try it out yourself!