game development pro
After struggling for a bit with the shadow mapping implementation, I finally have something presentable. I followed a tutorial from Microsoft and thought I understood what was happening. However, it required a lot of changes in the rendering code and it took a little while to get things working. Even once it was somewhat functional, I still had some issues with what they
Creating the Art of the Game by Matthew Omernick was a quick and easy read. However, I wish I had noticed the age of the book (and also the age of the reviews on Amazon). This book is seriously dated, and it has not aged well. Although some of the topics are still applicable, and lot of the stuff he talks about is
There is no question, Digital Modeling by William Vaughan is a book every 3D modeler (or aspiring modeler) should read. It really captures the essence of what makes a good model, and doesn’t get bogged down with technical details of specific modeling packages. In this review, I will briefly go over why I think everyone with any interest in 3D art should pick up
After a few days of hacking away at the code, I’ve got a new video up. In this update I have added normal mapping and specular lighting. I did have a few set-backs while working on the shaders, and it was made even more difficult since I was basically “flying blind” without a debugger. It seems that the Express version of Visual Studio
3D Game Engine Design: A Practical Approach to Real-Time Computer Graphics by David H. Eberly was an quite a read, at slightly over 1,000 pages. However, after a few chapters in I was already getting fatigued and I really had to push my way to the end. That’s not to say that the book was bad, it was not, however it was nothing
Spent the last couple days adding in skybox support into the engine. Currently it’s a little hard-coded, but it does seem to be working well. I also bumped the field of view (FOV) up to 90 (from 45) so you can see more of the sky. I wanted to make sure I was only using my own artwork for this engine demo. Unfortunately,
While getting models loaded was pretty exciting, I ended up dealing with major load times on the demo. Granted, my XML parsing code is probably slow as all hell, but I don’t think COLLADA is really designed for real-time engine use. With simple plane and cube shapes the loading wasn’t that bad, but with my soda can model (around 600 triangles) the loading
What you see above is a custom model I made in 3ds Max, exported as a COLLADA *.dae file, and imported into my DirectX engine. I figured I’d start with something simple, like a soda can, and I plan to make a lot more models going forward. Although I hadn’t touched Max in years, I found it to be a comfortable experience and
This has got to be one of the more insane physics demos I’ve seen so far. Most physics engine handles the basic rigid bodies and such, but start to fall apart with more complex interactions (i.e. fluid and cloth simulations). With the demo shown above, from Nvidia, it seems these difficult problems have been solved. Cloth, fluid, smoke, and rigid or soft bodies, all
After some more testing, it looks like OGRE is not the savior it seemed like yesterday. While the static geometry boosted frame-rates greatly, it’s only useful for, well, static objects. Meaning the models can’t move or animate. I did find another option, instancing, which initially looked promising. It allows rendering of large amounts of identical objects faster than just having them be individual.
