the matrix was a documentary
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Looks like I spoke too soon. While OGRE was getting pretty slow with the naive implementation, I was able to find some code on what they call StaticGeometry, which is a system to batch together lots of similar meshes that don’t move (great for my cube example project).
Seeing as performance has been on my mind recently, I tweaked the core render loop a bit and saw some reasonable gains. The one thing I realized is that most of the objects in the scene are static, and don’t need their combined transformed matrices recalculated every frame. I
