[Week 9-11] End of Semester Update

Hello!

With the school year is coming to a close, the last few weeks have been fairly busy.
I have not been able to blog as much as I would like to, so today's blog post is a summary of what I have been doing the past couple weeks up to today (weeks 9-11).

In the recent lectures periods, we have been doing in class exercises, such as creating the portal effect and creating water effects, which brings together the different concepts we have been learning about this semester. We also had the chance to demo our GDW game to the class for criticism on things to improve on in preparation for GameCon/LevelUp.
In relation to the water exercise, we watched a GDC 12 presentation on the Water Technology of Uncharted from Naughty Dog. In their presentation, the method of how they did their water rendering was really interesting. From what I understood, they were using different geometry sizes of clipmaps on top of each other, and blended in between the different levels.
It worked together with the camera, where the important objects in the scene with detail were in the smallest mesh, with the camera focused on it. As the objects/camera moved in the scene, the rings would also move.

Water Technology of Uncharted

The other topics that we have covered in the past lectures were deferred rendering, depth of field and motion blur, all three topics that were interesting to me.

In the recent tutorial with Dan, we went over the implementation of shadow mapping; an explanation of what is done, and the shader code process. We also went over how to implement projection; projecting an image from the light source onto the scene. I plan to use what we were shown to complete homework assignments due in the few weeks.

Shadow Mapping + Projection

As for homework, there are two weeks remaining for homework submission. My framework still has a few small issues with UV texture loading, but I can finally start finishing off homework questions.
So far I have started and almost completed the ambient occlusion demo, the shadow mapping demo, as well as an artist questions demoing the use of normal/specular/diffuse maps in different environments such as Maya, the opengl shader designer, and into my framework. I may work on mesh skinning or reflections, if I can finish it on time.

Ambient Occlusion In Maya

- Jonathan