http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:57:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just had another look at Crazy Bump, a very useful tool for generating normal, AO, displacement, and specular maps, only to discover the tool is no longer free. This saddens me. It's a great tool, but I'm not sure what it does warrants a $100 purchase. http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=34 CityEngine A large portion of my research was based off of some of the ideas behind CityEngine. Their building generation interface is much, much slicker than mine, but then, they were probably more than one guy working for less than two semesters. Free 30 day trial, but $7000 to buy. ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=33 Master's research is finished, but there are still things to learn. This site never updated much, but I'll be trying harder to keep it going with my various personal projects. Component-based design has been my latest hot topic. Here are some useful links I've collected (or written): Component Based Game ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=32 Here's a brief summary of various programs I've been trying to use to generate AO maps: faogen: Costs money. Seems pretty reliable and pretty fast. But, against, costs money. Blender: Er, wouldn't load the .obj file I tried to throw at it, which started things off in exactly the ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=31 This set of references isn't nearly comprehensive - there's a lot of information about procedurally generating textures, much more than buildings or cities. My thesis also isn't focused on textures, so it's just a side-section. Still, a lot of useful papers: Ebert, D. S., Musgrave, F. K., Peachey, D., ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=30 Continuing in yesterday's trend, here are a bunch of references for procedural city generation: Parish, Y. I. and Müller, P. 2001. Procedural modeling of cities. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and interactive Techniques SIGGRAPH '01. ACM, New York, NY, 301-308. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383259.383292 Greuter, S., Parker, J., Stewart, ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=29 I spent the night organizing my references so that they're easier to cite while writing the actual thesis. I've got a lot of stuff here that other people might find useful, so I'm going to make a multi-day event of posting the references I have. Most of the ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=28 The nVidia GeForce 8 Documentation explicitly says that loops should now support run-time condition testing, which to my mind means that non-const variables should be permissible in the condition test. Either way, I should be able to create an infinite loop and have a statement inside which breaks out ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=27 Alas, the majority of nVidia's profiling/debugging tools only work with DirectX, so I am either forced to insert code myself or find different tools. GLIntercept looked promising, but it hasn't been updated in a little over two years. There's no logging of geometry shader info in there, which I could ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=26 It confuses me a bit why the GPU doesn't have a decent random number generator. Procedural textures have been around for quite some time, and moving their generation to a shader makes sense. There is a noise function in GLSL which doesn't work reliably (everything I've read indicates ... http://www.theanimalfarmcreations.com/research/?p=25