3d Rendering And Related Subjects

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Raphael' post='1406607' date='Oct 21 2007, 02:21 PM']Most of my life, I wanted to be an architect. It remains a hobby of mine. I really wish I had a copy of autocad so I could play around on it in my free time, but it's too expensive. I took some drafting courses in high school and the teacher was a Catholic, so he gave me enough slack when I was a senior to come in and design stuff for fun. I spent the whole year designing the floor plan and frontal view for a cathedral...it had a colonnade, a rotunda, a very large nave (seated a couple thousand), two bell towers. It was pretty sweet. One of my dreams is to build a little oratory in my backyard some day. Actually, one of my dreams is to run a Catholic retreat center, so I'd probably design and build a church there.

The rotunda has one column for each book of the Scriptures (I think if a Protestant tried to take over and knock seven out, it might collapse, lol), the Pater Noster above the front doors, etc. The rotunda does look a bit like the US Capitol, which was on purpose because I didn't know many other good models. The whole structure is in marble, except the belltowers are in cobblestone (not the best mix, but I liked it at the time). Oh, and the foundation is built of 12 stones and there are nine levels to the rotunda (for the 9 choirs of angels). The front of the church (on the inside) is a parabolic shape to help sound amplification.

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v172/PrRaphael/Cathedral.jpg[/img][/quote]
Dude, that's sweeeeet! I wonder if there are any free programs that are comparable to the x-thousand dollar programs? Maybe you could help me make this game? j/k, I know you're super busy, that would be phat though.

[Laudate_Dominum]

I wish video cards could all handle 16384x16384 textures... hehe

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406621' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:02 PM']Dude, that's sweeeeet! I wonder if there are any free programs that are comparable to the x-thousand dollar programs? Maybe you could help me make this game? j/k, I know you're super busy, that would be phat though.[/quote]
It's not as easy as it looks, lol. Lots of calculations go into doing even simple things. I've spent whole days designing even simple little chapels on Google Sketch-up (although they always looked pretty sweet). I don't know of any free programs that are similar, although there is one 3-D program that Simcity 4 used which was pretty good, but it's not as user-friendly as autocad.

If a virus hadn't taken my old computer, I'd show you some of the chapels I came up with on it...some of them were pretty sweet. Granted, I'm a fan of Gothic and Baroque and you just can't get that detailed without killing your RAM, but there were some pretty good ones. Domes were always fun to make because I could never find a sphere feature on sketch-up, so I'd have to make a geodesic dome (or something similar) and then soften all the edges, lol.

I couldn't be an architect because my math was great, but I stunk at chemistry (dropped out of it in high school, lol). Most of the really good programs nowadays are integrated, so you have to be decent with design, math, chemistry, engineering, etc., usually specializing in one. At least, that's what I was told.

The world needs more good architects. You remember St. Francis Hall at FUS? The bathroom water drains are level with the rest of the floor because some architect wasn't thinking and thought it would look nicer...so now the janitors have to sweep the water up toward the drains instead of letting the drains just do their jobs.

Anyway, yeah, lol...I'm an architecture nerd.

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406615' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:51 PM']Yeah, I've been pondering the kind of restrictions that will have to be in place because in the end the cost is just too high on the kind of realism that I'd like to have and I don't know that its really worth it since it is a game and not a full fledged simulation of reality.[/quote]Simulations always involve cutting corners. The trick is knowing which corners should be cut first. A typical problem here is spending loads of time trying to solve something that has little impact on your app.

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406615' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:51 PM']I'm thinking of introducing two modes where one involves a complete view of the planet from a distance and the other is a kind of "orbit mode" where only a portion of the planet is visible but a higher tessellation, higher resolution planet is feasible. It wouldn't have the smooth and seamless experience that would be ideal, but compromises no doubt have to be made.[/quote]That's a great idea to attack this problem. Having a "whole planet" view and a "zoomed in" view for a piece of the planet works well.

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406615' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:51 PM']Since I'm basically creating a custom rendering engine from scratch I think it would be a big mistake to avoid HLSL. I've noticed that the more recent DirectX SDK documentation has been extremely HLSL-centric which suggests to me that this is pretty much the way to go.[/quote]I would make the general comment that you should try to avoid coding everything yourself (which is a strong temptation for anyone in 3D graphics) and try to write at higher levels when possible. This will save time, and help keep you focused on the important stuff.

Most rendering engines give you the hooks to write at lower levels when you need to.

As a side note: personally, my biases are toward OpenGL and not DirectX for a few reasons. But, if you're happy with DirectX, I won't comment on that little religious war...

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406615' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:51 PM']I know how to write a shader which uses a heightmap texture to pull of the effect but since my original post I've come to question using this technique at all. I'll need to fiddle around and see what works and what I like.[/quote]I think it's a good instinct that you've got to try to push calculations down to the GPU when possible. I'd love to see what kind of stuff you've done. Are you developing in Visual Studio?

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1406615' date='Oct 21 2007, 04:51 PM']I'm still very stoked that you're into this stuff! What applications do you prefer to work with? I have a bunch of crappy home grown utilities that I use to do things but combined they probably amount to less than 25% of what you could do with 3ds max or maya. [/quote]Let's see... First, I am not much of a 3D modeler anymore, though I used to do modeling more. The 3D tools I have used are 3D Studio, Creator (aka MultiGen), and a bunch of others that you've probably never heard of. I've programmed in OpenGL, as well as a bunch of higher-level languages, including Performer and OpenSceneGraph. In short, I'm a programmer who uses modeling tools only when I need to.

As far as "crappy home-grown utilities", there's nothing wrong with that! We've all got them! The trick is to always keep your eyes open and make sure you know what else is out there.

[Laudate_Dominum]

Since this discussion I have been acquiring real catalogs of data pertaining to stars and other bodies within known space. It has so far been a very demanding process and I've been writing utilities to extract and normalize the slew of data and then import it into my schema. So far I have adequate data on about a quarter of a million stars.

One of the plans I have for this data besides using it for the astrometrics lab is to design an application that will help generate assets for the actual game play levels. Obviously the scale of the game is so vast that it would not be feasible for me to manually create every sector of known space (from the Star Trek perspective) in the alpha and beta quadrants.

The number of sectors that the player will actually be able to visit will be limited since warp travel in ST is itself pretty limited when considering the actual scope of the entire galaxy. I am thinking of using the data I've been collecting to generate skybox/skysphere textures that would apply to large regions of space (at least 20ly3, perhaps 100), and then use the same data to real-time render the stars that fall within an inflated bounding sphere from the center of the sector corresponding to the stars that were excluded when the skybox textures were rendered. This is all just background details btw, I'm not talking about the more particular issues.

The further from sector 001 (Sol system) the game gets the less concerned I am about accuracy. Once the game play passes beyond stardate 46379.1, for example, it is possible to explore the Gamma Quadrant via the Bajoran wormhole. I could care less about accuracy in the Gamma Quadrant since no one would know any different anyway. The Sol System is the opposite in that an astronomy buff in orbit of Earth in my game would be likely to notice big mistakes, omissions or nonsense.

Would you have any advice by chance? Not just rendering stuff but even about astronomical data and all that?

Thanks.

[Laudate_Dominum]

I wonder if it is worth the bother pre-rendering background textures.. I wonder if it would be fine to just have some kind of particle system that renders anything that, based on distance and magnitude, would make a dent on the scene from the players current view.. Just seems like in some cases this could be a drag such as if the player was near a complex star cluster or something... Seems like a the PS approach could be better use of memory at least. Considering the planet texturing problem this could be a substantial concern..

[Laudate_Dominum]

Has anyone ever dealt with trying to reconcile the Star Trek star charts with real life? I've been working on this for a while now and there are still some big problems. Just curious. Peace.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

L_D, did you get my second PM?

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Raphael' post='1409195' date='Oct 25 2007, 01:37 PM']L_D, did you get my second PM?[/quote]
I did indeed. That was phat! I laughed at the clear render because it reminded me of hyper's ave maria thread. hehe

I think FUS should hire you to design the new chapel.

[Laudate_Dominum]

Hmm.. I wonder if those screenshots of that x-wing I made last year are still in photobucket...