Monday, June 18, 2012

One last visit to the forest

Here is a slightly old video I took from the voxel forest. This one has a radiosity solution. It is still not there for me, it may be too dark, also it also has some bugs in the lighting of grass and canopies that I fixed after doing the video. Anyway I thought it could be entertaining to some of you.


Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Dude where is my castle?

I have been writing some new grammars lately. I realized that if my system was any good, it had to be able to do romantic castles like Neuschwanstein, Disneyland, etc. I don't really like this style, but there was no way to avoid it.

So here are a few screens of procedural kitsch:







Note there are no materials or texturing. This should help you see the grammar output clearly.

This is the same castle from different angles. It sits on top of a series of boxes which were produced by an earlier stage, when city blocks are created. It is not required for the boxes to be aligned, although they are in this particular instance.

The interior is properly connected by a system of doors and stairs. Even the round towers have spiral stairs. You could go in and fool around inside this structure.

Most of what you see here is parametric, which means very different castles can arise from the same grammar rules. The basic components that you find instanced many times over, like windows, doorways, ledges, can also be replaced.

If you have been following this blog for a while now you will realize that this castle is built out the same elements of the church I posted more than a year ago. As you can see it takes little effort on the modeling side. I have been very lazy about creating new basic components.

As usual there is a lot of room for improvement. I want to add little windows in the rooftops, gargoyles, better doors and windows, balconies, etc. I will probably revisit this style later, for now I will move to the next cliche, maybe a Mayan temple or a Japanese Castle. If you have one type of architecture that you think will prove unsolvable, please drop me a comment.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

More radiosity shots

Here is the rest of the radiosity screenshots I took over the long weekend. Keep in mind this only shows ambient light, this is why they are darker than what they should. Still a long way to go!





Friday, May 18, 2012

Radiosity Screenshot

Here is a quick update on the radiosity. In this image there is only ambient light. Sunlight will make it more interesting for sure.


Wednesday, May 16, 2012

20 Light Bounces

I rewrote the radiosity solution over the weekend, this time for the Voxel Farm. Here you can see some results for the same forest scene of the earlier video:



It is a bit tricky to understand the light in these pictures. Primary light sources like the sun and the sky are not shown here. You can only see the light that has bounced off the surfaces or went through the tree crowns, which are translucent.

There are no materials or any texturing. The green hue comes from the crowns and parts of the ground that are covered by grass. But don't pay too much attention to the colors. This was to see if the algorithm was working properly. Also keep in mind the crown polygons are there only to collect, scatter and reflect illumination. They are replaced by the instanced leaves.

I found I needed to get up to 20 bounces to get enough illumination down to the forest ground. Otherwise it was too dark.