So, I’ve graduated, and with that come the [end] of my computer graphics quarter-long projects. To recap, my honors capstone project was to create a fully destructible terrain engine using BSP tree merging. Then, the Computer Graphics 2 project was to implement Screen Space Ambient Occlusion in addition to indirect lighting, or real time (fake) global illumination using GLSL shaders. I’m fairly happy with the progress I made, but will continue to work until they are fully optimized and useable by the gaming community. I’d like to release both as open source goodies should anyone be interested in using my progress in their own projects.

You can get the demo/source code from my portfolio here:
http://ambitiouspagoda.com/portfolio/

Then, be sure to check out the wiki project pages:

Destructible Environment engine - http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Destructible_3D_Environments
SSAO and SSIL - http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Screen_Space_Dynamic_Lighting

Now I just have to work on getting a job doing this stuff so that I’m not a big shlub all summer

So I’ve been working on my honors capstone project steadily for the past 2 weeks. I’m trying to achieve a destructible environment game engine using BSP tree merging techniques, hypertextures and hopefully GPU acceleration via geometry shaders. So far the BSP works just fine, and I’m about to dive into some merging routines. Check out the progress here:

http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Destructible_3D_Environments

While your at it, you can see the progress Kent and I are making on the Ray tracer for Computer Graphics II here:

http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Ray_tracer

For about three weeks I have been lounging around my living room at school listening to Christmas music. Of course, as the majority of my time is spent using my Mac, I came across a great station under the iTunes radio category of “Holiday”. SomaFM, with their tag line as “Chilled holiday grooves and classic winter lounge tracks” offers a very interesting mix of beats. Although I love the classic songs that we all know, such as those from Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Chuck Berry, I have to admit- along with my college friends who chill it up with me in “The Christmas Zone” (aka my living room) - that there is something about SomaFM that makes the atmosphere very likable. Many of the tracks feature indie hip hop and dance beats, which sample those aforementioned classic Christmas tunes. Honestly, check it out, and if you don’t have iTunes, you can still stream from this url: SomaFM

Getting more to the point, I found myself liking so many of the songs that every other minute I was interrupting my programming or Maya workflow to record the song title from iTunes and write it down so that I could check it out later. Then it dawned on me! Why not write a cheesy AppleScript to grab this data for me and concatenate it line by line to a file? Furthermore, how about setting this script to fire every time I press a certain key combination by setting a trigger in Quicksilver? Well, it turns out that it works great, and I’m currently priming it up and possibly integrating it with Growl instead of the current confirmation which happens when the hotkey is pressed: OS X’s Alex speaks it aloud to me :/ Amusing but… ok maybe I’ll keep it as an option. Yeah so look for that soon. I’ll make another post when it’s available (or using this idea just write it yourself. It was pretty damned simple).