Real-time Rendering #5

This is the 5th lab of our realtime rendering module. We had to create a torus from first priciples by using a parametric equation which can be found here. The scene displays a textured torus with a phong shader under a spot light. The project was developed in Visual Studio 2005 with XNA Game Studio and NVidia's FX Composer.

Havok Moving On?

This is an article which appeared in the Irish Times on Friday, February 13th. John Collins reports on the possibility that Havok, a now Intel owned physics engine company spun out of Trinity College Dublin, might move their operations abroad "due to the lack of talented software engineers in the country". This is of particular interest to me as I'm currently studying a game development MSc in Trinity. Collins interviewed Havok CEO, David O’Meara, who had some rather scathing words about the standard of physics software developers in Ireland, and especially Trinity.

"If we want a smart economy, it is the top 5 per cent of graduates that create the knowledge – we have to be worried about them, not the average student. If you get less than 350 points in the Leaving Cert, I would question if you have the cognitive ability to do engineering at third level." - O'Meara

The Leaving Certificate entry points for Computer Science are floating around the 350 mark, which I believe is what O'Meara is referring to in this case. The article can be read here...but it makes for pretty grim reading...

Real-time Rendering #4

This is our Realtime Rendering Lab #4 where we had to implement Phong and Blinn-Phong illumination shaders. I used XNA Game Studio with C# Visual Studio for development with NVidia's FX Composer 2.5. The clip shows the simple Gouraud illumination model, which displays no specular lobe as the Phong model does. I display the Phong model before optimising it for Blinn-Phong which characteristically displays a larger specular lobe. The final shot is a comparison between the Phong model against the Blinn-Phong.

Real-time Rendering Lab #3

This is the third lab from our Real-time Rendering module. Our goal was to take the height map material we used for the last lab, and develop further to make height maps for an environment terrain. In this case, we generated height maps, but also textures for the mesh model. I used T2 Texture Generation to generate height maps and textures. I developed the scene using Microsoft's XNA and Visual C# in Visual Studio 2005.