Processing

While not a complete solution to a project, processing offers alot in terms of education and experience and is presented as an Electronic Sketch Book for testing ideas.

The founation of processing is the unification of design and art skills with programming principals to create a truly Digital and Dynamic form of Art.

Just Thinking...

After attending a lecture by Gino Acevedo, weta digital and shop, i came away with one realy important motivtion. I need to learn biology.

The study of living things. This is a keystone to succesful and natural feeling projects and will implications for all areas of the design. These include issues like the unnacany vally, the 'not real enough because we see it every day and we know how it should look and i doesnt quite look like that' as well as fluid, natural motions and procedurally styled content. So i begin at the easyiset source of all digital information. The wiki:

Biology (from Greek βιολογία - βίος, bios, "life"; -λογία, -logia) is the study of life and a branch of the natural sciences which studies living organisms and how they interact with each other and their environment.
It examines the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of living things.
Also, it classifies and describes organisms, their functions, and how species come into existence. Four unifying principles form the foundation of modern biology: cell theory, evolution, genetics and homeostasis.

All of this interests me and provides strong foundations for the themes and structure of my next project. The next step is to choose a platform to target....

Options include OGRE, XNA, and Processing as well as Adobe Director

The Final Demonstration

Final presentation capture for major project, 2008.

Journey throught the void on the back of a giant turtle, your spirit guide. A compainion in the dark. Explore the mysterious landscape and steer the turtle throught the void.

My concept was about a relaxing, non-confrontational environment similar to Myst. It was built on metaphors of dreaming and meditation, the idea of seeking some kind of enligtenment.

the vimeo convert has made it a bit to dark. im going to recompose a more coimplete video for the portfolio/exibition

The Compass

A visual metaphor for navigating the journey of the soul


This is an idea ive been working on for the HUD. It had to be minimalistic and meaningfull and after watching The Golden Compass on DVD, it seemed obvious.

A single 3D model with a white emmisive material to overlay on the Viewport which would be the players only means of navigation and information. The compass would rotate and chage perspective accoding to the players viewpoint to the turtle

These are just Blender Renders. Actualy programming in a second Scene Manager and Viewport and Camera proved difficult. Ogre will not let a Viewport be transparent to the Viewport would have to be rendered to a texture and set to Additive colour mode. Working on solutions now..?

Progressing..

Here are some screen shots of testing the lighting setup. The process will be two fold baking the light in blender then placing lights in the OGRE engine (using blender coord. space) to actualy light the geometry.

The scene unshaded

Using Shift-P for blenders render preview window


I render out wire frame previews for generating mapping ideas

There are two main light sources. The warm toned 'Heart light' (which has a subtle heartbeat sfx to go with it) and the 'Leading light' which is a bright blue. Then there are the lamp post which follow the paths around.

The Compositing engine

After several failed attempts(im not sure why), iv finaly got the basic post compositor effects working in OGREs real time 3D engine.

This with a Radial blur and an Invert filter applied



Then the Invert filter with Black and white



After that i turned off the skybox and changed the background and fog colour to white (which switches to black) and got a similar effect to the Z depth rendering tests done with blenders composite nodes here:
Composite nodes post

First demo - Travels Through the Void

this is what was playing on the psp

After about seven months of work on this project, its finaly delivering what i first dreamed it could. This clip demonstrates the engine working, as well as some of its nicer features like fog, particles, billboards and lighttrails. Also working is the irrKlang sound engine providing 3D placed sound in real time.

Things to be worked on:
OGREs post compositing - I want HDR styled lighting
Tweaking and improveing the basic animations and sound
More environment - more level design

I also plan to prepare a Blender scene to demonstrate a gameplay concept using its easy node based realtime functions.