Since Star Wars(tm) (so i’ve read), texture-based techniques have been used to improve the detail on planar and easily curved surfaces. The one i’m talking about here is called Greebles. Apply an heightmap texture on a surface and on a per-pixel basis, geometry is generated acoording to the pixel’s intensity. By doing it you get more detailed surfaces without having to model every little part by yourself, making things more interesting, realistic and much more appealing.
To achieve this i’ve picked Vertex Texture Fetch. It allows you to access texture data on the vertex shader. Pass a texture to the vertex shader and offset the surface vertices by the pixel’s intensity. To improve the looks, bump-mapping with multiple lights have been used. Everything presented here is generated on the GPU, even the objects. Runs nicely on a Nvidia 8200M. Lots of space for improvement.
So here it is, new demo is out! It’s called Taxesss from Nothing and it was released at Mainparty this year. This demo started as an idea from my good friend and work colleague, ps, who usually watches my experiments in first hand. After watching some of the stuff you can see in my vimeo account, he came out with this piece for a grindcore jazz track from The Lost Gorbachevs. After handing him all the sources, he started building the demo while i was working on my own idea. Well, it turns out Taxesss is out and has been quite well accepted by the alternative parties, and my own project is still waiting to come out.. Hope you enjoy this piece.
I have played with 3d stereoscopic in the past but never got to make someting good. This is still not the time sorry, but… i think its worth the post and the time. So what do we have here ?
The technique used is called ‘off-axis frustum’ a.k.a the “right way”, courtesy of Paul Bourke. If you want to read more about it you should pay a visit to his website.
2 images are rendered from 2 different point of views, creating two images with some little differences between them. The off-axis frustum means the point of view might not lie on the perpendicular line to the ‘view-area’. These 2 images are then sent to a simple shader that takes the R channel from the left-eye buffer, the GB channels from the right-eye buffer and then mixes it into a single stereo image. This is the color glasses compositing method, but it sure is possible to just send both images down the two adapters of your videocard and get the same 3d feeling (with colors) using an Head-Mounted Display or a multi-projector system of some kind.
After releasing Deep’s source code, i thought to myself i could also release an old production of mine, Sunflower.
Sunflower is a visual non-interactive application a.k.a. demo, feat. music from Four Tet.
