Shadow Graphics

Today was our first day of working on Endless skies during this free week.

With a good 12 hours of work it was quite productive.

Here’s what was accomplished today:

• The Camera Class was fully implemented and is finally working in both XYZ rotation and translation (though for the time being we won’t use Z rotation much since that rolls the camera. This however will be very useful once we get to flight) Much frustration and fun was had trying to get a monkey’s head to spin properly. Here is a screenshot from Geoffrey’s Computer, with an earlier version of the dragon’s head:

• Carnot now has a full png loader, capable of loading *.png files of any size that are either: Bitmap/RGB, 8bit/16bit, and interlaced or not, fully according to Portal Network Graphic Specifications (although we did have some issues with the ’save for web’ photoshop png files. Might look into it more, but really the way things are right now is pretty much all we need.
• UV Texturing is implemented but still buggy.
• Looked over some possible compression and image storage technologies.
• Finished the Head of the dragon. I had a version of this before, but today I added the teeth and cleaned it up a bit more:

(Normal Detail Mouth Positions)

(High Detail Head Shots)

Tomorrow I hope to put some work into learning how to use World Machine 2, as well as working more on the model and once Geoffrey gets textures working properly he will implement a sky-box (or probably dome in our case) which I’m hoping will support both panorama textures and gradient textures (used to store the different colors of the sky for different times of the day all in one texture. More on that at a later point.) After that, it will be time to start work on heightmaps. and the actual terrain.

See you tomorrow!

-Johannes