Archive for June, 2008

This semester at the university, we had a Graphics Processing Systems class. While old fixed-function OpenGl was used in courses and laboratory works, for the project, I chose to use my favorite graphics API in the whole world. Yup, you know what I’m talking about… the XNA Framework.

A few of my friends also got dragged into XNA, based on my two years of talking about how cool it is. Neither of them had any previous XNA experience, so I guided them to some tutorials and the creator’s club site and let them experience it from there. Also, popular request from them sparked the idea of an easy to use shadows library.

Godswood

From all the projects I’ve seen made, the one that I am most proud of is that of my beloved iubi-pufi-honey-bunny (read fiancee), Lidia. She made a great tree model inspired by George R. R. Martin’s works, all from scratch, and placed some mountains and water around it. After adding some falling snow, she decided to make the snow accumulate on the ground and trees, and came up with the idea to do some simple shader tricks and blend in the snow texture based on the time passed since the snow began to fall. The result looks very nice. Check it out for yourself, by downloading the binaries. (control the camera with directional keys and mouse, use [S] to toggle snow)

Island in the Ocean

For my project, I decided to try and implement Atmospheric Scattering and realistic water rendering. For atmospheric scattering, I learned from Javier Canton Ferrero’s sample. For realistic water rendering, I read, studied and converted to XNA Yuri Kryachko’s article from GPU Gems 2, “Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering”. My palm trees were modeled by Lidia.

You can see the results below, and download the binaries here.

Use the gamepad, or keyboard+mouse for camera control. [Space] pauses the simulation, and [S] speeds it up.