Midterm Madness

     Well Midterms are bringing there ugly head around, and i seem to be putting most of my studying towards Graphics. Over joyed that the midterm is only worth 10%, and is in  the afternoon, morning midterms are hell.

     I have been studying off a combination of old notes and the midterm slideshow, and I find that by the end of the slideshow I was happy I made some notes. For example the slideshow only contains 1 slide on toon shading, but it was almost the main point of that class. I guess hes just not having much of it on the midterm. I can sum up all the content this far as categories, i feel that writing it out will help with studying, and should make a decent blog. Listing off as follows, Basics of Computer Graphics, Textures, Basics of Shaders, Shader Examples, Lights and Shadows.

Basics of Computer Graphics-
    Vertex shader, Triangle assembly, rasterization, fragment shader, All need to be known, and understood. We learned it in intro to graphics, and we had questions on it with the midterm and exam.
How 3 dimensional assets are created, seems like really simple stuff to put on a midterm review, but I guess there's gonna be something on why we use triangles over squares, (it takes more processing power).
Textures-
   UV Mapping, mapping the texture to certain pixels of the 3D image. Types of textures, bump mapping - getting normal information off the texture, and displacement mapping- getting displacement information from the texture, displacing the pixels individually.
Basics of Shaders-
More specific things in the graphics pipeline, where the shaders, VBO.A and textures happen.
Shader Examples-
     Like I talked about earlier toon shading is a good example. Some examples should be known, like the monocolour/colourshaders in Dan's tutorials, or edge tracing.
Lights and Shadows
     This ones big, the difference between Ambient, diffuse, and secular. Toon shading is removing the gradient of diffuse and secular by making a function that only has a set amount of lights, as in only have bright and a grey. Radiosity brightens areas, then blurs them to create a soft more realistic light looks. The didn't mention it in the slide show, but we did talk about ambient occlusion which asks how many objects are in the way of the light source? And bases lighting off that.

Thats a quick summery of what I have gone over, So far this midterm seems like its gonna be a lot more theory compared to animations and intro to graphics. Wish me luck

Harder Than it Should Have Been

     Second semester is on its way, and a new class asks for blogs. The things are my kryptonite, and I don't even really have powers. For reasons I don't really feel like sharing with the world wide web writing forms like this are ridiculously difficult for me, but I got to give it a shot.

    Intermediate Graphics, if Introduction to Computer Graphics, and Computer Animations had a big brother it would be this class. I'm going to sum up what I learned from week one from my perspective.

1. Most of the code in Introduction to Computer Graphics was a trick (SFML and immediate mode), you're going to have to drop it and remake your code with what we're using if you want a chance.

2. You are gonna have to stress out at least once a week, for a non code related task. As in Blogs are mandatory, and there worth a hell of a lot.

3. Homework questions are back, this time with a twist, it has to be in your framework and there marked properly. Meaning the lead programmer better get it together or everybody goes down.

4. Mr. Hogue is really unimpressed with our midterm and exam scores there worth less in this class.

    Those for points have been haunting me for the last few weeks, but enough of that into actual course content.

This is what our first semester prototype looks like.

     So far it has a really simple art style that can be improved by incorporating pretty much anything that has been shown in class so far. To knock the big one off the list, cel shading would work wonders with our simple colors especially on our protagonist. The best comparison for a game we would like to match would be Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

    cel shading it self seemed pretty simple, We covered it week 3. instead of using a gradient for lighting, 100% being black and 0% being the original image, just average it out i.e. from 40% 100% will be grey. This end up making everything have two colours (implementing more is easy), one for the original and a darker version for shading. Seen in this wind waker picture, links cloths are green, and dark green where the shading is. 

    What got me really interested with the toon shading was creating black borders, using normal values to know whether something is facing the camera never crossed my mind. I'd love to see what playing with some of the ranges of that and the toon shading would look like. Especially reversing the roll of the border shading and only having color on the borders, creating a sort of highlighted edge effect I think would be awesome for certain scenes in the game. To be more specific Specular lighting, calculate the value of light seen by the viewer, if the value is close to 0 make it black. moving the range somewhere other than zero could create some weird border effects as well.

    What i really want to do this semester is combine some of the shaders with some stuff we learned form animations last semester. More specifically creating scenes with a combinations of lighting effects and particles. 

Two main scenes i would like to get into the game are snowing and raining. Raining is really rarely seen in cel shaded games, and usually its just a simple particle effect and not much else. I would love to throw in some lightning by making a super bright ambient light for a second, and otherwise having some really distant dark lighting, with borders highlighted like i said earlier. While for snowing I want to try using the toon border method but moving the values to somewhere in the middle and see if i can get a snow covered effect. 

Another tool from this class I would like to incorporate is bump mapping, it wont really be used by me as much, but it would be great for my artists. Most of our enemies are humanoid figures and they seem to have more and more triangles. bump mapping will be nice for lowering that.

Next weeks blogs, going to be on week 4 and 5. I was sick week 4 so I've missed the classes, but I plan on doing some research on the topics in the lectures online to catch up.