Gearing Up For My Final Year

After doing very well (even if I do say so myself) on my work placement helping develop public security software in .NET. I am nearing the end of my time at the job. I have received great feedback from my team leaders at work and I am proud of the contribution I gave to the products I worked on. I have learnt a lot that will help me in the future and the experience has been extremely beneficial.
As I come to the end of my year (and a bit) in industry I see the final year of my degree getting closer. In order to prepare for my final year I have started to set up a source control server on a mini-atx box I have build and I have start reading papers in the area of research I have chosen to base my applied research project on.
Each paper I read makes the task I have chosen seem more complex and far bigger than I could have imagined so I am putting my efforts into narrowing down the key areas I am interested in for my proposed dissertation title.

Busy busy busy

All my assignments have been officially set and time is flying by so fast that before you know it, it is Sunday again. I have been working hard since my last update, wrestling with unreal and coding away my own graphics API.

Its all very well me telling you what I have done but what you really want to see is the all important end product of the work. I will start with my 3D renderer. This is the project that I am most enjoying right now because it is very challenging and when something renders correctly it is incredibly rewarding.

Here is a wire frame render of a 3D cube with back face culling active. With the menu that I worked on this week you can turn on and off features from within the software.

This is the renderer with the GDI+ API filling in the polygons.

This is with directional light.

Another feature in the software is the ability to switch between different predefined models. This is a model of Starscream from transformers with directional light.

This is Starscream with point lighting. In addition to this I have been coding my own rasteriser so that I don't have to use GDI+ for my solid shading.

Now I have shown you my 3D renderer progress I will show you something more game-like. Here are some screenshots of my unreal engine game "Famous Five: Five Run Away Together".

Progress

Time seems to be moving very fast lately. I have been practising my MIPS assembly in console development and I was thrilled to hear that in two weeks time we will be putting all our hard work into practice on the PSP development kits.

In Games Development techniques my game is coming along nicely, I have a mini game in place in my level where you must collect mushroom in the forest on my map.

In Introduction to 3D I have written a camera class and a rendering pipeline and my program now renders 3D wire frames of .md2 files. I felt this was a large achievement and I put a lot of time and effort into the program to get it to this point.

Enter The Matrix

In Introduction to 3D graphics programming last week I was playing with the matrix. Ok, so its not as fun as it sounds. A matrix is a array of numbers used in maths to denote objects or transformations.

Last Tuesday I programmed a matrix class that will be used in my 3D rendering program. It is built to use 4 dimensional matrices. As the third dimension is perpendicular to the second , the forth dimension is perpendicular to the third.

Here is a two dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional object, the so called "Hypercube".

In graphics programming you use matrices called "Transformation" matrices to move and change the shape and size of 3D objects.

This week we will be learning about the virtual camera, the way you view the 3D world and the way it is represented as a 2 dimensional image on your screen.