w11 – Mesh Landscape

 

During work hours, I spend countless hours looking at finite element meshes; discrete geometric representations of CAD data. Solid shapes filled with hexahedrals and tetrahedrals or thin walled structures mapped with quadrilaterals and triangles. Often enough, the temptations of spicing the engineering-oriented visuals with a touch of Ooompf from ye’ old demoscene clue shop. We are the Norwegian Demoscene after all, remember?

First step, create some landscape generator that would make it possible to additive add noise and features onto an arbitrary object.

Second step, trying to apply some of the tricks I learned when I did the short and sweet low poly planet project.

Third step, figuring out the simplest way to get anti-aliased lines in ogl. (It’s been a while, and it probably don’t qualify to be called a “step”).

Forth step, using my own line method to try to create some god rays. It looked like shit so it got cut, this is why (but the shading is less shit than in the second step, easy!)

Several iterations of playing around;

And getting it to look okay-ish….even with the use of some crude postproc

From here I started to incorporate dusty components such as camera, the wonderful synctracker and other stuff I need to make a video snippet.
Who knows, maybe next week? I want to continue on this road for a while – and there is several areas to explore, the lowest hanging fruit is naturally to add all the standard effects such as tonemapping, depth of field and bloom.

Let’s see.

 

Bonus:

[rant mode on]

I can’t exactly pinpoint when I stopped updating this blog. Its been on my mind many times the last four months. Between life and other projects it has often gotten the short straw. Unfortunately, because I really enjoy making these small updates.

Working as been going on slow and steady behind the scenes of the vast sea of information we know as teh internets. Yet again we rise from our own incarceration designed by inflated egos wanting to show off; this is a key reason to the lack of updates – the need to wow – which was the exact opposite to why we chose to start this blog in general.

[/rant mode off]