I have posted previously about a simple terrain heightmap display program I have made, but never talked about some of the methods of generating and manipulating heightmap based terrain systems.

I added anti-aliasing to the rendering of the ray tracer. At first I tried regular sampling which is breaking a pixel down into smaller sub-pixels and shooting rays through the center of those pixels and averaging the result. This was better than nothing but still created some artifacts when rendering. The next trial was random sampling to replace aliasing with noise, but the samples can become clumped together and look unnatural. The method that I have settled on for now is jittered sampling which consists of breaking the target pixel down into sub-pixels and shooting rays at a random position through the sub-pixels so that each sub-pixels has at least one ray shot through it. Changing the amount of samples per pixel reduces the aliasing effect.

Just a quick update, my raytracing project - SimpleRTracer is now available on sourceforge at this address - https://simplertracer.sourceforge.net

Just thought I should update that the svn of my Astronomy work is live at https://owls-h1.sourceforge.net

Today I was kind of bored so I decided to write a simple particle system in XNA. The helpful tutorials over at https://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/ helped point me in the right direction. This particle system is very primitive at the moment, a particle emitter follows the mouse around the window. When I get the time (or the motivation) I am going to add a few more features such as different particles (smoke, water, fire, etc.), some different effects like attraction and repulsion and maybe the option to place multiple emitters in the scene.

The following reports are both about the visualisation pipeline that I developed when working for ICRAR (International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research).

This program is an older OpenGL based terrain loader. The program loads in a greyscale heightmap and generates the terrain based on height values stored in the image. This version uses the DevIL image library which allows it to load a wide variety of file formats. Several textures are loaded, these include the ground texture, the detail texture and the water texture. A simple method of creating a water plane is to create a plane at a certain level for example a y axis height of -10, then animate the UV coordinates of the plane so that the water appears to move.

Just a quick update, the video in this post shows some of the work I have been doing for the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. This video consists of 951 frames, each frame is a 3d volume that has been calculated from the GIMIC data set. The volumes are then rendered out from Drishti with a rainbow colour table.

Since I got my new laptop, I have been working on a personal project creating a simple, easily extendable raytracer.

I often have the need to transform cubic images into a cube map or skybox, so I have written this program in python to create them quickly and easily.

I am currently working as an iVec intern on the Visualizing Galaxy Simulations project. The project involves taking cosmological simulation data stored in .hdf5 files and converting point, mass, h1 mass data into a volumetric 3d density representation of h1 hydrogen gas. I am using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to calculate the density contributions of nearby points.

This code will load a doom md5 model with textures and animation. The source code for this application was adapted from here. I do have a better version of this application but some of the features are not yet complete such as bump mapping and displacement mapping. I will upload the updated version at some point in the future when I have enough spare time to finish it.

My name is Daniel Beard and I am a third year games programming student. I wanted a place to upload work that I have done and build a profile over time. Hopefully someone else will get some use or education from my programs.