Fake Terrain Shadow

The recent Houdini Bootcamp had be great fun, and I was impressed with the turnout of the SHRUG (Singapore Houdini 'R Us Group) session too. Going through the bootcamp a second time round reinforced my understanding of how Houdini works. Thanks goes to Peter Robbinson again, not forgetting help from my SHRUG buddies TK and Doug.

As usual, my day job means I have very little time to play around with Houdini much. All my experiments so far has been on-and-off, one-or-two hour affairs. I wish I could spent more time toying with different techniques and doing more advanced stuff but alas my backlog of things to do is threatening to overwhelm me already.

The experiment this time round is creating fake texture shadows for game terrains. This is an old trick used by many game developers to display complex static shadows in real-time. I myself used it 5 or so years ago on a PS2 game. Every shadow had to be hand-created in LightWave and Photoshop back then. Of course, the modern game engine can automatically generate lightmaps, but I figured this could be done procedurally using Houdini for non-photorealistic game environments where computed lightmaps will not look appropriate.

Yes, I'm using the butterfly image as a stand-in for the tree shadow :P

Alas, I'm stuck trying to getting Houdini to do automatic UV projection to each piece of newly generated shadow polygon group, using the ForEach node. Hopefully I'll squeeze out some time to play around and come up with a workable solution soon. As of now, I have neither the luxury nor the inclination to get this resolved.

Boot Back to the Basics

Peter Robbinson is back in Singapore for the third time and the second Houdini Bootcamp at NYP. This time, we have more industry attendees and one of them (a leacuter from a PRC CG school) showed us movies of his students' work from China. The work was amazingly impressive and I really kow-tow to the dedication and artistic talents of the PRC students and trainers.

Why is Singapore, supposedly technologically and educationally more advanced than many Asian countries, so lacking in such calibre of work? Even our local professionals' work are hard pressed to match the quality of their student efforts. What gives?

My take is that we (as a creative culture) lack a few key things:

1. Dedication and drive - Singaporeans are amongst the most lazy when it comes to work, but the most particular when it comes to rewards.

2. Obsession with excellence - Singaporeans do the minimum to "pass" and seldom give more than is required, which is why most stay within the confines of conformity and seldom achieve excellence. Yes we've won a few awards, but that should serve as encouragement to do even better, not as proof that we are already good enough.

3. Artistic and creative leadership - Singaporeans like to delude and praise themselves for their small achievements, but at the end of the day, our ranking has a shallow meaning since most of our so-called "world-class" is often just average from a truly expert perspective. Get rid of your stinking ego already!

4. Cooperation and creative teamwork - Many Singaporeans like to be the "Indian Chief" to gain prestige, power and position while contributing nothing of lasting value to the group effort. Of course our well-educated leaders use big word and express big ideas, but they are often superficial application of intelligence and borrowed concepts, devoid of true insight and long term wisdom with lasting benefits.

Hmm, am I back in Singapore-bashing mood again lately? I wonder why? :P :P

I believe we do have the ability to do much better, if only we can overcome the fetters that block our united progress. The key always lie with people and their attitudes, not with with money, technology or physical resources.

Together. Majulah.

Multi-display Technology by ATI

Just two weeks ago I was rambling about support for multiple display screens in games. A few days ago, ATI announced their Eyefinity multi-display technology.

Check out this cool Youtube video of 3D gaming at 5760x2400:



In my blog post, I mocked up a sample of a dual screen Crysis. The following video shows a demo of the Cry Engine 3 running on three screens!



Awesome.

More Fog Tests

Playing around with VEX code instead of VOPs this time. The cool thing about the built-in Mantra Atmosphere VEX Lit Fog is that it has volumetric noise and receives volumetric shadows cast by objects. I customized the VEX code so the fog amount decays with height, and also mix in a bit more uniform scattering to achieve a ground fog look.