Fractured Foundations

I’ve been working on outlining the goals of my project and coming up with a development process. However I’ve not ironed out all the details yet so for now I’m just going to post up some progress.

One of my main goals is to create an easy to use and hopefully intuative interface for my target users to work with.  I’ve really been taken by the node based systems that can be found in a lot of material and shader editors and plan to replicate that style work flow.   For now there’s not going to be much meaning behind what it’s doing but that’ll come with time.  For now I’m just prototyping a few UI styles.  Originally I’d thought of doing the whole project in C# and using the built in UI features however I prefer C++ and have been looking for a reason to explore the wxWidgets API.

So the general outline and goal at the moment without too much delving into requirements is a node based graph editor.  The nodes have to be manipulatable and can connect to each others inputs and outputs.  There also needs to be a list of both available graphs to brows through and open for edit, a list of available node types, and I want to also include a tool bar that allows users to select between “modes” which will include simple selection and movement modes for now.

Here’s a quick screen shot of what I’ve gotten up and running.

Working Prototype for Graph Editor

The next task is to write a generalised backend to store, load and save the data from the graph, hopefully abstracted to an XML schema of some sort. Also I want to incorporate allowing the user to switch between graphs as well as deleting exisitng graphs and creating new ones.

I’m going to try and keep track of the books, sites and articles that I’m reading.  I could just bookmark them in my browser but by keeping them here makes them easier to retreive and *should* anyone ever want to follow my progress they can see them.  I’m going to start with the key ones I’ve been looking at and include short descriptions.  My bookmarks folder is overflowing but in reality doing something like this helps focus and narrow down which things truely are important and influence my project rather than the rest which is “interesting” or just the all to common link that you save of thinking ‘I might have to look into that later.’

Books

• “Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach” by a fair few people, including the big man himself Ken Perlin.  This book is pretty much my bible.  It covers some great methods for texturing and modeling.  It also has a ton of foundational concepts so I plan on using them and exploring how to use them to create building block functions common to nearly all procedural methods.

Articles

• “Generating Random Fractal Terrain” is a really interesting article walking through an outline of how to create terrain using a few different methods.
• “Procedural City” by Shamus Young is a very good multi part blog about how he went about creating a very interesting procedural city creator.  His methods and ideas are fairly well covered and the final application itself is very impressive.  This is certainly one of the key articles I’ve been looking at and analysing step by step about how I can improve the process of creating such projects.

Links

• “Animal Farm Research” is a blog following the progress of what appears to be an MSc dissertation in procedural modeling/city generation.  I like it and would hope to be able to use it as a comparison for how I’m progressing with my own subject matter.
• “Inigo Quilez Personal Site” is a fantastic resource for some exceptional technical articles about the mathematics, code and process of generating all sorts of graphical effects and systems.

I suppose word press stole the glory of a first post, if such a thing could be glorious.  After 3 years I finally setup something on this site and now I think I’ll use it.

For now it’s just dissertation stuff, and hopefully not much else since normal blogging is for sad people.

So, project stuff, had a meeting on friday and discussed my proposal which turns out to be a viable project if not slightly less academic as all the others.  I’ve written up in order to formalize a chunk of what was just rambling thoughts about what I wanted to do and finally gave some thought to what I needed to do.  I’ll probably take a few days to write up some proper introductory stuff about what I intend to do and why.  Whether I can go into specific development of the project or not while I’m working on it is something I’m not sure about, though I’ll probably do it anyway as I’d like to keep track of my progress in some written medium so I can piece it back together and drop it into my dissertation.

First things first though, I have to go and think about a title, maybe flesh out some GUI design and figure out how to design my goal implementation… what fun that shall be!

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