In our project, we have set the goal to be just geometry rendering. We do not plan on doing any fancy shading to mimic how light interacts with-in the materials of the trees that are generated. Things that we would include would be trunk/branch generation, pruning, and associated attributes. We would like to also include various environmental effects described in the paper such as gravity and wind-sway. We also may look into the level of detail aspects for distance rendering performance.
For this project we will use pair programming to develop the goal functionality. Both team members will have time .driving. and .advising. and time given is typically in 2 hour chunks during the day between classes and other responsibilities. Bigger lengths of time will be given on days off to make up for time lost or schedule slip. Right now we need to organize the hierarchical construction of the shapes we have made available and implement the limitations and algorithms to match those found in the .Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees. paper. We are in a good position to implement all the essential functionality to create some good trees and possibly get some of our declared .extras. such as environmental effects.
In the 3 weeks we have laid out for finishing this project we have set weekly goals of the following:
So far an environment has been set up in SDL and openGL to render basic geometry and textures. A simple GUI for adjusting parameters has been started in CEGUI. These consist of the various variables that are used in specifying a tree (length of branches, splits per segment, type of branching, etc.). This is set up in hopes of having the ability to change parameters in the GUI and have them reflected in the rendering without having to close and reopen the window or recompile. We also have the basic geometry of the trunk and branches complete but the code to use them in piecing together a tree is not yet implemented. Some tree textures have been found and included in the basic rendering of the trunk that is currently implemented.
So far the team.s progress has been a little slow but more priority will now be given to this project. Other class work and projects have cut into the time available to develop the tree renderer but the platform is now in place to quickly develop the implementation that will create the realistic trees.
The timeline, or goals for our implementation, remains unchanged for this project. Although for now it has gotten off to a slow start this project will see more activity as the due date nears. We have the same goals for functionality but the extra functionality that we said we might implement might be less likely to get attention since in further research it will take more work than we may be able to allocate.
Here's a quick screenshot of the environment as it stands with a chunk of trunk.
