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Firewatch-Style Sky & Fog

After seeing this presentation from Jane Ng about her work on Firewatch, I fell in love with their backgrounds and tried to build a similar sky and fog shader. Their blog entry on the topic helped me get started by defining the parameters they use for their system, but it was a little light on implementation details.

I started by just generating simple gradients for the sky, set from user-defined colors. From there I projected the sun as a circle onto the sky from a position on the unit circle (to allow the user to the time of day) and added some exponential falloff from the sun's base color to the sky near the sun's position. The fog itself is a simple exponential function, with the density of the fog increasing with distance from the camera and with decreasing height. Scattering effects from sunlight into the fog are handled with a similar exponential decay function to the halo around the sun in the sky.

The coolest idea Campo Santo had, though, was their adjustment of the fog's color from a gradient map. This was easy to implement, but makes a huge difference. We just sample from a 1D texture based on the distance from the camera for each point (normalized to the 0..1 range based on the max draw distance) and use the color from the texture in the fog calculation instead of using a constant color value.

Using these gradient textures for the fog makes it really easy to create some very nice silhouettes off in the distance, and by adjusting the fog's density & height parameters you can still maintain a great deal of detail in the foreground, which lets the system provide photo-realistic rendering for objects near the user, and more stylistic rendering for distant objects.

It also lets you do some crazy things, like this rainbow map I used to debug some distance calculations.

There are GUI controls for all of the fog, sky, and sun parameters, which should be fairly self-explanatory. The fog uses a constant color by default (also settable in the GUI), but to use a gradient image instead just drag and drop any image onto the scene. Your gradients should be 1px tall, and some power-of-two px wide. Here are some examples:

If you have a Leap Motion and a VR HMD, you can also view the sky in VR and control some of the sun & fog parameters through hand gestures:

  1. With your right hand: Make a fist, and move your hand vertically to move the sun. Pinch your thumb & forefinger and move your hand side-to-side to change the size of the sun.

  2. With your left hand: Pinch your thumb and forefinger together, then move your hand vertically to adjust the fog height, or horizontally to adjust the fog density.

Play online here
NOTE: It will render at the size of your browser window! If you have performance issues, try resizing your browser.

Fluid Visualization

I helped build a small fluid visualization application in OpenGL over the summer. Our main goal was to produce something specifically for fluids, with the hope of making something more intuitive than ParaView for at least a limited set of scenarios (ParaView is amazing, but very complex).

At the moment the project supports most of the basic types of glyph and line rendering used for many fluid visualization scenarios, and we have plans to extend it with more interesting features like volume rendering and particle tracing.

It also provides a small plugin API which can be used to integrate the visualizer directly with a fluid simulator. At the moment we include a simple Lattice-Boltzmann Method simulator with the visualizer to demonstrate this, and to show off some LBM-specific rendering capabilities for displaying the distributions in each cell, which could be helpful for debugging your simulator.

The project is completely free and open source and available on github. If you find any issues or fork it and want to contribute changes, feel free to let us know!

The project dependencies are fairly minimal, with CEGUI being the hardest to set up. A manual is included in the repo which explains all of the GUI controls for the different rendering primitives.

Cyrano the Hothead

A short game made with a friend in one week for the Public Domain Jam. You take on the role of Cyrano de Bergerac just after he joins the military, and before he has gained the great amount of respect and panache that he is shown to have in the play.

Combat in the game is handled much like a card game, with different cards representing different types of actions that can be combined to form an attack. Some of these actions are physical, which will damage your opponent's health, and some are verbal which will lower their morale. Some card combinations will also allow you to execute a special move, which may differ from the specific cards you played to produce it. Physical damage is augmented based on the morale of you and your opponent, so maintaining your morale and combining verbal and physical attacks is the key to success.

The theme for this jam was "Paper", so we decided to make the characters as paper cutouts. To further drive this home in the game, characters (and many scene objects) are rendered on flat planes, and have normal maps applied which were made from high-res scans of rough paper.

Play online here, or take it with you for:
    -OS X (20 MB)
    -Linux (24 MB)
    -Windows (20 MB)

The game source and all related assets are also freely available:
    -Game Source & Assets (130 MB)
    -Additional Art Resources (332 MB)

    CC0

PRESS:

    IndieGames.com Browser Pick
    PCGamer: The Best Free Games of the Week

Wetris

A Tetris-like game in which some pieces release water into the play area when they are cleared. As the water level rises, wooden blocks will float, separating them from metal and water blocks. This creates a two-tiered play area in which one must plan rows both at the surface and at the bottom of the water. The water level itself is managed by the player by submerging fireballs, which causes the water to evaporate.

Play online here

Object Tracking for Interactive Installations

Simple object tracking prototypes in one and two dimensions using a cheap webcam. The tracking data is used to control the state of an LED array (via USB connection to an Arduino which manages the LED driver).

The eventual goal from this project is to develop a cheap, robust, system for tracking multiple people as they move through a space, allowing the room to react to their presence and movement. Essentially, to provide an easy and cost-effective means for developing installations like this one, which tend to be quite expensive to produce. To keep the cost as low as possible these early prototypes used the cheapest USB webcam I was able to find, which wound up costing less than the circuitry needed to control the LEDs. For a large-scale installation, the cost of LED controllers, lights, etc., easily outstrips the cost of the cameras, so future prototypes will use RGB-D sensors which allow for much more accurate object detection and tracking than a normal webcam.

The cost of driver chips, however, is non-negligible for a project large enough to fill a room. The cheaper drivers tend to only come in surface-mount packages, so prototyping is going a little slowly as I make breakout boards to use in testing. I'm currently focusing on using the TLC5947 driver for LED arrays, which seems to be quite cost-effective.

Raymarching with Refraction

A little hacky but working. The sky is actually just a hollow textured sphere, which unfortunately required me to bump the iteration count on the march up to avoid getting a seam on one side (should probably have just used a cubemap).

TODO: Caustics for the shadows, and reworking the hacks into something more robust (e.g. in the current implementation transparent objects will occlude other transparent objects).

Play online here
NOTE: It will render at the size of your browser window! If you have performance issues, try resizing your browser.