Projects CS 5610/6610 - Fall 2009

Due: midnight, Monday, December 14, 2009

For CS 5610, particle systems are a good way of demonstrating your OpenGL abilities. You are free to get ideas from the particle system code from: http://www.particlesystems.org . A good write up is on the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_system

If you are doing a particle system, you must do several things:

  1. Use vertex arrays to store the particles
  2. Use billboards in your system. I suggest using billboarded trees (cylindrical billboards so they don't flip sideways when the camera is looking down). here's a tree (sgi image format): http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs5610/assignments/project/tree1.rgba
  3. Allow full camera motion (such as you've been doing for the past few assignments).
  4. Use a skybox to improve the scene. This is in French, use GOOGLE language tools to translate http://web.archive.org/web/20050225083949/http://home.planet.nl/~monstrous/skybox.html Here are some examples of skybox texture sets: http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/fall2002/gamedev/labs/lab1/index.php http://www.simonoc.com/pages/materials.htm
  5. Make the visuals very compelling. You should plan on spending 10-15 hours to make the particle rendering look nice.
  6. Bumpmap the floor where your fire/smoke/fountain is happening.
  7. You should use your OpenGL ability to make the particle system look 'real' using either billboarded textures or opengl sprites.

For natural effects like fire or smoke, make them look realistic. This can be improved by changing the billboard size over time or cycling through various textures.

Otherwise, you should have cleared a project with me.

CS6610 only:

I expect you to read a research paper and implement it. You should contact me about this to approve your project.

CS5610 and 6610:

Your project should have a complete writeup including screen-shots in html format. You should hand in both your project and the html web-page(s) with images.

You will be graded with 25% on the mid-project results (including an oral presentation (last week of class) and 75% on the final project (including a running project and the writeup).

Extra Credit

No extra credit for this project.

Submission

Same as always but use openGL4

Additional Resources