Explorer
Helen He
David Osborn
Jeff Boyd
Paul Woodrow
Alan Dunning
Sheelagh Carpendale
Overview
The realistic simulation of nature has been an active field of research in computer graphics for the past few decades, particularly in the game industry as well as in virtual walkthroughs. In our project, we chose to focus our interests in the area of real-time animation and rendering of an interactive, dynamically-changing world consisting of grass and clouds. In this world, grass and clouds react to wind effects, precipitation in the form of rain, dynamically forming and dissipating clouds, as well as day and night-time scenes with sun and twinkling stars respectively. The player is also able to hear ambient sound effects, such as crickets at nighttime, and the sound of wind blowing through the grass.
This world is a first-person exploration game, based on the concept of exploration and experience rather than a focus on photorealism and a physically accurate simulation of the world. Instead, we simulated an approximately realistic-looking world, playing around with various rendering effects inspired from artistic techniques and the non-photorealisim computer graphics area of research. The results we obtained were quite interesting and have definite potential for much future work.
This project was part of the course Art Science and Technology (2006-2007).
Video
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