You may work with one partner on this assignment. This lab consists of two distinct parts. The first part builds on the previous lab. The file /usr/local/doc/pa_ortho.asc contains ortho photo imagery of the terrain data from lab 5. Apply the data in this file as a texture to the terrain in lab 5. The file is a many megabytes in size and you should not copy this file to your lab directory on the CS machines. You may however create a symlink to this file, or copy it to a personal machine if you are working remotely. You may use the function read_grid in grid.h/.cpp to imports .asc files in row major order. The values in pa_ortho.asc are integers in the range 0 to 255. The grid struct stores a grid as floating point pixels. To save space, you may want to build a separate image buffer for the texture which a 2D array of Glubyte values. Since the image is greyscale, you do not need to store separate RGBA components. You may use the value 1 for the internalformat in glTexImage2D (one byte per pixel) and GL_LUMINANCE for the format parameter. See the red book or online docs for details. This will save considerable space. After copying the grid into a separate image buffer, clear the grid to save more memory.

Applying the texture should be fairly straightforward if you follow the texture example from w07-texture. Keep in mind though that the texture is at 10 times the resolution of the terrain (see grid info for details). And you will need to perform a mapping between texture coordinates (0..1) to your scaled terrain coordinates. You may want to experiment with a small patch of the terrain and texture first before attempting to do the entire texture.

There are however three things that are a bit tricky. First, the buffer for the texture data must be a contiguous block of space, so you cannot dynamically allocate a 2D array. You must instead allocate a 1D array and pack the pixel data from the ortho imagery into this 1D array. The function makeCheckImage in texterrain.cpp shows an example of how this might work. The second trick is that in texture coordinate (0,0) is in the bottom left of the image, but (0,0) is the top left in grid. A correctly rendered ortho image should look like the image shown below.

Finally, some of the graphics cards (notably the HP machines) suck. There is a snippet of code in texterrain.cpp that checks if it should be possible to load the entire ortho photo as an texture map. I have tried a few machines, and even the HPs claim they can load the texture, but don't be afraid to downsample if needed. If your terrain project was slow before, adding a texture with 10 times the resolution is unlikely to make it faster. Note you should be able to decimate the grid at a lower resolution and use flat normals and apply the texture to the coarse grid to try and help performance. I highly recommend just applying the texture map to the square in texterrain.cpp as practice before slapping the imagery on the full terrain.

If you are curious as to how good the graphics card on your lab machine is, try typing grep -i mem /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Something like (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Total Mem: 16384 kB (on almond) indicates a sluggish 16MB card, while (--) NVIDIA(0): Memory: 524288 kBytes (on lime) indicates the sweet 512MB cards. The silver door on the machines is your gateway to success. The HP logo is an indication that the machine needs replaced soon.

Draw a tree or some other plant form using L-sytems and the procedural methods discussed in class. You may want to consult Algorithmic Botany and in particular chapter one of The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. A local copy is also available.

This part of the assignment is fairly open ended. You can hard code your favorite plant if you like or try to handle more general constructions. My only requirement is that you model be 3D and contain at least two shapes (e.g., a branch and a leaf). You may add non-determinism or probabilistic rules to your plant if you wish.

Once you are satisfied with your programs, hand them in by typing handin40 at the unix prompt. You may run handin40 as many times as you like, and only the most recent submission will be recorded. This is useful if you realize after handing in some programs that you'd like to make a few more changes to them.

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Last updated: Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at 01:07:43 PM