Worksheet 1 with comments

Honours Project Worksheet – #1
Michael Daglish 0500981

Comments in yellow by Jonathon Holmes
Comments in blue by Dr C S Özveren

At the moment I’m stuck between two ideas on what I want to do for my honors’ project which I have included in this worksheet. I attend to decide which idea I’m going to go through with by the end of the week.


State the topic of interest that you may wish to take forward into a project.

My first topic of interest is fluid simulation and my second topic is graphics lighting techniques.

Fluid simulation sounds like a good choice to go with as it would give plenty of relevant information to document without being too generalised. I would say that graphics lighting was a bit too broad a subject to get enough detail within a 7500 word limit. This could be broken down into finer elements of lighting such as photon mapping or radiosity mapping – just depends on how you would like to approach it.

Indicate the issues surrounding this topic that you may wish investigate.

The issues surrounding my first idea would be
The physical properties of the fluid
How the fluid reacts with objects being dropped into it.
How the fluid reacts when it is being moved (i.e. being poured)
How the fluid reacts when a force is applied to it. (i.e. Wind)
maybe look into fresnel reflections and refraction for the rendering of the fluid? This could possibly combine some elements of the lighting from the second topic into this first one? Would also make your final application look really pretty.

The issues for my second topic are
Creating accurate lighting in a scene to improve the realism to the scene
Creating accurate shadowing ( Ambient Occlusion? ) corresponding to the light present to the scene
Having lighting that doesn’t slow done the rendering of a scene.
If you still wanted to go into lighting techniques then you could maybe look into how aspects of the global illumination model can be applied to realtime applications, especially as technology progresses.

This Idea sounds fine I agree with the comments made. Please talk to Dr Lucas / Dr Natanson before you proceed

Outline your initial ideas about how you would carry out the practical aspects oft he project. i.e. what do you envisage yourself actually doing for the project.

First idea:
First of all a lot of research will have to be done into how fluids behave and the physics behind them. This will be done by reading up on a number of resources and speaking to math lecturers regarding the issues I have. A demo would also have to be created to show what I have learnt throughout the project. The demo could consist of a small area which would be a fluid which the user can apply forces to and see the reaction this has on the fluid or the possibility of dropping objects into the fluid and seeing the reaction. Another idea for a demo would be to show what happens to the fluid when it is poured from one container to another.

Sounds like a good plan :) seems more feasible than the next idea as it requires very few art assets to be created as the content for the application is naturally procedural.
That said, the second idea could result in a very cool looking application if art assets are not an issue. Difficulty is getting the visual quality to a standard that is eye catching enough to stand up with modern games such as crysis, assassins creed and half life 2 :'( . Not impossible but no doubt very tricky.

Second idea:
First of all research would have to be done into current lighting techniques which are used within the games industry and look into previous techniques aswell. A demo would also have to be created to show what I learnt throughout this project. My current idea for this demo would be to create a 3d which would contain a number of lights i.e. a concert stage. The player would be allowed to move around this scene freely and see the lighting which has been implemented.