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I'm looking for some good ideas for a simple 3d graphics program as my final project for an intro to computer graphics class. As for some background information, we'll be using opengl and will have a little over a month to work on it, so nothing too far-fetched. The simpler and "prettier" looking, the better. It does, however, require some sort of interface that the user can interact with (so a very simple game or similar is a good idea) and must be 3D.
My only idea so far is maybe a 3D version of Tetris (google for some examples).
Edit: I ended up going with 3D Tetris. For a less than a month's worth of time, you can see what I came up with here.
A 3D text/code editor. Text is 3D, errors stand out, code indentations not only indent, but protrude on z axis, pages/files are 3D and can be flipped like a ringpad.
Probably not useful, but fun and more interesting than a game IMO.
In university, for my parallel programming course, I did an openGL/MPI implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It was quite interesting. Wish I still had the code around somewhere. The advantage of using open GL is that you can lay out the grid in different orientations rather than a flat grid. Remember, code doesn't exist until it's checked into source control.
Putting some physics in makes it more interesting. How about implementing Labyrinth (the maze toy where you are supposed to guide a ball from the starting point to the goal by tilting it).
EDIT: Erik told me it's called Labyrinth.
A 3D minesweeper game similar to this one.
Rubik's cube.
Look at http://www.contextfreeart.org/ ... write something similar, but for 3d.
If you've ever played Missile Command I belive that this could be a good project to '3d-ify'.
Try a chicken crossing the road game.
You will probably need to demonstrate the bare minimum of:
textures
lighting
animation
interaction
collision detection
Do not include even simple physics if there are no marks for it. Prioritise tasks based on the marking scheme. Get something simple working first and back it up :)
Honestly it's actually pretty easy to load up a bunch of animated models and set up a simple first person shooter. I mean, to get a generic thing working you don't need all that much:
Either load and display a heightmap or a BSP tree as the level.
Load and render some simple MD2 models (keyframe animation, low amount of polys and simple format).
Draw a simple hud.
Ray/AABB intersection, every time the user clicks you'll need to cast a ray from the center of the screen and see if it intersects an the bounding boxes of the enemies.
Simple FPS camera system.
The above is pretty doable in a month for as far as I'm concerned. (It's probably doable in a week if you already know some of the stuff).
I tried to do a 3D Asteroids for a class once. I never completed the gameplay part, since it was a graphics class. The ship could move around, as could the asteroids, but there was no collision detection. The ship and the asteroids had 3D textures applied to them, and the asteroids were built out of ellipsoids, so they were actually 3D. The gameplay was all 2D, though.
How about one of those games that are a wooden maze with a ball rolling around the top. You tilt the board and try to get the ball round the maze without falling down the hole? It has the advantage that it's relatively simple to get started, but you could probably think of some extensions if you have time.
If you're looking for a true university size task, mine was to produce a small helicopter "game" where you could take off from an aircraft carrier in an ocean and fly around with some environmental effects, moving water etc. i.e. nothing too complicated. As another example, the task set for the year previous to mine was a little sans-opponent racing game.
I would worry that you may loose marks with tetris as it sounds like little would be done on the z-axis and may come across a little too 2d though it obviously depends on your brief.
Anyway, these will give you the chance to experiment with the basic OpenGL features such as fog, lighting, geometry, textures and some basic movement physics & collision detection/response.
Further on this, though often beyond the scope of such a university sized task you could then take this further add nicities such as animated geometry (e.g. people), environment mapping, reflections, shadows, particle systems, shaders, perhaps a heightmapped island.
Rewrite Blocks 3D. The graphics on this project look horrible now. I remember playing this game (or one like it) on a 386 with wireframe graphics... awesome. The game is basically 3D tetris.
I would check Panda3D or Pygame.
Panda3D is probably close to what you are looking for, and one idea that always works is to put the user's face in the main character or object. 3d-pong with the player's face? Use something unexpected... like a tetris made of burgers instead of bricks.
I love little self-organising alife applications like boids. They can be fun to code and always benefit from a nice UI, especially 3D ones. User input can modify aspects of the environment as well as moving around/through the environment.
I like exoplanets. Go read up on them. On Wikipedia and http://exoplanet.eu there's a lot of information. Astronomers and public outreach people could always use fresh 3D animations showing how the Doppler effect works, or how the planet transiting in front of the star makes it for example 0.5% dimmer.
Or, what I work on, is how when the planet passes behind its star. At Earth we receive just a teeny bit less infrared from that star. The user could adjust the orbit, size of planet, etc. and see how that affects what astronomers see. It could be fun, simple enough to do, and unlimited potential in extending the work for nicer textures, slick lighting effects, etc., and you could end up with something to contribute to science education.
I'd be making such 3D animations myself, if I weren't busy helping crunch numbers for the actual science. I'll be jealous!
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I am going to split this question in 3 parts
First, I've been given this problem, and I don't know where to start, if you have been solving related problem, would you give me some hints and keywords to help me do some more research?
I have done some research on my own
So here is some 2D chest CT scans (sorry due to reputation rule i can't implement images directly)
All photos are in the same angle. So I think I can simply read each photo to a vector of pixels, do some thresh holding to make all black and black-ish pixels going to be a non-colored pixel. Next, I'll create a vector called vector_of_photo of those vectors. Then the index of each vector in vector_of_photo are now the Z-index.
Now I can render a 3d photo from those vectors of pixels right?
In the second place, I got trouble understand raycasting algorithm,
I think the idea here is, when I already got a box of pixel then everytime I rotate the box, it cast straight-lines from that angle of the camera to the box, each line found a has-colored pixel going to stop casting and render that pixel (or more specific, copy the pixel to the exactly location on the plane).
Did I understand it correctly?
At last, the OPENGL/c++ part is just the option I think I'm going to use to solve this problem. And I'm not pretty sure it is a good idea or not, so give me some more hint about the programming language, library or module I should take a look at.
I happen to be working on the same problem in my spare time. Haha :)
Here is one approach to your problem:
Load the images into your application, such that you get the 3D volumetric dataset that you describe
Remove all points that don't fit within some range of values (e.g. 0.4/1.0 to 0.6/1.0 brightness). You may need to apply preprocessing and filtering.
Fit a mesh to the resulting point cloud with open-source software. Here is a good blog post about that
https://towardsdatascience.com/5-step-guide-to-generate-3d-meshes-from-point-clouds-with-python-36bad397d8ba
Take the resulting mesh (probably, an STL file) and visualize it in any software your want (Blender 3D, Unity 3D, Cinema 4D, a custom OpenGL application), anything really.
My own approach to this problem is very similar to the one you suggest in your question, and I have already made some headway. Therefore, I thought it would be good to suggest another route.
NOTE Please be aware that what you are working on is not a trivial problem. It's a large project, and there are many Commerical companies that put years into doing just this. This is a great project for learning OpenGL, rendering, and other concepts. It's perfectly doable, but you may be looking at several months of work, and lots of trial and error. Good luck!
Its not often that two people would happen to work on the same problem, so if you want to discuss further, feel free to contact me over linkedin and/or post a comment below. www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sohnen-a2454b1b2
I'm currently in the process of developing a very basic 3D OpenGL game in C++ as part of a small college project. We don't get a lot of insight from the teachers however, and only very limited documentation, as well as a small timeframe, so I'm kind of a little lost here at the moment.
My game is a tank battle on an orthogonal plane that pretty much looks exactly like the image I sketched below. Each tank (A and B) can be controlled by a different player, and each one can shoot projectiles, which are supposed to influence the other tank's score upon collision.
My question is, what would be the simplest way of effectively implementing collisions for the tanks? (Tank vs tank, tank vs map boundaries and tank vs any kind of parallelepipedic object like the one in the center of the picture - and the same thing but applied to the projectiles shot from the tank turrets).
Ideally, without the need of using an external physics engine, but also accepted if the implementation can be done easily. At the moment, I'm solely using the GLUT library.
Download and integrate Box2D (http://box2d.org) into your project.
Unless your project is to implement a physics engine, then don't bother doing it yourself. Your time will be much better spent learning how to integratate libraries and how proper physics engines work.
You can then easily use a box collider for your tanks, circle for projectiles and 4 lines for your perimeter. You can create callbacks to notify you when a projectile has collided with another tank.
You will have to use forces and torques to move and rotate your tanks, rather than just updating their positions. But you would probably have to do that anyway if you were going to implement the physics yourself.
I'm interested in trying to create realistic fluids (water), for a 2D game. This game is similar to Terraria. I have heard about how you can slap a bunch of colliding particles on the scene and render over it and voila, realistic acting water.
Terraria uses tile based water, which I am not a fan of.. I want something more advanced.
I thought about using bullet 3D physics (box2d has limits I would hit). For non colliding particle effects, I am thinking about using something like SPARK, since I think that'd give me the best of both worlds.
The issue I am thinking about, is that each block is 16x16, so on a 1600x900 scene, there are about 5 thousand tiles.
So I need to tell the physics engine that these tiles are collidable. Of course, there are void tiles that are considered to be non collidable.
Does anyone have ideas on this? Language is C++, I doubt that's relevant though.
EDIT: i think i'm going to have to cave in and use grid based water. I suppose, in retrospect particle based just makes everything more difficult but for what gain?
Your question is about tiled fluids, but you seem to actually be asking about a particle based approach.
If that's the case, what you're looking for is "Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics", or SPH, which is a very popular technique for 2D and 3D fluid simulations in realtime situations.
Yes, it's basically just a particle system, with each particle responding to the forces in your environment (gravity, collisions etc.) in a reasonable (mathematically stable) way, combined with a constraint that they must stay a certain distance apart in order that the fluid is incompressible.
You can render the particles as points, if you have enough of them, or you can use them as a source for deriving a surface (for example using marching-cubes, though in 2D I wouldn't worry about that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamics
It has the advantage of being relatively easy to code, and indeed to accelerate on a GPU.
Indeed I think they're probably a better approach than trying some kind of tile-based approach, and you get some more interesting results, such as spray kicking up, waves kicking against the edges of objects, etc. It's not too hard to get something pleasing working, I'd give it a go.
Just learning the basics of OpenGL for a class and was looking for something challenging and interesting to try and draw. Any suggestions?
Aiming to photorealism (just plain models, lights, materials, textures, etc.) is one thing, but what is even more interesting in my opinion is demoscene and all kinds of non-photorealistic effects. The idea of a demo is to program some nice animated graphics that automatically change from one effect to another or tell some sort of a story, and have a background music. Here you can find some videos. Just take a look at what some others have done and use your imagination. That's the funniest part of 3D programming in my opinion. Of course what you'll first program would be something extremely simple when compared to those videos on youtube, but everyone has to start from somewhere. Simple also doesn't need to be ugly. Some random suggestions:
mathematical shapes with sin(), cos(), etc.
alpha blending, especially addition blending (glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);)
terrain rendering
read 3d model data from a file. (Wavefront .OBJ is a relatively simple one)
feedback effects with glCopyTexImage2D, which copies pixels from screen to a texture (in real life you shouldn't use this because it's too slow, but when learning the basics it's ok)
etc...
You might consider building an OBJ viewer. You will get the experience you're looking for, and it's a pretty good project for a beginning 3D graphics programmer, in terms of difficulty.
I believe opengl has built in shapes such as a teapot that you can call and have it draw. For starters, I'd stick with easy shapes like squares, circles, and cones. Try drawing a wireframe model first since that's the easiest, by using either quadstrips ,triangles or just poly lines. After you've gotten that down, learn to set up lighting and materials so you can draw a solid model.
At school we had a very interesting assignement to get started with OpenGL that I will share. The long term goal was to modelize a living room so you basically have to draw:
A table.
Two chairs.
A carpet.
A sofa
Some stuff that you might find interesting to add on the table for
instance a TV!
When you have all the things done, try to polish the scene a little bit by adding some lighting effects!
Hint: for all the objects you simply need to start with a basic rectangle. Then you can construct your scene step by step using translations/rotations.
I am working on a simple 2D openGL project. It contains a main actor you can control with the keyboard arrows. I got that to work okay. What I am wanting is something that can help explain how to make another actor object follow the main actor. Maybe a tutorial on openGL. The three main things I need to learn are the actor following, collision detection, and some kind of way to create gravity. Any good books or tutorials to help get me in the right direction would be great.
You could use a physics library like Chipmunk Physics, which lets you attach springs and things between the two objects and detect when they hit each other and other things.
A pre-rolled library would be good, but the concepts you describe are ones you need to know if you are going to do any sort of game programming anyways:
A simple way to make one actor follow behind another is to have the lead actor store its position every time it moves. Feed these positions to a trailing actor with a delay of a few values - the longer the delay, the further behind they travel. Simple, but doesn't handle dynamic collision (other actors moving the block collision.)
Collision detection in 2D can simply be axis aligned (AA) bounding boxes. Search for this and you'll see the 4 ifs or so that are needed.
Gravity is just adding a fixed velocity (usually down) to every object every game loop. This is constant acceleration which is exactly how gravity works.