Topic: Technical WIP

[kat]

A WIP topic for those of the left brained inclination (coders).

Screen shots and images should be kept to a maximum for 800 pixels width/height. Also consider providing information about what you're showing so readers know what's what.

[carnage]

Hi guys, been a while but I have been pretty busy lately. Thought I would show of some of the latest work on my thesis. Its a real time colour deficiency simulator implemented using high level shader language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR99nzWr8mc
Cant work out how to emebed the video into this post...

Should have some more to show soon simulating other visual deficncies such as cateracts and macular degeneration.

[kat]

That was interesting, not what I would have expected based on what you've experimented with in the past. What made you decide to focus on this? And yeah, you have to 'link' to YouTube vids because the < embed > is html, which is turned off.

[carnage]

Well I was trying to get a project in procedural generation but after some initial tests and looking around for literature it dint seem to really be working out. I have fairly reasonable game development skills but game development doesn't really translate well into a serious academic exercise for a thesis.

One of my tutors was looking into this subject for a possible PhD and had an interested in game technologies and wondered if they could be applied to solve this problem so it seem like a project that was tailored to my skillet and had a serious academic background.

Currently the system is only using 2D image but soon I will be implementing depth based impairments like far and short sightedness and will require some kind of 3D environment. Since the project is not based on 3D design there is no restrictions about using other people work, so expect some begging for 3D assets in the near future 

[silicone_milk]

Wow that really was interesting. As Kat said, not expected. But still pretty neat.

[ratty redemption]

agreed, interesting and very clean looking interface.

in my late teens I developed a cateract in my right eye which I eventually had operated on about 5 years ago, so I went many years with decreasing vision in that eye. not only was my vision getting very blurred but I was also seeing double in that eye and light was scattering across the lens.

not sure how you'd simulate all that but I can give you feedback if it would help.

[carnage]

Ratty cateracts is one my to do list of impairments to simulate so feedback from someone who has expereinced the effects first hand would be very useful. If your willing it would also really help support the results in my thesis.

Your description of the symptons is very useful and gives me some clues about how I would implement it. If I were to make some quick mock ups of the effect in photoshop could you give me some feedback on how they could be improved to match the effect.

I am also particualry interested in how the effect progressed over time as one key goal of my thesis is simulating impairments with variable severity so they can be customized to simulate a given individuals impairments and give them an idea of how they could change over time. So they can make more informed desions when cosnidering corrective surgery

[carnage]

Another little bit of progress. Over the weekend I have been playing with different methods of creating a blur shader. I think I have got something that gives the required visuals with an acceptable performance cost. Although not much use as a visual impairment on its own, this will form the basis for many of the visual impairments I have still yet to implement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FjhLPWFwr8

It does look a bit block and tends to snap between levels a blurriness in the video, luckily this is just a feature of the video compression on youtube the real thing is fairly smooth

[carnage]

Hi guys haven't really been posting much here lately. Thought I would share some of the work that has gone on the past few weeks. Thrown together a simple office scene in blender to get a 3D environment to work with. Did actually prove to be very difficult because unlike working with a nice game engine XNA doesn't have any scene composition tools, or lighitng solutions etc. So had to manually unwrap all object to light-maps (the blender unwrap light-map tool doesn't really give good results) and bake from blender.

Original I was going to have textures and more interesting solutions. However this simple scene took a long time to get working mainly because every little change caused a large amount of work having to manually bake light-maps and reimport each asset and texture into XNA framework.

Here is the office scene as it stands. Will try get a video recorded later of walking around in the scene with impairments acting on it

[ratty redemption]

@ carnage, I like your approach with this project, but sorry to hear of the workflow issues. hopefully your find enough workarounds to keep using these tools.

also I can still give you some feedback on the visual impairments if you ever need me. and feel free to pm or email me when the time comes if I don't appear to of seen your updates to this topic.

[carnage]

Hi, finaly got around to making some of thoes promised videos to tie off this thread. These is in on wednesday so been a bit all hands on. Luckly had a review today and apart from a couply of changes and additions it seems to be in a pretty good state... yay  

Cateracts is the only simulation video I have at the moment, it looks like in the near future it will be going though a bit of an optimisation stage so probably be able to demonstrate some better videos then, sorry for the framerate but I cant find a system that has is capable of screen capping while running the sumulator

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVtxYFMeUw&feature=channel[/youtube]

[kat]

Very well done carnage! Capture rates will depend on your PC rather than the tools necessarily but try CamStudio (I use that for the tutorials) or for what you're doing you might be better buying a full license for FRAPS. Failing that just point a video camcorder at your screen!

On the subject of cataracts... I was watching a program online the other week that spoke about the intense colours and visual experience people can see when they have the lenses removed as a result of certain type of surgery, Monet's paintings from later life after he had cataract problems being the most acute example of that.

[Shaderman]

Very nice carnage!

[ratty redemption]

agreed and I've given carnage some feed back in pm's but there wasn't much that needed improving imo *thumbs up*

[carnage]

Im doing a bit of portfolio work at the moment, aiming for a technical artist position. So some code, shaders and modelling. Plan is to put together a small scene with some models from blender and write a few shaders to render them. Im imagining something like a fish tank, lots of opportunity for interesting shaders and models.

To start off I have ported and old piece of code that simulates ripples on liquid surface over to the GPU. Its was quite CPU intensive, one simple operation that runs for each pixel in the map. Obviously the GPU being able to process the pixels in parallel really speeds this up.

Work so far
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aspf47XqMBI[/youtube]

As you can see it is currently simulating a rain falling in a puddle. The code should allow more complex interactions but I need to code the mouse pointer to cause ripples first. More updates on this soon.