26th January - Meeting with Technical Supervisor

So, today I had my first meeting of the semester with Matt Bett. It was pretty productive, though my brain is currently in the thrall of a nasty cold, and I gained a new sense of focus.

These past two or so weeks have been rather unproductive I must admit, mainly due to being ill and to me panicking slightly when I should have been focusing. My original plan of action for the project was to first create a demo application - containing lights, shadows, physics etc, which I could then implement the ambient occlusion into. But I think I was placing  too much importance on that aspect, and my talk with Matt made me realise that I should focus my efforts on the Ambient Occlusion, on actually anwering my research question and not on having an amazing 3d scene. If I have time at the end of the project, then I may go back and improve my framework but all I really need is a reasonably simple directx framework with the ability to use models and shaders.

I already have a basic framework to work with - I stripped back the framework I used for the maths coursework - so my tasks for the next fortnight is to get a simple 3d scene running with the basic SSAO shader. If I can get this done before the fortnight is over, then I will next think about the blending (or blur) that will be applied to the SSAO to make it look softer/less noisy.

Matt already suggested to different blending methods during the meeting - Gaussian blur (which is quite expensive) and a simple Bilinear blur (vertical blur then horizental blur) and I'm sure that some research will turn up even more variations.

Onwards!

Honours Project Proposal (Final)

The project proposal is all done and handed in, and the real work looms ahead. Oh dear.

You can read my Proposal here.