Month: December 2003

Viking Ship Building

I took a very interesting upper level course on Viking History and for my term project, I researched Viking Ship building technology and archaeological ship finds.

Examining the archaeological evidence of ships in Norway and Denmark, and its impact on our understanding of Viking nautical technology.

Speedy Gonzales the robot

For my Building Intelligent Robots class at the University of Missouri – Columbia, we worked in teams of two to create (and recreate) a robot for a number of different tasks.

The robot’s brain is a MIT Handyboard, and we used LEGO bricks and motors to actually build the thing.  We designed him for high torque, and as a consequence he was one of the slowest robots in the class, earning him the moniker Speedy.  The sombrero came during a late night build session after taping out some boundaries on the floor…

The final project report is available, and it includes more pictures, prose, and the source code.

Graphics research framework

This is pretty much just a laundry-list of features with some pretty pictures.


Useful stuff

  • Flexible scene-graph with multiple render targets
  • Virtual File System for seamless loading from regular directories, Quake PAK archives, or ZIP files.
  • Limited GUI support (transparent text windows which can be dragged around or typed into, great for debugging)

Level formats supported

  • Quake level loading (.BSP, version 0x1D)
  • Quake II level loading (.BSP, version 0x26)
  • Quake III level loading (.BSP, version 0x2E)

Model formats supported

  • Quake II model loading (.MD2)
  • Quake III model loading (.MD3)
  • Molecule loader (.M3D)
  • 3DS loading (.3DS, incomplete)

Textures/materials supported

  • JPG
  • PNG
  • TGA
  • PCX
  • BMP
  • Q2 .WAL
  • Q3 .shader

Demo effects:

  • Tunnel
  • Infinite 3D grid
  • Tie-dye (composite effect)
  • Sinus Scanlines
  • Copperbars
  • Iterated function systems with multiple morph modes and pre-defined matricies for the morphers: Binary, Coral, Crystal, Dragon, Fern, Floor, Spiral, Swirl, Tree, Triangle, and Zig-zag
  • Particle systems: Snow, rain, grid-bugs, explosion debris

Full-screen processing:

  • Radial blur
  • Roto blur
  • Motion blur
  • Glow blur

Procedural surfaces:

  • Sphere
  • Ellipsoid
  • Cylinder
  • Rectangular prism
  • Torus
  • Superellipsoid
  • Supertoroid
  • Elliptic Torus
  • PQ torus knots
  • Springs
  • Bezier curves
  • Supershapes
  • Spherical harmonics

Misc. features:

  • Texture-mapped fonts
  • For a neat effect, text strings can be bound to any of the path objects, such as the PQ torus knot.
  • Skydome (including real sun position and CIE clear/cloudy sky luminace)
  • FBm generated heightmaps
  • Heightmap from image
  • Skybox

Generated surfaces (no parameters):

  • Pisot Triaxial
  • Triaxial Tritorus
  • Pillow Shape
  • Whitney Umbrella

These are all generated using a general purpose parameterized-surface generator with different parameter matricies.