Technical Development: Point Sprite Refinement, Basic Dirt Containers

This video shows the updated point sprite systems, as well as basic dirt containers

Heat Vent

The only problem with the previous implementation of this system was that the distortion was more noticeable with distance.  By calculating the distance from the emitter to the camera, the approximate depth of these points are rendered to the depth layer, which is used to scale the final distortion when combined with the final scene.  Now distortion is controlled and is more noticeable at close distances, and softens to no distortion farther away. 


Flare System

By combining the simple point sprite Flare System directly with a Heat Vent System, much more realistic fire is produced.  The heat system is modified so that particles initially expand, and then contract in line with the fire particles to preserve detailed distortion on the smaller particles.  If the heat point sprites only continue to expand, the smaller fire particles that trail from the flare  much more noticeably appear as circles. 

These processes are also combined with a simple the exhaust system.  The final result from these three simple point sprite systems is quite convincing, and the effect is further enhanced by blooming the bright colored pixels with the Light System.

Up close the detail is still lost, but the the mid range and far distance views are quite successful.  Combining simple systems for fast realistic effects is a major goal of this exploration.


Dust System

The harsh lines with intersecting ground and objects with dust particles are still quite noticeable and problematic.  The Dust System is also rendered to the Depth Layer, where the blue channel contains a highly dynamic range from 0-1, and also contains distortion data in the red and yellow channels.  This will cause the final scene to soften these harsh depth lines, and will also blur the color lines that result.  

Though despite these efforts, the harsh lines and artifacts from this system are still apparent,  further time will be needed to smooth out this rendering.  So far the best solution is to prevent dust particles from intersecting with emitting objects as much as possible.



Conveyor System

I worked on enhancing the depth of this system by adding an additional row of vertices in the middle of the stream, raised by a given height value.  There are noticeable artifacts at the end points of stream, which seem they will be difficult to fix.  Other than that, the stream does appear to be more rounded, but a similar result might also be produced by interpolating between two normals.  I am now using a generic bump map as a dynamic key for any ground or dirt texture.  Using a bump map renders more realistic and dynamic dirt, and is highly adaptable.


Dirt Containers

For machine animation, I created a simple system to simulate dirt filling a container.  This process is quite simple, consisting  of a set of verticies to define the dirt, and minimum and maximum values for each vertex.  The location and texture coordinates of the vertices are then interpolated between the two depending on a fill value.  The implementations in the video are very simple, and can definitely be enhanced. 

I will be working on creating a simulation where the excavator will automatically dig and unload dirt into a dump truck, and the dump truck will also unload its bucket onto a conveyor system.  I will focus on linking the container, falling dirt, dust and conveyor systems smoothly between these processes.